Tell Us More ... comments from Tech Ed

Eray sent me his comments for the final days of Tech Ed, so here they are. He has a great tip buried in here for moving WSS pages from a test environment to a live environment. The Export/Import feature in FrontPage is great for this. He explains below how one customer uses it.

Someone once advised me, "When deciding on the level of technical depth for a demo or presentation, always err on the too technical side." I took the advice to heart, and during my breakout session, I took an ironic leap into the wonderful world of XSLT. Ironic because, with FrontPage2003, a user does not need to code to create useful web applications on top of SharePoint. However, the audience seemed to enjoy seeing the XSLT we generate for each major DataViewWebPart feature.

I showed them how we generate an xsl:template for each repeating data region. Next, I explained how the xsl:variable "Rows" uses XPath to select the correct node set to iterate on, and that view level filters are really just predicates on that same location path. I similarly showed how we accomplish view level sorts via xsl:sort and conditional formatting via xsl:if statements. The transparency of our generated XSLT seemed to resonate with the audience.

After the session, I spoke to a small group of attendees with solution specific questions. One of particular interest had to do with staging best practices. Another attendee suggested a nice solution: let each user develop their application within a private web. When ready to go live, use FrontPage’s web package feature (Tools, Packages, Export/Import) to pack up the application and then re-deploy on the live web.

Another interesting application involved entering data via the web, storing that data, and then viewing results of calculations on that data. That attendee used FrontPage’s List Forms on top of a custom SharePoint List to accomplish the data entry portion. They added the formulas to the DataViewWebPart by using <xsl:value-of select="XPath expression" /> where XPath expression represents the formula in XPath.

I spoke to one or two folks that would have like to hear more about SharePoint customization. While that wasn’t the topic of my specific talk, after my talk, I showed them the CSS classes SharePoint uses to theme its pages. I also pointed them to the www.sharepointcustomization.com web site, always a great resource.

Later that night I decided to check out MOM’s Rumble in the Jungle at the San Diego Zoo. I was quite surprised and maybe a little jealous to see my friend Jon, a technical product manager for MOM, get serenaded by Jessica Simpson on stage! I guess it’s like another saying I’ve heard, "Marketing always has the most fun."