Busted! Importing Profiles from multiple organisational units in Active Directory

One big drawback of the way AD implements LDAP is the lack of support for querying on Organisaitonal Units. No matter what you try, you will hit a brick wall when trying something like OU=SharePoint or OU:SharePoint in a simple query. Even trying to access the value as a property of an AD object will fail as OUs are not stored as properties on objects but only form part of the hierarchy and not part of the metadata. So, when importing profiles into SharePoint, the only place where you can enter an OU is when you are selecting the datasource, before applying any filters. Which means only one single OU, right? Wrong. read the solution at SharePoint Mythbuster.com

Busted: Customising the application.master

There are numerous articles out there about how to change the system master page. The one that all pages in the _layouts aka LAYOUTS folder use. In most cases they want to do this to enable a different datasource for the top navigation aka global navigation. The average rookie who is in charge of creating a site in MOSS using the publishing feature will stumble across this problem and start hacking away at either the original application.master, or even go and implement a custom http handler to exchange the application.master with a custom one on the fly. None of these approaches are best practice nor are they supported by MS. So is it impossible to fix without breaking the system? Not at all.
I've published a solution to www.sharepointmythbuster.com! It will allow you to replace the top navigation on the fly for all pages in the site collection, including those horrid system pages and application pages.

Gettting Started with SharePoint development

Microsoft put together ten labs for Developing on SharePoint and also provided a fully functional VPC for you to get started. Time for the image is running out, as it will expire on 30/09/09. So if you don't have your own SharePoint development environment and wish to have a look at what all the hype is about go and download the image quick

VPC Image:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1beeac6f-2ea1-4769-9948-74a74bd604fa&DisplayLang=en

WSS Hands on Labs:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=B885DCE8-C93F-48AA-B798-4422FEBCC200&displaylang=en

Loads of Resources, Demos, and online Walkthroughs
http://www.microsoft.com/click/SharePointDeveloper/

SharePoint Event Troubleshooting Tips

Gary from Combined-Knowledge pointed out this useful post in the WSS SDK today.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa979520.aspx
It is a great little list of issues you will come across when working with Event Receivers in SharePoint. You're bound to have come across the one or other weird behaviour when implementing events. You're not alone. The above list mentions a dozen common issues to be careful of.

How to Pre populate Form Fields in SharePoint

Can't do it better than the boys over at Endusersharepoint. A great JQuery script which works universally with all kinds of Field types including lookups and date time fields.
Just plonk this onto your EditForm or the page with your Dataview and off you go.
Sadly there are no delegate controls on the built in EditForm.aspx for you to override automatically so you will have to either customise the editforms or build your own for your cusotm content type or cusotm lists definition.

http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/04/20/jquery-for-everyone-pre-populate-form-fields/