LAYOUTS folder revealed

May 24, 2008 - 02:09, by Mark van Lunenburg

A social life ....... well draw your own conclusions when reading this post but the excuse is at the end of this post.

Of course nothing goes wrong during your development and deployment. But what if for some unforeseen reason a little mistake is made and because of that only the default.aspx is screwed up, you might still want to access the other useful administration pages of your site.
Or perhaps you might want to have some shortcuts to commonly used administration pages, this post might help you. 

Fortunately there are not so many pages so therefor I will update this list bit by bit, bare with me and please feel free to help me out here.

For now I am only listing the pages that are directly accessible from your site collection and don't require a querystring. It's an oldie and kind of retro but back in his handsome younger days my mate Daniel posted an item about querystrngs.

  1. AclInv.aspx = add users
  2. AddNavigationLinkDialog.aspx = Edit the title, URL, and description of the navigation item.
  3. addrole.aspx = Add a Permission Level
  4. AdminRecycleBin.aspx = Site Collection Recycle Bin
  5. AreaCacheSettings.aspx = Publishing Site Output Cache Settings
  6. AreaNavigationSettings.aspx = Site Navigation Settings
  7. Site Navigation Settings  = Site Navigation Settings
  8. AreaTemplateSettings.aspx = Page Layout and Site Template Settings
  9. AreaWelcomePage.aspx = Site Welcome Page
  10. AssetPortalBrowser.aspx =
  11. associatedgroups.aspx = Edit Group Quick Launch
  12. AuditSettings.aspx = Configure Audit Settings
  13. avreport.aspx = ow really :))
  14. bpcf.aspx = New Basic Page
  15. ChangeSiteMasterPage.aspx = Site Master Page Settings
  16. ContentTypeHierarchy.aspx = Content Types Hierarchy
  17. create.aspx = create overview lists, sites and pages
  18. CreatePage.aspx = Create Page
  19. ctypenew.aspx = New Site Content Type
  20. deleteweb.aspx = Delete This Site
  21. dws.aspx = Document Workspace (instruction page)
  22. editpolicy.aspx = Edit Policy
  23. editprofile.aspx = Edit Details
  24. enhancedsearch.aspx = Search Settings
  25. ........ to be continued

While going trough all the pages in the layouts folder I came across some pages that I have never seen before. Have a look yourself and feel free to provide your vision about the purpose of these pages.

  1. ConnGps.aspx

Excuse: I am at the Volkswagen dealer waiting for my car to be ready.

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Deploy your own custom webservices on a sharepoint environment

May 12, 2008 - 03:12, by Mark van Lunenburg

I was a little bit puzzled about deploying a new webservice. This is how I did it.

  1. Copy your dll file into the bin folder of your web application
  2. In the 12\ISAPI folder, which is the virtual IIS directory _vti_bin folder, locate the web.config file and modify the following:

    <webServices>
        <protocols>
            <remove add name="HttpGet" />
            <remove add name="HttpPost" />
            <remove add name="HttpPostLocalhost" />
            <add name="Documentation" />
        </protocols>
    </webServices>
Depending on your needs you can either make the web service available on farm level by using the ISAPI folder or on web application level by using your web application folder.
  1. Farm level:
    Copy your asmx file in the ISAPI folder

  2. Web application level: 
    Create a new folder under the root of your web application and copy your asmx file to this location.

Now navigate with your browser to the copied asmx file:

  • http://<web application>/_vti_bin/<service>.asmx
  • http://<web application>/<new folder>/<service>.asmx

If your webservice listens to SOAP requests then you need to enable that by adding the <add name="httpSoap" /> entry.

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Want to blog about SharePoint using SharePoint?

March 19, 2008 - 05:06, by Mark van Lunenburg

To celebrate the release of the Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition 2.0 (CKS:EBE) zevenseas, in partnership with PixelMill, would like to offer the first 20 people to email us at openzeas@zevenseas.com a free, hosted blog, powered by the CKS:EBE.
The CKS:EBE brings the most critical features required to run a successful internet facing blog, including:


·         Modular Theme Framework ("MTF") that allows for the development of rich themes
·         Support for Akismet comment spam detection
·         Multiple categories/tags can be mapped to each blog entry/post
·         Friendly URL ("FURL") for the blog's posts
·         Friendly URL for the blog's RSS feed (and support for FeedBurner)
·         And more....


This offer came together at the recent SharePoint conference, and was the result of a discussion about the CKS kit and what it means to community building. At zevenseas we have been lucky enough to work with a number of customers on ways to engage with the people who care most about their products and services. We’ve used the CKS to build out a platform that enables them to do this effectively, on SharePoint, with blogging at its core. We hope this offer is the beginning of another small community.

