Goodbye ArmsInFragileHands

This will be my last post to arminfragilehands.blogger.com. I have migrated my content to http://dis.mantle.me which is where I will be posting content from now on.

This blog will stay up for archive and search hit purposes, but any new content will be on the new site.

If you are subscribed via Feedburner, then you shouldn't see any difference.

So long for now and thanks for great start Blogger.com!

Change Password Web Part - ITaCS

In a previous post here, I described the issue that we were having with people using the Change Password Web Part in AD Tools.

We never did find a resolution, but we did find another web part which does not suffer from the same short comings as my own.

ITaCS has released their new Change Password web part, and I am recommending that all people who are currently using my web part without success use this one instead. I have confirmation from users on SSL that this web part does in fact work.

You can pick it up at their CodePlex project site...

http://changepassword.codeplex.com/

Free Windows Forms Controls

Since I'm doing a Win Forms project right now, I just thought I would convey how much I enjoy the free Krypton Toolkit. I thinked I have written on this product before, but if you don't have the Krypton toolkit for Windows Forms, you should definately check it out.

http://www.componentfactory.com/free-windows-forms-controls.php

My favorite component is the Group Header which allows you to create expanding and collapsing sections - kind of like an accordian.

The best part about it is - its the right price - FREE.

Changing The New! Tag In SharePoint

One question that I get more than almost any is can you change how long the "new!" tag is displayed on something and if so, how do you do it?

You can change the duration of the "new!" tag (which is 48 hours by default btw) by using the stsadm tool. You can also target it at specific webs by specifying the URL attribute. The following example sets the new tag to 14 days.

stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname days-to-show-new-icon -propertyvalue 14 -url http://mySharePointServer/site

There are also plenty of posts on removing it altogether if you prefer that route. Just search for "Remove New Tag SharePoint".

Opening Links In A New Window - SharePoint 2007

One of the questions that I get the most on SharePoint is how to open simple links from a link list in a new window.

As you probably know already - there is no way to do this out-of-the-box with a Links List in SharePoint.

Here is an article on how to change ALL links in ALL link lists to open in a new window...

http://weblogs.asp.net/bryanglass/archive/2008/03/07/changing-links-list-in-sharepoint-2007-to-open-in-new-browser-window.aspx

Andrew Connell posted a very nice solution on how to modify the Links List to let you to select whether or not you want to open the link in a new window.

http://andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/SharepointLinksListOpenInNewWindow.aspx

My favorite solution is to use a Content Editor Web Part and JQuery. You can insert the following code to open all links in lists (not documents and announcements)

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function() {
$('a[href^="http://"]')
.attr("target", "_blank");
});
</script>

You can also use the Summary Link Web Part. This gives you much more control over your links and how you want them opened. You can style them to look pretty much identical to the links list.

This was also a problem in 2003 and I though Microsoft would have added a fix for this in 2007. There is obviously a reason why they did not implement this feature. Maybe we will see it come to fruition in 14.

DVD Drive Not Available In Vista/Windows 7

When this happened to me, I thought it was because I was using Windows 7, but it turns out that Vista has a similar problem where it appears to just stop recognizing the DVD drive. It puts an exclamation point next to it in the device manager, but that's about all.

The fix is easy enough and described here by Microsoft...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929461

The embarrassing thing for me was that I was showing Windows 7 to my yuppie mac friend and explaining how great it was. Then I went to rip one of his CD's, and I have no ROM drive available. He looks at me like "Yeah dude - no great surprise your pc sucks - get a mac so you can read cd's like everyone else in the world". Come on Windows - work with me here!

An Operations Error Occured - Directory Services

While the AD Tools for SharePoint have been well received by the community, I have had one issue that I cannot seem to get on top of.

Some users report that when they use the "Change Password" (which essentially executes the invoke("ChangePassword", username, password) on Directory Services), they get the following error...

"An Operations Error Has Occured"

You can check out the CodePlex project site here for the entire discussion thread.

It took a while to track down what was going on here because I couldn't replicate the issue, but thanks to the community, we know more about this than possibly ever before.

It turns out that this error occurs when the application server sits in the DMZ over SSL and the LDAP server sits behind it on the intranet.

Now the unfortunate thing about this is that this is the scenario when allowing users to change their network passwords would be most beneficial. Users wouldn't normally need to change their password via an application if they are on the network. They could really just do ctrl+alt+delete and take care of business.

So we have tried a number of things to get this to work, including some users making registry changes on the backend to log events for LDAP and trying different combinations of the Authentication Type enumeration for Directory Services. None of these have remedied this issue.

It appears that the only way for this type of update to take place is to enable Kerberos authentication to the application server.

We continue to investigate...