Ajax Loading Image

This is a nice site that is giving away free ajax loader images. You can customize your own and then just download it.

http://www.ajaxload.info/

Give your site that cool Web 2.0 look and feel with ajax and the cool ajax loading images.

Web Based Link Checker

I currently use LinkAlarm to check my web site for broken links, this service has worked great but it eats into my yearly budget. I found a nice example of how to write my own link checker at the following site.

http://blogs.iis.net/tomkmvp/archive/2008/06/26/web-based-link-checker.aspx

As soon as I get some time I will start working on this application and should be able to modify it to fit my needs. Basically go through my entire site, check links and produce a report of what needs to be fixed.

Install SharePoint on Vista

We (SharePoint developers) have always had to either develop on a server or spin up our vpcs or vm images with server running on it to develop SharePoint applications. There is now a solution to this. Check out http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2008/05/21/how-to-install-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-sp1-on-vista-x64-x86.aspx

for information regarding the steps needed to install and configure SharePoint to run on Windows Vista. Finally, we can develop on our local machines without the heavy server image.

On a personal note, I am going to continue to develop on my vpc image. My reason being Vista is slow enough without SharePoint and SQL running on it, developing on a server image gives me a better chance that my application will run without issues when deployed to the SharePoint server and the big one, the installation of SharePoint on Vista is not supported by Microsoft.

Kayak Club of Ada

My wife and I love to kayak the Thornapple and Grand River around Ada, MI and I think it would be great to share this experience with others around us. So I've set up a site for a potential kayak club based in Ada, MI. The idea would be to get others involved in kayak trips in the morning, evenings or entire days. It would be great to have a group of people that share our love of the water. I imagine this club would one day also sponsor some sort of river cleanup.

Speaking of river cleanup, I found a full size 16 speed Rally bike in the Thornapple behind the florist shop yesterday evening. I couldn't pull it out since I was on the kayak and probably would have fallen it, but I plan to get it out. Unless someone else sees this post and does it before me.

Anyway, the link to the kayak blog is http://kayakada.blogspot.com/ Please drop us a line if you'd like to participate with us.

InfoPath Tabbing Tab Index bug

I have an InfoPath form with controls defined below.

TextBox - Tab Index is 1

TextBox - Tab Index is 2

Date Picker - Tab Index is 3

TextBox - Tab Index is 4

TextBox - Tab Index is 0

If I tab through these fields, it goes down the line 1, 2, 3, 4, 0 as expected. However, if I tab from 1 to 2, 2 to 3 and then choose a date using the calendar and then tab again it goes down to the textbox with tab index of 0.

Why does this happen? Because the small calendar icon seems to be it's own control and gets focused on, it's tab index is presumably 0 even though the entire Date Picker control is 3. So when I tab from the calendar icon it goes to the next tab index of 0 which is expected. However, this is not an expected behavior from a user perspective or from any other perspective for that matter.

That entire Date Picker control should have a tab index of 3 not just the text portion of the control but the entire control including the small calendar icon.

This same behavior seems to occur for radio buttons and drop down controls as well. If instead you replace the Date Picker with a Drop Down control and the user selects a value, the next tab is to a control with a tab index of 0, even though it's expected that it should be 4 (using the example above).

I would consider this a bug that needs to be fixed for Office 14. Probably not important enough for them to fix it in a service pack for Office 2007, even though that would be nice.

Grand Rapids Tech Lunch #2 - July 7, 12pm Grand Rapids Brewing Company

My fellow colleague, Joel Ross, has put together a Grand Rapids Tech Lunch. What a great idea! This time the lunch will be held at the Grand Rapids Brewing Company on 28th street. Last time I was at TechEd, this time I've got a meeting at 1pm I need to attend, so I won't be able to make it again. But I encourage you to go if you are in GR and want to meet other developers.

http://grtechlunch.com/grafitti/meetings/2-grtechlunch-event-july-7-2008-grand-rapids-brewing-company/

Outlook Business Contact Manager (BCM) Custom Import Tool

BCM is a great tool provided by Microsoft to manage business contacts and vendors. It can be used as a sales tool or to keep track of approved vendors. Most of you probably have this data stored within an ACT! database, an Access database, an Excel spreadsheet or some other format. If you have ever tried to import this data into BCM you'll quickly find that it's not as customizable as it should be.

Now I don't know what version BCM is, I know it was at least around with Office 2003, but it could be improved dramatically. One improvement could be the import tool. My requirement was to import an Access database into BCM into custom fields. The Microsoft import tool did not fit my needs to I wrote my own import tool to do this. I can see from the newsgroup and complaints that a custom import tool may be desired by a lot of people.

If this is the case for you, please drop me a line. I'm more than happy to release the tool I've created so that it may help you. It is easy to custom to fit your needs with a little bit of development.