Easy (Relatively) Clean Up of Live Spaces Spam

Here’s a nice tip to help clean up the spam that you tend to get in the comments of your Live Space, thanks to Matt Farrington-Smith in the UK (http://windowslive.uk.msn.com/rss/article.aspx?cp-documentid=9257705). Instead of navigating to your default Spaces homepage we’re going to visit the ‘Mobile’ version. If your Spaces default page is http://yourspacesname.spaces.live.com then your mobile…

SharePoint Error: “The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet view for one or more of the following reasons…”

I recently updated my Windows XP SP3 machine with some recommended updates from Windows Update.  After I did so, I received the following error every time I tried to open a Datasheet view in SharePoint: The list cannot be displayed in Datasheet view for one or more of the following reasons: A datasheet component compatible…

Common SharePoint Question: How Do I Know How Much Disk Space I’m Using?

Here’s an easy one — except that most of your users won’t know about it.  I was just asked how someone can know about how much disk space they are using with their SharePoint sites.  Well, lo and behold, if you are a Site Collection Administrator, you can (at the root of the Site Collection),…

Disposing of Objects Correctly in MOSS or WSS 3.0

One of the big "gotchas" in coding against the SharePoint Object Model is not disposing of resources properly.  In relatively little time, you can find that your server is cycling itself to free up resources, with no apparent reason.  The first thing you should check is your own code. Roger Lamb has written an excellent,…

“The form cannot be displayed because session state is not available.” Error in SharePoint UI-Based Workflow Configuration

My client was seeing an odd error in one of their environments, bot not any of the others.  When you would go to configure an out-of-the-box workflow on a site, you’d see the "The form cannot be displayed because session state is not available." error after clicking Next on the first configuration screen (/_layouts/AddWrkfl.aspx). Some…

“Cannot get the list schema column property from the SharePoint list” Error with Excel 2003

This seems to be a fairly widespread issue with no clear solution.  It occurs when the user chooses the ‘Export to Spreadsheet’ Action and the SharePoint list view has a Date/Time column displayed.  With Excel 2007, the data is exported to Excel just fine, but with Excel 2003, the above error is shown in a…

Encoding Query String Values Between .ASPX Pages

I ran into an instance today where a column’s data contained the ampersand (&) character when I hadn’t expected it to.  Since the ampersand is used to separate Query String name/value pairs in the URL, that ampersand was causing me problems. In general, you should always encode Query String values just in case they might…