I did some googling and found a walkthrough from Microsoft: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms464040%28office.12%29.aspx (or for 2010: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms464040(office.14).aspx).  At first I thought it seemed odd to have to install my web service to the 12\ISAPI folder where it would get mapped to http://myserver/_vti_bin/, and to have to convert my static wsdl and disco files (generated by VS) to .aspx pages to have them handle the correct path, etc., etc.  I resisted the idea and went home for the day.

The next day I decided to try the walkthrough and sure enough it works great.  So I thought I should jot this down for when I run into it again.  Maybe it will help you some day, too.

EDIT: this link may also prove helpful: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/MOSS4Devs-08-WebServices.aspx

Eventually I googled it and found other people with the same problem. Turns out, jQuery only tracks event handlers that have been bound using jQuery. So, if the event handler was bound declaratively in the HTML markup (or output by some other system/framework), Unbind() won’t touch it (doesn’t know about it unless you used Bind() to add it).

The workaround solution is to use .removeAttr(eventname), such as .removeAttr(“onclick”). This worked for me and stopped me from banging my head on the wall any further. Hopefully it helps you, too.

Code blocks are not allowed in this file

I’m posting this now because I just ran into it for a second time, but had completely forgotten what the issue was when I googled it the first time.  So I’m posting it here for my convenience, mostly!

If you suddenly start getting an exception from SharePoint stating that code blocks aren’t allowed in your master page, you need to add a new <PageParserPath> element to web.config to allow the code.  Why this starts happening all of a sudden when the same code block existed in the path previously without the exception, I will never understand.  But the point is, follow the directions in one of these blog postings to resolve it:

http://mystepstones.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/code-blocks-are-not-allowed-in-this-file/

http://svengillis.blogspot.com/2008/03/code-block-are-not-allowed-in-this-file.html

http://dotnetdeveloper.co.uk/blogs/sharepoint/archive/2008/10/10/code-blocks-are-not-allowed-in-this-file.aspx

(Note: if you still can’t see the template after activating those features, try navigating to http://<your_site_root>>/_Layouts/AreaTemplateSettings.aspx and adding the Site Directory template to the available list, then try again.)

Recently myself and a few other SharePoint team members at my site rolled a number of new and updated features into production.  This was a long and grueling affair, and part of the reason was we spent a few hours on this issue I’m about to describe.  We never found anyone describe this problem (or solution) through googling, so I’m either it’s hard to find, or nobody has talked about it.

We have a custom landing page layout and landing page layout content type that we use on a collaboration site.  A previous version was in production and worked fine.  Part of our big production rollout the other day was to update both the landing page layout and content type.  We deployed these two features in our usual way: by updating the 12-hive, de-activating, install -force’ing, and [re]activating the features through stsadm on the command line.  The landing page content type activated fine, the landing page page layout activated fine, but we have a 3rd feature which is for the landing page itself (to dynamically create it through some code in FeatureActivated), and it was throwing an index-out-of-bounds exception when we tried to activate it.

Looking at the exception, and the FeatureActivated code, we narrowed it down to what appeared to this block of code:

SPContentTypeId contentTypeId = new SPContentTypeId(welcomePageLayoutContentTypeId);
PageLayout[] layouts = pubWeb.GetAvailablePageLayouts(contentTypeId);
PageLayout welcomePageLayout = layouts[0];
page = pubWeb.GetPublishingPages().Add(dcsLandingPageFileName, welcomePageLayout);

Specifically, to the layouts[0].  This seemed to indicate that GetAvailablePageLayouts was not returning our custom landing page layout associated with our custom landing page content type.

We spent some time re-deploying all 3 features again with no success at that last step.  We made sure that the content type looked up to date, that the Master Pages and Page Layouts gallery had the most recent version of the page layout, that the page layout was correctly associated with the landing page content type, that we had deleted the old landing page from the Pages library, etc., etc.   Nothing we tried helped.

Eventually through some googling, another member of my team found this installable feature that lets you do a number of things, among them to enumerate all the available page layouts to the command line.  The feature is described here http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2007/08/enumerate-available-page-layouts.html.

Once we had installed and ran that feature, we discovered that our custom landing page layout was not showing up in the list.  We re-verified the the site settings that the page layout was in the gallery and was associated to the page layout content type, and that the content type was installed correctly, etc., but nothing seemed to help.

