I had a client who wanted to display and indicator showing the task list status as of today, for example: if  there is more than 15 days for the task due date display a green light image, less than 15 days display yellow light image, the task is already late display a red light image.

Simple, however, this client is hosting the SharePoint out of site and we can not deploy custom code at all. I can use an calculate field to select the image to display however that image would not get updated unless a user updates the task, I can write a timer that would run daily and update the filed but that is not possible as I can not deploy custom code, or I can write a custom code that runs a client machine using SharePoint APIs iterates through the task list and updates the items causing all calculated fields to be re-evaluated. The problem with this solution is that it is kind of dependent on having a client machine that would run this code periodically and frankly kind of a messy solution. After researching many of the info on the internet, and a friend’s brains, we devised the following solution.

The calculated field would contain a simplified date and a javascript would run in the browser updating the field with HTML with the proper image info and executing that HTML.

You can check the following links for information on this subject  

•  Dynamically Updating A SharePoint Calculated Column Containing A "Today" Reference http://vspug.com/dez/2008/07/31/dynamically-updating-a-sharepoint-calculated-column-containing-a-quot-today-quot-reference/
• Date Functions in Calculated Fields http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdesigner/archive/2008/08/01/date-functions-in-calculated-fields.aspx

I was working with a team on a SharePoint implementation in NYC. The team was adopting Scrum as a methodology to run the project. This is my first Scrum project. Things seemed crazy to me. I read and acquainted myself with Scrum, well things still seemed crazy to me till I took a high level look and saw why things was crazy. The team was implementing Scrum literary without understanding of software engineering principles. Scrum in short advocates iterative development with emphasis on short cycles, and each iteration delivering a working (or kind of working) software, it encourages “daily stand ups” or review of the activities the team is going to do this day and has done the day before { now here comes my first beef, early in the morning is the most productive period of my day and I believe it is for most people I hate to waste this in a meeting discussing stuff} this should be a short meeting 15 min or so (hum well with any modest team of 5-7 people, this takes more than 45 min, and people tend to go into details and waste time and there is the micromanagement which creeps in , and those who love to hear their voice does not matter they are talking nonsense and I can go on and on).   But the most missing and important ingredient is the design and architecture, Scrum does not address that and assumes everyone in the team can play any role and advocates learning on the job, that is fine for graduation project but to deliver a project on time and within budget you need a good architecture, a good design and assigns tasks to each member of the team that suite his skill set. Learning is very important but that is a specific task to be assigned separately. To be continued..

In a project I was working in I wanted to customize how the blog post was displayed. The Post.aspx in the Post list uses the new WebPartPages:XsltListViewWebPart, which is a new web part in SharePoint 2010. I would not bore you with a lot of background and stuff that You can read in the MSDN. I will just describe the solution that I implemented.  I had to change the XSL Link  it uses in Miscellaneous  options of the web part and implement  the template as follows

<!-- BaseViewID='7' and TemplateType='301' is Posts.aspx view for Blog's posts list -->

  <xsl:template match="View[@BaseViewID='7' and List/@TemplateType='301']" mode="full">

    <xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="AdeccoRenderView" />

  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="View" mode="AdeccoRenderView">

    <xsl:variable name="ViewStyleID">

      <xsl:value-of select="ViewStyle/@ID"/>

    </xsl:variable>

    <!-- total first -->

    <xsl:variable name="HasExtraColumn" select="$TabularView='1' and $MasterVersion=4 and ($ViewStyleID = '' or $ViewStyleID = '17')"/>

    <xsl:variable name="Fields" select="ViewFields/FieldRef[not(@Explicit='TRUE')]"/>

