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Branding your SharePoint site: Application master page customization using HTTP Modules

By Edith Colegio   When it comes to SharePoint site branding, you think about styles, pages library, web parts, etc. But then you realize your site has another “side”… the “_layouts” section where it involves all pages: 1) People and groups (site permissions), 2) All site content, 3) Site settings, and all of them use a different masterpage than the rest of your site!   Then you think you can “customize” those pages with a simple modification to your “Application” master page (using your site’s theme of course). That’s not as easy as it looks. According to Microsoft there are two ways to modify/customize the application.master page:   1.       Modify the application.master page in t...

SharePoint 2010: A quick overview with more developer friendliness.

By José Cortes   A little background: with SharePoint 2007 you had the option of installing the portal in WS2003 or WS2008, either in their 32bit or 64bit options, and you could choose between the core system WSS 3.0 or the full upgrade to MOSS 2007. In all of these cases you were able to use .NET framework 2.0 and 3.0, and with some patches you could even use the 3.5 version. Now with the new SharePoint 2010 (read as “SharePoint twenty ten”) we have a new name for WSS 3.0, and it is Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010. It is still the heart of the platform and provisions the basic services of SharePoint that allows you to deploy your custom templates and instantiate them in your list...

CSS Best Practices

By Cesar Olivas When you start creating a website, you have to make some choices before you start. Some of these choices are using HTML or XHTML, Tables or Divs, Floats or Position, Inline Styling, etc. In this post I will give you some explanation of all the elements that you usually need to choose from. DoctypeEvery website needs to have a doctype declared, failing to do so may result on your page rendered ineffectively.  The best way is declaring a doctype like xhtml transitional, strict or html 4.01 and help meet standard requirements. As a personal experience, this has been an issue in SharePoint implementations, since default masterpages do not include a doctype. In a customizatio...

CSS3: New Cool Features

By Cesar Olivas CSS has been around for some time now, since 1996, and it completely changed the way people used to make websites, for good. First came CSS1, with some support for fonts, color text, backgrounds, spacing between words, alignment, margins, paddings and some other attributes; it looked really good for its time. Then same CSS level 2 in 1998, which introduced some powerful features like positioning, z-index, media types. Then came the revision we use right now, CSS level 2 revision 1(CSS2.1) which fixed some errors in CSS2 and removed some unsupported features. But the web is evolving, turning into a more interactive, user-centered design; the technologies were bound to ev...

How to send a Scheduled HTML report directly from SQL Server

By Gabriel Palma   The situation A customer asked recently for a quick daily report of about-to-expire items, he wanted something simple that could be sent via email to the people already registered in the database. Acquiring the information was very simple (as simple as writing a query). The problem was getting those results inside an email and sending it automatically every day. We came up with a scheduled SQL Server job running daily, getting and shipping the results without passing through .Net code.   The steps Step 1. Write the query to retrieve the raw data.   I used AdventureWorks database for the following example. Here I’ll get a report of work orders with due date ...