SharePoint

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 provides architecture for designing and developing scalable solutions. Two of these concepts are Site Collections for separating information and Variations for delivering multilingual solution. While working with both concepts – especially in Web Content Management (WCM) solutions I have found out that there is no easy way to create Site Collection or Variation relative links.

Imagine you want to retrieve the contents of a non-binary (text, CSS, XSL, etc.) file stored in SharePoint 2007 and all you know about that file is its location (URL). How would you do it?

As announced earlier this morning, Google has published the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide: a set of good practices which can help you get the most of your website. Having it read with my SharePoint 2007 developer hat on a couple of things took my attention in particular.

The SharePoint team has just announced that they are working on a tool which will help SharePoint developers to deal with disposable objects in custom code. SPDisposeCheck – as the tool is called, will check custom compiled assemblies and validate them against the Microsoft guidance.

Obtaining the value of a particular field (SPField) of a list item (SPListItem) is quite awkward. First of all you have to pass either the index, Id or the InternalName of an existing field. If the field exists a value of the object type is being returned. In some cases that value can be null. If it’s not you can cast it to its origin type as in most cases defined by the SPField.FieldValueType Property. Imagine doing all that each time you want to retrieve a field value. Isn’t there a better way?