    <xsl:variable name="Groups" select="Query/GroupBy/FieldRef"/>

    <xsl:variable name="Collapse" select="Query/GroupBy[@Collapse='TRUE']"/>

    <xsl:variable name="GroupCount" select="count($Groups)"/>

    <xsl:if test="Aggregations[not(@Value='Off')]/FieldRef">

      <tr>

        <xsl:if test="$HasExtraColumn">

          <td/>

        </xsl:if>

        <xsl:if test="$InlineEdit">

          <td width="1%"/>

        </xsl:if >

        <xsl:apply-templates mode="aggregate" select="ViewFields/FieldRef[not(@Explicit='TRUE')]">

          <xsl:with-param name="Rows" select="$AllRows"/>

          <xsl:with-param name="GroupLevel" select="0"/>

        </xsl:apply-templates>

      </tr>

    </xsl:if>

    <xsl:for-each select="$AllRows">

      <xsl:variable name="thisNode" select="."/>

      <xsl:for-each select="//Row">

        <tr>

          <td colspan="2">

            <div class="TopTitle">

              <div  class="PostTitle">

                <strong>

                  <xsl:value-of select="@Title" disable-output-escaping="yes" />

                </strong>

              </div>

              <xsl:if test="../../@BaseViewID='7'">

                <!-- Handle _edit only their own_ property on list -->

                <xsl:if test="($thisNode/../@value.listpermission.EditListItems = '1' and (($thisNode/../@value.listpermission.ManageLists  = '1') or ($XmlDefinition/List/@WriteSecurity = '2' and $thisNode/@Author.id = $Userid) or ($XmlDefinition/List/@WriteSecurity != '2')))">

                  <div  class="ms-blogedit">

                    <a href="javascript:" onclick="javascript:STSNavigate('{$HttpVDir}/{$thisNode/../@resource.wss.lists_Folder}/{$thisNode/../@resource.wss.blogpost_Folder}/EditPost.aspx?ID={$thisNode/@ID}&amp;Source={$HttpVDir}%2Fdefault.aspx');">

                      <xsl:value-of select="$thisNode/../@resource.wss.blog_edit" />

                    </a>

                  </div>

                </xsl:if>

              </xsl:if>

            </div>

            <div class="PostSubtitle" >

              <div class="PostAuther" >

                By: <xsl:value-of select="@Author" disable-output-escaping="yes" />

              </div>

              <div class="PostPublishDate">

                Posted <xsl:value-of select="@PublishedDate" />

              </div>

            </div>

            <div class="PostTable">

              <div class="PostDateBox" >

                <div class="PostSmallDate">

                  <xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(@PublishedDate), 1033, 'MMM. d yyyy')" />

                </div>

              </div>

              <div class="PostBody" >

                <xsl:value-of select="@Body" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>

              </div>

              <div class="PostComments">

                <img src="_layouts/images/AdeccoPortal2010/icon_comment.png" alt="comment"/><xsl:value-of select="@NumComments" /> Comment(s)

              </div>

            </div>

            <hr />

          </td>

        </tr>

      </xsl:for-each>

    </xsl:for-each>

    <xsl:if test="$InlineEdit and not($IsDocLib) and $ListRight_AddListItems = '1'">

      <xsl:call-template name="rowinsert">

        <xsl:with-param name="Fields" select="$Fields"/>

      </xsl:call-template>

    </xsl:if>

  </xsl:template>

Now the blog post looks like the following

Not bad eh

Hope this helps you in your SharePoint 2010 implementation

This is a sample configuration store that I wrote for a SharePoint implementation that I was working on. The configuration manager has a simple interface that takes two keys (siteID, and Key)  and returns the string associated with these keys here is the interface definition

The implementation for the IConfiguration manager expects to find the list URL and the site URL where the list exists(the list can exist in any site) in the application settings of the web.config. The implementation caches the retrieved values which has its own draw backs as changes to the list are not reflected till the cash expires but for this implementation the requirement did not expect lots of changes.

The Provider just loads the implementation based on the class name and assembly name of an entry in the application settings in web.config.

The consumer would write code similar to

      IConfigurationManager cm = ConfigurationManagerProvider.GetConfigurationManager();

      lblSiteTitle.Text = cm.GetConfiguration("Site1", "Key1");