I love this post by Woody Windschman:

First, Do No Harm

Use the Product : Don't customize where SharePoint already does what you need.

Do it with Style : Don't build a Master Page when a CSS theme will suffice.

Take the Data View : Don't build a binary web part when a Data View or Content Editor can do the job just as easily.

Master It : When you do need to make major changes to the layout of your pages, customize the Master, but don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

Feature it at Staples : Don't build a Site Definition when you can achieve your goals with Features and Feature Stapling.

The Definition of Success : If you must use a Site Definition, understand the ramifications.

Original post: http://www.thesanitypoint.com/archive/2 ... -harm.aspx

Microsoft has a bulk conversion utility that can convert multiple DOC files to DOCX files. This blog post presents very basic information on its use. This utility has been around for a while, but a fair number of people don’t know of its existence. Because it’s a powerful tool designed to convert all files on a server (or even a bunch of servers), its use is a little cryptic. This is fine for IT professionals, but if all you want to do is bulk convert a single directory of DOC files, this post shows what you need to do.

Before you can use this tool, you need to install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack. While the compatibility pack is primarily used with Office 2003 to allow it to load and save Open XML files, in essence, the compatibility pack is comprised of file format converters, which the Office File Converter (OFC) uses. To use OFC, you need to install the compatibility pack even if you only have Office 2007 installed. Download the compatibility pack here.

Next, you need to download and install the Microsoft Office Migration Planning Manager (OMPM). This contains a bunch of stuff, but for bulk file conversion, we are primarily interested in just one tool, OFC.EXE. Download the Microsoft Office Migration Planning Manager here.

When installing, as usual, you will select the installation directory. OFC.EXE is in the Tools directory under the installation directory. In addition, in that directory, there is a sample OFC.INI file. To run OFC.EXE, you need to create an OFC.INI, and place it in the directory where you run OFC.EXE from.


Cross Post From http://blogs.msdn.com/ericwhite/archive ... -docx.aspx

When you get an xml result from the SharePoint webservices, these results are Strings, but in the SharePoint dll these results are availbale in an enum.

private SPFieldType GetFielType(XElement xElement) {
return (SPFieldType)Enum.Parse(typeof(SPFieldType), GetAttribute(xElement, AttributesWeb.Type));
}

I created some wrapper classes that makes coding easier against SharePoint Webservices, in time I will publish more of these:

these can be found here

Whatever xml encoding SharePoint sends can be decoded using the code below from System.Xml.

XmlConvert.DecodeName("My_x0020_Name");