Then we finally had a break-through:  looking at the enumerated available page layouts listing from the stsadm tool, we noticed that not only was our custom page layout not showing, but a number of other page layouts were missing, all of which were out of the box SharePoint Publishing content types!  We determined this by comparing the enmerated page layouts list on our “broken” site vs. the list on another site using the same lading page that was functioning correctly.

This lead us to the Site Collection Features and Site Features pages to verify that publishing was enabled.  It was.  We were further stumped.  On a whim, we decided to try de-activating both features and re-activating them.  Guess what–this solved our problem!

So even though publishing appeared to be enabled, somehow, bizarrely, it was actually broken.  Flipping the switch on and off resolved this, after a few hours of face-palming and much stress.  I hope this tale may help you if you ever run into this.  It’s worth a shot!

Some of these I already know about and use a few (Firebug, Web Developer, IE Tab, YSlow), but I intend to add a few more to toolbox (Window Resizer, Page Diff, CSS Viewer).  The rest seem to either not very useful to me personally, or are duplicates of functionality I already get from Firebug and/or Web Developer, but hey, YMMV!

Be sure to hit up the hyperlink above for the full blog post!

C# has finally decided to embrace optional parameters and named arguments!

That’s right.  It only took 4 versions to catch up to what you were doing well before the .NET days.  Oh well, better late than never!

Of course, you could at least partially work around this in C# 3.0 and older by putting the method implementation in the most verbose signature version of your method and creating any number of overloads needed.

Using the example from the blog posting linked above (please read it before continuing), you’d create:

//main method with all the parameters and full implementation
public void SomeMethod(int a, int b, int c)
{
/* put the actual implementation here */
}

//overload to omit the c parameter and default to 100
public void SomeMethod(int a, int b)
{
SomeMethod(a, b, 100);
}

//overload to omit the b and c parameters and use the defaults 50 and 100, respectively
public void SomeMethod(int a)
{
SomeMethod(a, 50, 100);
}

However, if we then want an overload that omits the b parameter only, we run into trouble.  If we try this:

public void SomeMethod(int a, int c)
{
SomeMethod(a, 50, 100);
}

We would end up with a compile error, since the signature of this overload would be the same as the first overload I declared above, namely:

public void SomeMethod(int, int)

If a, b, and c were of different datatypes, we could declare any combination of parameters, but this example of all int’s does demonstrate the weakness of this approach, and why the new optional parameters and named arguments is so exciting!

But recently I read about of Copy Source As HTML, a plug-in for Visual Studio that allows you to copy some code as raw HTML, complete with all the syntax highlighting, optional line numbers, and other options.  I’m going to start using it the next time I post code.  I think it will be very handy.

• ASP.NET 4.0 is additive over 3.5, nothing dropped. There are nice API/behavior improvements, but existing code all still works
• NET 4 is a full release with a new CLR version # (unlike 3.5). Here is a blog post about that http://tinyurl.com/4multi
• Despite being side by side and a new version number, the features in 4.0 it are still compatible so it is easy to upgrade
• Controls in ASP.NET 4 have updated markup/rendering for easier CSS. eg: <asp:menu> now uses <ul><li> elements
• New 4.0 projects by default use CSS rendering/output of controls. Upgaded projects can still use old rendering, avoiding breaking changes
• ASP.NET 4.0 control output (css vs. tables) & ID generation modes can be configured for any project w/ <pages> section in web.config
• The goal is no more need for CSS control adapters. ASP.NET controls in 4.0 now output clean markup by default
• ASP.NET 4.0 controls have a ClientIDMode property (which is inherited from parent, so you can set once and/or override)   [I previously blogged about this]
• ClientIDMode can be “static” – which means id you set is what is output to client. No more ID concatination. Ideal for CSS/JS
• If ClientIDMode is “predictable”, id values are concatinated but clean (no more ctrl_). Better for nested list controls
• Yes – ASP.NET 4.0 and .NET 4.0 Beta 2 will support a “go live” license. Really, really soon now… stay tuned [my emphasis, not Gutherie's]
• 10 Features why ASP.NET 4 is better for public websites” – http://tinyurl.com/asp4improvements

[Bonus item not tweeted this afternoon:] URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms

Sounds like some great improvements coming!