When you use site definitions to create sites it’s often pretty unclear what the order is in which the sites are provisioned. Knowing the order can be important if you want to make several changes to your site that are dependent on each other. In case you need to know how to make sure that the changes are executed in the right order, Check Mirjam’s blog 🙂

That’s another question that I Answered in MSDN Social forums and thought of sharing with you here 🙂
Q :
The documentation regarding those attributes is not informative enough.
Hidden :
Optional Boolean . If TRUE , the field is completely hidden from the user interface. Setting ReadOnly to TRUE means the field is not displayed in New or Edit forms but can still be included in views.
ReadOnly :
Optional Boolean . If TRUE , the field is not displayed in New or Edit forms but can be included in views. Setting the Hidden attribute to TRUE completely hides the field from the UI.
Anybody knows the differences ?And what about CanToggleHidden attribute ?

A :

Similarities : Both aren’t displayed anywhere unless you configure a view to show any of them.
Differences : Hidden Fields can be updated through the object model but ReadOnly fields can’t be updated through OM like “Created” And “Created By” fields.

If you are still confused, consider the following example :You have a field that you use only by the object model for setting or getting a flag and you don’t want the field to be visible to anybody and non updatable through the UI, however you want it to be updatable through the object model.
For me, I was creating a list that stores the applications of Scholarships offered by a foundation and we needed the status of each application to be totally hidden but updatable through the OM.
Theoritically, this should be an east task :
SPSite site=SPContext.Current.Site;
SPWeb web=site.OpenWeb();
SPList list =web.Lists[“ScholarshipApplicationsList”];
string id=list.Fields.Add(“Status”,SPFieldType.Boolean,false);
SPField statusField = list.Fields.GetField(id);
statusField.Hidden=true;
statusField.Update();

But if you try this you’ll receive a nice exception
Why? The Hidden property checks if CanToggleHidden property is true and throws an exception if its not.
Fair enough, all we do then is set the CanToggleHidden property to true and do the update but there is no such a property in the object model.
So I’ve decided to use “Reflection” ..
SPField statusField= web.Lists[“ScholarshipApplicationsList”].Fields[“Status”];
Type type = spfield.GetType();
MethodInfo mi = type.GetMethod(”SetFieldBoolValue”,
BindingFlags.NonPublic BindingFlags.Instance);
mi.Invoke(spfield, new object[] { “CanToggleHidden”, true });
statusField.Hidden = true;
statusField.Update();
And if you want to use CAML, this is much more easier :
<field displayname=”Status” type=”Boolean” required=”FALSE” name=”NewField” cantogglehidden=”TRUE” hidden=”TRUE”>

Q :
Thanks Ayman El-Hattab.I’ve created a few hidden fields but now I’m trying to delete them using the following code :
list.Fields[“Status”].Delete();
But I’m gettin the following exception :
“You cannot delete a hidden column ”

A :
Unhide the field , then delete it. CanToggleHidden attribute is now set to true, so you can hide and unhide the field as you wish.

It’s a good practice to catch the UnauthorizedAccessException within your sharepoint code , it might be thrown if the logged in user does not have enought permissions to get some code execued in his security context .
However, the SharePoint platform handles this exception on the developer’s behalf by redirecting to _layouts/AccessDenied.aspx page .
To override this behavior, you can set the property SPSecurity.CatchAccessDeniedException to false, telling SharePoint “Please do not to handle the exception for me, I’ll take care of it“.

Example :
bool AccessDeniedflag = SPSecurity.CatchAccessDeniedException;
SPSecurity.CatchAccessDeniedException = false;
try
{
SPList list = web.GetList(web.ServerRelativeUrl+”/Lists/ListName”);
SPListItem item = list.Items[0];
item[“title”] = “ayman-elhattab.blogspot.com”;
item.Update();
}
catch(UnauthorizedAccessException ex)
{
// Redirect to your custom page
SPUtility.Redirect(“MyAccessDeniedPage.aspx”,SPRedirectFlags.RelativeToLayoutsPage,this.Context);
}
finally
{
SPSecurity.CatchAccessDeniedException = AccessDeniedflag;
}

That was a problem that we encountered in one of our projects. We needed to prevent some lists and libraries from being deleted even by site collection adminsitartors.

Actually there are two ways to do that :

1) Using Event Handlers
Firstly I though of extending SPListEventReceiver, I expected the presence of a function called “ListDeleting”. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as “ListDeleting”.

Ali Al-Kahki ( My ITWorx colleague ) came up with a very nice workaround listed below :

public override void ItemDeleting(SPItemEventProperties properties)
{
if (properties.ListItemId == 0)
{
properties.Cancel = true;
properties.ErrorMessage = “You are not allowed to delete the list”;
}
}

2) Using SPList.AllowDeletion

When I was exploring the SharePoint object model, I discovered a very interesting property in the SPList class. When setting this property to false, the “Delete list” option will not be displayed in the list settings page .Even if you try to delete the list programmatically an exception will be thrown as long as this property is set to false.

SPList list = web.GetList(web.ServerRelativeUrl+”/Lists/ListName”);
list.AllowDeletion = false;
list.update();

I prefer the second approach but I like Ali’s workaround 🙂

This morning, i was surfing the SharePoint forum @ msdn social forums searching for some stuff. A guy there was asking how he could globalize his features definition files ( removing language specific contenrs ) and obtaining those values dynamically from resources files. His company was developing a language pack for a service they offer built on MOSS 2007.
I answered his question , he marked it as answered so I just thought of sharing this conversation with you.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointdevelopment/thread/c58cf229-b219-4491-b25d-c97c3305901a/#837904e3-0a50-45f5-aca8-fc566407798b

Me and my colleagues @ ITWorx came across this weird issue on different environments when trying to access the SSP administration site collection.

Symptoms : When we try to navigate to the SSP administration site default page, we receive the error highlighted in red below. However, we were able to access other SSP administrative pages by typing the URL in the browser.
“Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately. 
Parser Error Message: The base type 
‘Microsoft.Office.Server.Internal.UI.SharedServicesAdminDefaultPage’ is not allowed for this page. The type is not registered as safe.”

Resolution: Add the following line to the SafeControls Section in the web.config of the SSP web application.

<SafeControl Assembly=”Microsoft.Office.Server.UI, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c” Namespace=”Microsoft.Office.Server.Internal.UI” TypeName=”*” />

It’s also worth mentioning that my friend Amir ElKady bought me a Pepsi Can for solving him this issue 🙂
Thanks Amir