I often create Xsl stylesheets to make my Xml documents more readable, especially when I’m going to send them to someone else to read. Add the following line, just below the <?xml declaration, using the path to your stylesheet:

This example comes from a data file that we use for testing. The application reads the xml data, but having an Xsl stylesheet makes it easy to read the data for entry into the app for testing.

In this example, we just email the testers a copy of both files and tell them to drag the xml file into Internet Explorer. Of course, you can save the stylesheet on a server and use a fully-qualified url in your <?xml-stylesheet declaration too.

Is your system taking longer to boot than you’d like? Want to find out how long it’s actually taking or if there are hidden boot problems? Vista already has all the answers you need, they’re just hidden.

Ed Bott has a helpful article on using Vista’s event viewer and built-in diagnostics to track down problems and crunch your boot time numbers.

You may also want to read his article Five secrets to faster Vista starts.

When you’re ready to fix the problem, there’s no better tool than SysInternal’s Autoruns.

-ed

If you want to quickly change the theme for a single SharePoint site, then this post is for you. If you want to change the colors on the “Simple” theme for your entire enterprise or add a new theme for everyone to apply – this post is not for you (you can learn how to do that here or  here).

Prerequisites

1. Site owner rights
2. Knowledge of Css and Html
3. SharePoint Designer 2007
4. FireBug or the IE developer toolbar or some other way to find the styles or IDs of page elements on the screen. (Note: View Source is not an acceptable substitute unless you have 10 hours of free time)

Ok. Let’s get started. The first thing to do is to go to Site Actions –> Site Settings –> Site Theme and choose the theme that is closest to the look you want. For our example, we’ll say you choose the “Simple” theme.

Click apply and your site will now take on the look of the theme.

Next, open your site in SharePoint Designer. You should have a new folder “_themes” with a subfolder “Simple” that contains all the theme files.

There are a several Css files in the theme folder. This is where you will make most of your changes. You can also replace the theme images with your own if you want custom gradients or drop shadows etc. For the Css changes, I use Firebug or the IE Developer toolbar to identify the style name or ID of the elements I want to change and then update the styles accordingly.

 
  This is the IE Developer toolbar where you can see the elements and class names.

I won’t go into detail on how to change the individual styles etc. I’m assuming you already know how to do that. If not, Heather Solomon has some good references on her site to get you going.

-ed

I'm going to try to start blogging more and blogging more about photography. So, in that vein....

I stumbled upon this today... the Gorillapod SLR and SLR-Zoom models. I knew of Gorilla pods and how cool they were, but did not know they had an SLR edition - shame on me!

Needless to say, this will be going on my wish list...

-ed

Any list view page for any list or library can be filtered via the querystring by adding the following:

http://server/site/list/view.aspx?FilterField1=FieldName&FilterValue1=FilterValue

Where FilterField1 is the internal name of the list column and FilterValue is the value you want to filter on.

You can add more filters fields by adding FilterField2 and FilterValue2 and so on to the querystring.

A few things to note...

• Use the hex code for spaces (_x0020_) in your field names. So "My Column" becomes "My_x0020_Column" in the querystring.
• Field names appear to be case-sensitive.
• Filter values must be an exact match, but are not case-sensitive.
• When filter values contain spaces, use the url escape code %20. So "My Value" becomes "My%20Value" in the querystring.
• Filter the list view using the column headers to see how the url should look. It uses this syntax.

If you have xml data (documents, settings etc.) and you want to create strongly-typed .net objects to wrap them, Visual Studio has an out of the box solution for you.

Follow these steps:

1. Create an .xml file in your project. Remove the default content from the file and enter some sample xml that represents your structure. Save the xml file.
2. From the main toolbar, choose XML -> Create Schema. This will generate an .xsd file (you may need to include this file in your project manually).
3. Using the Visual Studio Command Prompt, navigate to your project folder and run Xsd.exe <YourXsdFileName.xsd> /c  . This will gen a .Net class with properties for all of your Xml document elements.

This is just a quickie, but it should come in handy. Say you've created a view in SharePoint, but when you did, you created it as a Data Sheet View. If you want to link to that view, but show it in standard "Html view mode", you can just append "?ShowInGrid=HTML" to the end of the view url, hiding the ActiveX control and data entry interface.

-ed

I discovered (or was told) today that the Page Viewer web part in SharePoint allows viewing of a network folder or file in addition to any web page. What's especially nice is that for network folders, SharePoint renders a fully functioning Windows Explorer ActiveX control over the folder, just as though it was on your desktop.

This is great if you have files that haven't or can't be moved into SharePoint. Combining the Page Viewer web part and a custom search scope of your network files, you have all your data at your fingertips whether it's in SharePoint or not!

My Tech Ed backpack is lighter than ever. I just haven't been able to muster up the energy to search and beg for the cornucopia of useless logo-stamped crap and t-shirts I'll never wear. Sadly this year I won't be one of the "cool guys" with the blinking badge or the  newest Tech Ed hat.

I will however confess to snagging one of the vacuum-sealed Office shirts. I just think it's cool that you can scrunch a shirt down to the size of a bar of soap ( am I the only one?) Hey, you've got to wear something while you cut the grass.

- ed

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/. The name says it all.

Here are my take-aways from the Keynote speech / demos:

1. The upcoming Team System Architecture and Modeling Tools look awesome. Specifically, they showed how you could use your architectural model to validate that code does not cross boundaries or call components that it shouldn't. This is all part of the "Oslo" set of technologies. The Architecture and modeling features look to be part of the V10 release of Visual Studio.
   
   
2. SQL 2008 has some shiny new toys for devs. Of particular interest to me were the spatial data support for geo-tagging and calculating geographic information, ADO.NET Data Services (REST based data access services), SQL FileStreams allows you to store files on the SQL Server Disk, but control and access them like normal SQL data.
   
3. Robots are cool. Not exactly hot-off-the-presses, but Microsoft has built a robotics framework and development environment. They also have a simulator that lets you write robotics code and test it on a virtual robot.