Application Pages in SharePoint

Application pages allow you to create custom screens in SharePoint and make them available at any site level, similar to the accessdenied.aspx and error.aspx that come out of the box with SharePoint. To create an application page, follow the article by Ted Pattison to get the minimal code that is needed in an application page.

Once you have the page built you place it in the 12 hive in the Layouts folder. To access your cuastom page you then navigate to a site (i.e. http://sharepointserver/site/_layouts/nameofcustompage.aspx. This will display your custom page. You can access it at any level of your site.

Application pages provide an excellent way to add custom code to your site and can be debugged by attaching to the W3WP process on the SharePoint server that matches the AppId of the site you want.

Minimal Master Page

One of the things I frequently find myself doing is creating a master page for some custom layout. There are many controls that need to be on a master page or errors will be thrown by SharePoint. To make sure you have all the controls the first time, Microsoft created an article with the code needed to create a minimal master page.

I use this article all the time and thought other people would like to have a place to go instead of trying to figure out what controls are needed.

Additional Tools for SharePoint Development

Another tool that can aid in the development of SharePoint solutions is the SharePoint Developer Explorer, which allows you to see the structure of your SharePoint site in Visual Studio. For more information check out TheKid's site:

http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/10/16/sharepoint-developer-explorer-visual-studio-add-in.aspx

To Extend or Not to Extend - That is the Question

At one point or another in every SharePoint administrator's career there comes the point where they have to take an Intranet SharePoint deployment and allow Extranet or Internet access to it for other stakeholders of the organization. This is a simple enough process, the only trick is whether to use the built-in functionality to extend a web application or to simply add some alternate access mappings.



If you choose to use the Extend Web Application feature in SharePoint, which is located in Central Administration under Application Management -> SharePoint Web Application Management. Choose the Extend an existing Web application option. It will then ask you to choose a Web application to extend and then the same settings that are available when you create a Web application - the name of the IIS site, port, hostheader, path, authentication provider, allow anonymous, and whether to use SSL. Under the load balanced URL section there is a new item that says zone. This correlates to the IE zones and also to the alternate access mapping that SharePoint will create. The options are default, Intranet, Internet, Custom, and Extranet. When you click the ok button SharePoint will create the IIS site and will create the alternate access mapping automatically.



The second option is to go into the alternate access mappings yourself and add them. AAM is located in Central Administration ->Operations -> Global Configuration -> Alternate Access Mappings. You would simply select the Alternate Access Mapping Collection from the drop down and then click on the Edit Public URLs link. You then have the option of adding the URLs for each of the 5 zones. Then just click save and the alternate access mappings are added.



Either way will allow alternate access to your SharePoint site. The choice is yours.

Request to Run ActiveX control on MOSS Sites

Today I was passed an email about public-facing MOSS and WSS sites prompting users to run an ActiveX control on the page. The control wants to run name.dll which is used by the presence feature in WSS. There is a workaround until Microsoft can fix the issue. This article explains the issue in more depth and provides the workaround:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mossman/archive/2007/09/13/fixing-the-name-dll-activex-problem-the-mossman-way.aspx

This seems to be a sporadic issue. We have a couple of public-facing sites and one has been prompting users to run the ActiveX control and the other, which is a much more heavily trafficked site, has not prompted a single user to run the control. The only other difference is that one site has anonymous access turned on and this could be the key to this issue not appearing on that site.

Release of SP1 for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007

Finally the release of SP1 for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 is out! There are many hotfixes rolled into this service pack as well as some new functionality and stsadm commands. You should read the following post about how to apply the service pack.