Dachief is blogging

My Australian colleague seems to be blogging as well, ... well he has a blog and that's about it...
http://dachief.blogspot.com.

Mondsoft .Net Search Kit

Check this out ...

Mondosoft today announced the availability of a new .NET Search Kit that facilitates deployment of enterprise and site search in .NET environments. The Search Kit consists of a .NET search control and three easy-to-use search templates developed to complement MondoSearch’s .NET capabilities, and offer significant time and productivity benefits for our customers and partners.

All three search templates included in the .NET Search Kit categorize search results, display the results in differing contexts and represent a style and interface that is easily tailored to fit any functionality and design specification. One template is suited for multi-lingual sites, another is fashioned after popular global search result pages, and a third provides a clear, legible layout based on a three column format. Using an html or text editor, the Mondosoft .NET Search Kit allows easy deployment and tight integration of MondoSearch in .NET environments.

The .NET Search Kit is currently available for download at no charge to partners and customers with a valid support agreement. It installs on top of existing MondoSearch 5.1b installations only, and is ready to deploy in a matter of minutes. For more information and illustrations, and to download the Mondosoft .NET Search Kit, please go to www.mondosoft.com/SearchKit.

You can also sign up for a free webcast for a demo of the .NET Search Kit. Please sign up at www.mondosoft.com/webcasts.asp

MondoSoft

Mondosoft uses full text indexes to store the content it indexed from Content Management Server. If you forget to publish these indexes you will get the very unfriendly error shown above. Remember that you have to publish the index for every language that you setup in MondoSearch.

CMS search with Mondosoft

We started a CMS project a couple of weeks ago which needed some search functionality, so we decided to go for Mondosearch from Mondosoft. I really like some things about this this product:

• All the functionality is completely programmable in .Net
  
• It works very fast


• The administration console is easy to use and completely webbased
  
• Support from mondosoft is excellent - I got a response by email for a problem in less than 15 minutes... amazing

There are however some downsides as well:

• The price tag is pretty steep


• When you make some configuration errors - your code will crash with not so helpfull error messages


• You have to change a lot of security settings to make the product work


• The information in the knowledgebase on their site needs some updating

In the next couple of postings I will explain some issues we ran into.

Get_aspx_ver.aspx file not found

After changing some settings in my web.config I suddenly got an file not found error for Get_aspx_ver.aspx. A file I definitely didn't add to my web project. Now it seems that this known issue. For more information check out the following 2 links:

• http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;825792
  


• http://www.aspnetresources.com/blog/WhatIsGetAspxVer.aspx
  

IE security warning for InfoPath

I started playing around with InfoPath and SharePoint yesterday,... this is definitely one impressive tool. At a certain moment I got an error message from Internet Explorer when filling in an InfoPath form. It seems that this warning appears when you use a webservice as a datasource in InfoPath. The easiest solution seems to be adding the source of your webservice to the Trusted Sites in IE. Another option would be to be make the form fully trusted but this is something I'm going to look into one of the next days.

SharePoint Wiki

I just found this resource page about SharePoint on Bryant Likes wiki

Free .Net developer magazine

Just fill in the subscriptionform and receive your free copy ....
https://www.codezone.info/en/magazine.aspx

CMS virtual subdirectory

When you are creating a CMS web application you have to manually create a virtual subdirectory to the directory which contains the files CMS uses to provide the web authoring capabilities. Right click your virtual directory and click New Virtual Directory, point this virtual directory to the following phyiscal directory \Server\IIS_CMS. Call the virtual directory CMS. This virtual directory should not be configured as an application so click Properties, go to the Application Panel and click remove.

Request validation and CMS

A new ASP.NET version 1.1 feature, request validation, prevents the server from accepting content containing un-encoded HTML. This feature is designed to help prevent some script-injection attacks whereby client script code or HTML can be unknowingly submitted to a server, stored, and then presented to other users.

This feature is however not so helpfull when you are using Microsoft Content Management Server, since placeholder controls in CMS actually expect HTML content. To disable this feature in your CMS web application add the following line in your web.config : <pages smartnavigation="false" validaterequest="false" >

Nice...

Check out the following site, it completely uses SPS2003 http://portal.sharepointsolutions.com/default.aspx . If you want to find more resources about SharePoint check out this very impressive list compiled by Eric Legaut - http://blogs.officezealot.com/legault/archive/2004/08/08/2238.aspx

And then there were three ...

I found out this week that some coworkers of mine also have a blog...
Check them out:

http://khsw.blogspot.com
http://www.bultinck.be

Project 2003 SP1 released

Microsoft Office Project 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) have been released.

SP1 Description:
Project Server: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=837241
Project: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=837240

Download SP1:
Project Server: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5dea5862-d534-4f17-ab08-7c9b790c5b15&DisplayLang=en
Project: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1b04c073-e58f-4f42-b76d-6b565a45cdc3&DisplayLang=en
Search Results for both fixes: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/results.aspx?productID=&freetext=Project+2003+Service+Pack&DisplayLang=en

Office 2003 SP1 released

Yesterday Microsoft released Office 2003 SP1. The major changes are found in InfoPath and OneNote but especially the added functionality with InfoPath service pack is very impressive.

Free alternative for MS Project

Recently Niku made its project planning tool workbench available for free. You can find it here.

Hello world

Today I'm joining the blogging crowd ... so let me introduce myself. I'm a technical consultant at a Belgian IT Services company. I have done a lot of .Net development and the last couple of months I have been focussing more on collaborative solutions such as SharePoint, Content Management Server and Project Server. Now you know what my ramblings will be about.