Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Creating a userfriendly Excel input form

Creating a form in Excel is fairly easy, using the right options in Excel.

  • enter a label
  • select the field which should contain the input and unlock the field.
  • Add a message to be displayed when the input field is selected:

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    • Deselect the gridlines in View:

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  • Protect the Sheet: allow Select unlocked fields only.

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Now the sheet is ready for use.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

JournalOwnership

 

As of Silverlight 3.0, there is a Navigation API. It is located in System.Windows.Controls.Navigation.

As explained in this blog there is a Frame Container which has several options.

One of these options is JournalOwnership. It is documented in MSDN here.

JournalOwnership has influence on the behavior of the browser history.

If the JournalOwnership is set to UsesParentJournal, navigation will be visible in the browser history:

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This enables the end user to navigate through the Silverlight application using the browser history.

If you do not want to use this feature, for instance in a banking application, the JournalOwnership should be set to OwnsJournal.

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After navigating through the menu items, the browser history remains empty.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Debugging Submit in InfoPath 2007

When you submit an InfoPath form which was opened from an existing form, so called Edit, it is hard to debug the managed code. The method that I use to resolve the problem is to put statements into the code I suspect. Just as the writelines in the early days developing without debugger. Instead of writelines I used the MessageBox.Show() command. This enabled me to pinpoint the error location.

Today I fixed a problem when submitting the InfoPath form which was caused by the fact that the file already existed in the SharePoint Document Library.

The solution was to enable a checkbox in the Data Connections of the InfoPath Form Template. Just as described in the weblogs below:

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Boot to Windows 7 VHD using an USB stick

This is really cool. Windows 7 can boot to VHD. To do this you have to change the BCD store of your machine. But there is more : you can also do this without changing the host machine !

How?

  • put a (bootable) VHD on the host machine
  • create a bootable USB
  • change the BCD of the USB stick ! (point to the VHD)
The steps in detail are written in John's Post.

This enables you to boot from USB stick into a Windows 7 VHD.

Advantage:

you can quickly use the hardware of a system without changing the system !

sample:

You want to try Windows 7 on an XP laptop but you don’t want to change the XP laptop, because it’s the family’s laptop ;).

Try it. It’s cool !

Thursday, April 15, 2010

InfoPath 2007 Object Model Poster

I just discovered that Microsoft has published a poster describing the InfoPath 2007 Object Model (and other Office Object Models)

Look here

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

How to display the Form version on the InfoPath 2007 Form

Just insert an Expression Box control into the Infopath Form using the following XPath expression:

substring-before( substring-after( /processing-instruction()[local-name(.) = "mso-infoPathSolution"], 'solutionVersion="'), '"')

Source: http://www.nivot.org/2008/09/30/WhyVSTO30VisualStudio2008SharePointWindowsWorkflowAndInfoPathMightGiveYouAHernia.aspx

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

File recovery on Windows 7

This morning, I accidently deleted a complete folder on my Windows 7 machine. I automaticly use SHIFT-Delete, so I could not Restore the folder and documents from the Recycle-Bin :(

Looking for tools I discovered the Recuva tool from PiriForm. I downloaded the Portable version, so without installer. Extracted the zip on another drive and selected my drive where the folder was accidently deleted.

Recuva

Thanx to the Recuva tool, I now have all my documents back ! It just worked..

:)

Friday, February 5, 2010

Basic Overview of SharePoint 2007 for End Users

If you want to have an overview of all the SharePoint functionality provided, you can look into the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training (Standalone Edition). 

The Training is meant for End Users (but Developers can also learn from it. ;) )

and covers the following:

  • Collaboration
  • Enterprise Content Management
  • Bussiness Process and Forms
  • Search
  • Portals and Personalisation
  • Bussiness Intelligence

I found it usefull to get the overview.