Someday, you may find yourself building a public-facing web site using SharePoint. Odds are pretty strong that when that day comes you are going to be creating at least one or two custom Application Pages which anonymous visitors must be able to access. You may already know that one way to achieve this is to have your custom page inherit from the aptly named UnsecuredLayoutsPageBase class.

What you may not know is that even when christened with a name like that, anonymous access for this type's descendants doesn't just work out of the box. If that were the case, I ...

The Perils of Renaming Your SharePoint 2010 Visual Web Part

The development experience for SharePoint 2010 is a huge step up from the elaborate Virtual Machine dance steps required by SharePoint 2007. Yet, as with any toolset this author has encountered, there remain a few hidden snares in the works.

One such snare presents itself when you have deployed a custom Visual Web Part created in Visual Studio 2010. All appears to be peachy as you move to add your new web part to a page on your site. Then, suddenly:

A Web Part or Web Form Control on this ...

If you've been doing SharePoint development for some time, you have undoubtedly used custom content types at some point. Simply stated, a content type defines the attributes of a list item, a document, or a folder. When you create a new custom list and you add or remove columns from the list, you are essentially defining a content type for the list. This is an example of content types at the list level, and list content types are derived from content types defined at the site collection level.

When defining content types at the site collection level, the power in this approach ...

Every SharePoint power user or administrator knows the power of the Custom List. In just a few clicks, you can create small applications for collecting information of varying data types. In addition, you can easily create views to empower your users to make effective usage of this data. The problem is that the custom list eventually reaches a point where the out of the box functionality, simply isn't sufficient. In this column, I will demonstrate how to use the SharePoint UI to build a custom list, and then enhance this custom list to use a custom form and receiver with ...

SharePoint developers and administrators are familiar with the concept of creating and deploying solution packages (.wsp files) to the farm using the stsadm command line utility. In some cases, (for example, when deploying an admin approved InfoPath Forms Services template), we may no longer have a local copy of the solution package. Ideally, we would export a copy of the solution from the SharePoint solution store. While the SharePoint object model provides a developer with a straightforward way to obtain solution packages out of the solution store, this doesn’t really help a SharePoint administrator. So how do we empower ...