Wildcard Search in MOSS

Earlier this year I was asked to implement wildcard people search in MOSS. The solution I went with wasn't pretty and I wish I could go back and do it again. If I could do it again I would try to use the method outlined in this article with some customisations to make it work for People Search: Web Part for Wildcard Search in Enterprise Search

The way I had originally gone about it was to create a custom people search box based on this article. It worked really well EXCEPT that if any of my criteria were null for the person but they met other search criteria they would not show up in the results.

List of SharePoint links

List of useful SharePoint resources:

• http://www.harbar.net/articles/postsp1.aspx - list of Post SP1 hotfixes for sharepoint
• http://www.mssharepointdeveloper.com/ - The SharePoint Developer Introduction for .NET Developers
• SharePoint Developer MSDN Web Cast Series
• Application Templates for Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0
• Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System
• Canberra SharePoint User Group
• SharePoint Capacity Planning Key Info
• CodePlex SharePoint - open source SharePoint projects
• Heather Solomon's blog - great for branding, css, publishing
• How to Create a SharePoint Server 2007 Custom Master Page and Page Layouts for a Web Content Management Site
• How to Optimize a SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management Site for Performance
• WSS 3.0 Master Page Desktop reference - Lists content placeholders that appear in a master page and what they are
• Some Useful MOSS Search Development Related Articles
• Office Developer Centre
• TechNet - Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Microsoft SharePoint Community Portal
• MSDN Forums - SharePoint
• The BIG SharePoint Resource List
• Developer Portal
• MSDN WSS Developer Centre

.NET and SharePoint Interview questions

My list of .NET and SharePoint interview questions

.NET Questions

Describe what an Interface is and how it differs from a class.



What is polymorphism?



What is reflection



How is the using() pattern useful? What is IDisposable?




What is an abstract class?




Can you name some major ASP.net objects: Session, Page, Server, Response, Request, Application




Can you describe the ASP.NET page lifecycle? What methods are fired during the page load? Page request, Start, Page Initialisation, Load, Validation, Postback event handling, Rendering, Unload. PreInit, Init, InitComplete, PreLoad, OnLoad, control events, LoadComplete, PreRender, SaveStateComplete, the page calls Render for each control, Unload




How do you store information across postbacks? What different ways are there? Which one do you prefer and why? ViewState, Query Strings, Application, Session




What is an n-tier design? Can you give an example?
What is AJAX? Have you used it? Examples?




Can you used application blocks in your programming? Which ones?




Patterns?



SharePoint Questions

What are content types and how are they used? Can you give me an example of where you have used them?




What elements does SharePoint provide to allow you to define the look and feel of a publishing site? Master Page, Page Layouts, Content types, CSS




How could you display information from a list on one site on another site in the same site collection? Dataview, CQWP, RSS.




Why would you want to extend a web application?




What is the 12 hive OR can you tell me where SharePoint stores it’s files




Are you familiar with the file onet.xml? What is it? Site Definition file




What is a Feature




What is a Solution




What is SPWeb, SPSite. Can you tell me anything special that a developer must keep in mind when using these objects in code?




What is SharePoint Designer? How have you used it?

SharePoint developers webcast series

A series of webcasts for SharePoint developers: http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2008/05/12/sharepoint-developer-msdn-web-cast-series.aspx

Closed web part gallery

Are you trying to find the closed web part gallery? I was, then I found it here:

1. Click on Edit Page
2. Click on Add Web Part
3. When you get the list of web parts that are available, click on Advanced.
4. Now you will see any web parts that were closed

Branding meeting workspaces

I recently had an issue where I created a master page and tried to apply it (using feature stapling) to sites based on meeting workspace site templates. The lessons learnt from this were:

1. Meeting workspaces don't use default.master. They use MWSdefault.master. Base the master page for meeting workspaces on MWSdefault.master as it has extra functionality specific to meeting workspaces.
   
2. When setting the master page programatically, you need to set two properties as follows:
   web.MasterUrl = "something.master";
   web.CustomMasterUrl = "something.master";
   For sites based on other site templates I only had to set web.MasterUrl.

How to get started as a SharePoint developer

List of skills and resources in this linked blog on Getting Started with SharePoint Development