Waldek Mastykarz - Innovation Matters | SharePoint Server MVP | ISSN 2210-9390

Content Query Web Part is probably the best solution for creating dynamic content rollups in SharePoint 2010. It’s lightning fast and because it’s using XSLT it allows you to easily change layout without touching your data. And although changing the presentation in Content Query Web Part is a matter of a few mouse clicks, it gets quite inconvenient when you start using custom XSLT files. Read more »

SharePoint 2010 ships with the great ability of adding Web Parts to content areas. This allows you to easily extend your content with dynamic elements providing your users with richer experience. Similarly to using Web Parts with Web Part Zones you should include Web Parts in Rich Content in your structured and repeatable deployment. There are however a few differences in how you provision Web Parts to Rich Content and knowing how it all works can make your life easier. Read more »

Programmatically granting permissions in SharePoint 2007 wasn’t that very complicated. You could grant permissions either to a User or a Group and in order to do that all you needed was a reference to that User/Group. As you might have heard SharePoint 2010 supports claims based identity what allows you to grant permissions using the identity of the user rather than a specific way of authentication. If you’ve looked through the public SharePoint 2010 API you might have noticed that there is no specific method that allows you to programmatically grant permissions to a claim. So how do you do that? Read more »

Last year I wrote an article about programmatically provisioning Variation Hierarchies in SharePoint 2007. The point of that article was that there was really no way you could provision Variations in repeatable way in a supported fashion and had to use reflection to get the job done. The situation in SharePoint 2010 has changed a little. The process of creating Variations has been made more reliable my moving it completely to a Timer Job. So a new approach, requires new code, and here it is. Read more »

One of the great improvements in SharePoint 2010 are Web Templates. Mirjam van Olst wrote recently a great article about why using light-weight Web Templates is a better approach than using full blown Site Definitions. While using Web Templates for creating sites and Site Collections is pretty straight-forward things get complicated when you need to create the Site Collection programmatically. Read more »