PixelMill, our SharePoint Designer Partners, have worked with us on these projects and wanted to be able to demonstrate just how attractive these blogs can be. To do that they have offered, for free, a selection of their premium design themes built for CKS:EBE. These are just the first of a number of new themes they will be offering to help your blog stand out, so be sure to take a look at their gallery.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the team who put the toolkit together. A big thanks to the CKS Team below, we’re really excited about its future:

Vince Rothwell (MTF)
Nadeem Mitha (Linkbacks)
Ari Bakker (Themes)
Heather Waterman (Themes)
Yvonne Harryman (QA)
Matthew McDermott (Documentation/QA)
Shane Perran (Themes)
Gaetan Bouveret (QA)
Keith Bunge (Various)
Steven Van de Craen (Captcha)
Brent Bolleman (EBE-PM)
Lawrence Liu (CKS-PM)

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Visual Studio 2005 class project - where is my workflow template?

March 12, 2008 - 01:06, by Mark van Lunenburg

When I was working in a normal c# class project I wanted to create a new workflow class item. Unfortunately the template wasn't available.

Luckily I found the post from Eric Schoonover which tells you basically four steps:

  1. open your csproj project file in notepad
  2. copy the following tag in the <AssemblyName> section:
    <ProjectTypeGuids>{14822709-B5A1-4724-98CA-57A101D1B079};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}</ProjectTypeGuids>
  3. Copy the following import node as the other existing import nodes:
    <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\Windows Workflow Foundation\v3.0\Workflow.Targets" />
  4. save the file and reload your solution
  5. Make sure you include the correct reference in your project:
    e.g microsoft.office.workflow.tasks

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Second day on the job

March 4, 2008 - 18:32, by Mark van Lunenburg

P3040189

In new sunny day in Seattle which was packed with sessions, five in total. This day was literally a pain in the ass due to the uncomfortable seats :)

The first session: Migrating a spd workflow to a vs.net workflow by Todd Bleeker
My conclusion of this session is that it is possible but it can be a bit of pain to accomplish this.

The second session: Build an Automated Expense reimbursement process using Infopath and sharepoint by Asif Rehmani
Now this was suppose to be a 400 level session, well my opinion is that it was actually a 300 and maybe even a 200 level session.

The third session: Advanced administrative Architecture Deployment and Operations by Shane Young
Well this session was to much high level and didn't go into dept. Unfortunately they only showed how to deploy wsp solution.

The fourth session: How microsoft IT design and creates enterprise portals on MOSS 2007
In this session we got to see two live situation on how Microsoft solved business challenges concerning news and provisioning the styling. They especially mentioned the publishing features like the content (by) query webpart. This session enlightened allot.

The fifth and last one and with pain in my behind one: automated server farm installation platform for the intranet and beyond by Ben Curry
This session was all about setting up sharepoint without using the GUI installation. Everything can be done with psconfig and stsadm. Basically we went through some batch files which are calling psconfig and stsadm with different statements.
Unfortunately the script didn't run due to the fact that it was being executed under a wrong user which didn't had enough permission through out the farm

I will post more details about all these session later on, so check this post at the end of the week again.

Tonight we have a gala at the museum of flight where also the Airforce one is stationed !! Tomorrow I am having my 70-541 exam which is for free (yes, I am dutch).

Catch you all tomorrow.

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It's a first day on the job

March 3, 2008 - 23:09, by Robin Meure

To start of with an introduction:

My name is Mark van Lunenburg, I finished my Business IT education in 2000 and started my career at ATS (Accenture Technology Solutions). I worked for about 2 years at ATS where I mostly worked with Actuate reporting which is not that much different from to Microsoft reporting server. After two years of working at ATS I decided that I wanted to work with Microsoft solutions so I joined Wortell, a gold certified partner. At Wortell I joined the sharepoint team, I was soled ........

Beginning of this year mr Mcpherson and mr Blaauw approached me with the question if I wanted to sail with a philosophy. The Zevenseas approach and mentality definitely matches my personal idea's, it was a real match !!!

After being unemployed for two days I started my first day here in Seattle, it couldn't be a better one !! On this day I got to see mr Microsoft himself who gave an overall impression about Sharepoint and it's future. After giving his view he impressively gave detailed answers on specialized questions raised by the audience during the Q&A session, I am taking my hat of (which means: respect in dutch).
We also got to see Microsoft's online WSS hosted service which actually seems like an answer to Google sites variant.

Each Zevenseas sailer joined a different sessions in the afternoon. I got to join the Search server, BI and RMS security sessions which were all interesting sessions.
The RMS security session went in detail like:
- RMS can be used on the document level and document library level but can't be used on the content type level
- Copy and past actions can be restricted
- screenshot's can be prevented, only third party tools can probably still make screenshots
- taking a picture from a screen? .......... hahahahaha ........... the joke of the session

After each session we called each other via the walkytalkies which is kind of nurdie actually but it's also allot of fun.

Although I have just started to blog, I already have my loyal fans which I want to mention :)
Jules Dekker, Raymond Groenendijk, Connie van der Biezen, Paul Keijzers, Bram de Jager, Rogier Kramer.

I hope you all enjoyed my very first blog and I will be keeping you posted. If you have any questions or reMARKs just let me know !!!

Hope to read you soon !

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