New Video Tutorials for SharePoint Designer

Microsoft and Total Training have been teaming up to produce a set of training videos for SPD. John Jansen (whose posts you may have read, below) is a senior member of the SharePoint Designer Test Team here at Redmond and hosts the videos, in addition to playing a key role in their development and implementation.

Total Training for Microsoft® Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is a 9 hour, level 300-400 training series. The videos show you how to build very simple or incredibly complex business solutions on the SharePoint platform. John will teach you about Master Pages, how to modify Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in SharePoint Designer, and how to integrate Visual Studio with custom Web part deployment and workflow actions. All with a smile on his face!

Highlights

• Learn how to build a Workflow in SharePoint Designer that leverages custom actions from Visual Studio.
• Create and modify new layout pages and customize them in SharePoint Designer.
• Customize the CSS files used in SharePoint to create a custom branded site.
• Build Master Pages from scratch so that layout pages and CSS files can be used across your site.
• Develop custom business applications with multiple data views.

Where to go 

• Get pricing, sample clips and view the course outline.
• View a video trailer of this new training series.
• Watch the first 20 minutes free with an online training guest pass.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 03, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 14, 2007
  Body: Happy Tuesday! One of the best things about a long weekend is the short workweek, unless of course

• Anonymous
  September 16, 2007
  Retomando el clásico recopilatorio de recursos y enlaces que sobre WSS 3.0 & MOSS venimos realizando

• Anonymous
  September 30, 2007
  John, I have purchased the training videos and been going through them several times - great work by the way. I had a couple of questions for you regarding the modifying themes lesson:

• Why do you need to change the codepage number when modifying the .INF file?  What does the codepage number do?
• You mentioned never to modify the core.css file because when you install a service pack, the core.css file will be undone.  Why will the core.css file be undone when you apply a service pack? Again, great work with the tutorial videos.

• Anonymous
  October 24, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 31, 2007
  Same issue- Server Error: An error occurred while retrieving the list of Databases from <server name>: The data retrieval service encountered an error during connection to the data source. Contact the server administrator for more information Still unable to connect.

• Anonymous
  November 01, 2007
  My sharepiont experience is limited to updating sites in frontpage for sharepoint 2003.  I don't really have much exp with asp.net.  My company is looking to upgrade to sharepoint 2007 and it's my job to figure this out.  Since we used frontpage in 2003 it appears that we'll need to rebuild all of our sites/web parts.  I am looking to figure out how to brand sharepoint (so create a master page and layout template), webparts and functionality. Would thiese training video's be suggested for someone in my situation? Thanks!

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2007
  The TotalTraing Video series on SPD has a segment that will show you how to build masterpages from scratch.  These pages have all the required SharePoint Controls hidden at the bottom of the page.  You can reveal and use just the controls you want/need.  Most importantly you have absolute control of the look and feel of the entire page.

• Anonymous
  November 27, 2007
  Snehal: As you have no doubt noticed, that error is very unhelpful. The most common reason for this failure is that the authentication has failed for some reason. I wonder if you can try using SSO from your new MOSS installation and using the SSO connection to get your SQL data...

• Anonymous
  January 24, 2008
  I forgot to post this- I can connect now, but only using SQLServer database authentication not Windows authentication.  Which is fine because that way the application uses just one set of credentials and users must be permitted to use the app by group.

• Anonymous
  February 12, 2008
  I found a solution to the "Server Error: An error occurred while retrieving the list of Databases from" problem.  I added a user with the same SAMAccount Id as the Windows User account I was attempting to use.  So if the name was "zionuser01" (this is a made up name of course) in SQL Server, then I added a SQL user "user01".  I set the password to the windows account password.  Apparently the SharePoint Designer cannot authenticate Windows accounts to SQL Server, even though other application have no problem authenticating a Windows user.

• Anonymous
  February 12, 2008
  Hi Larry: Just a quick FYI. The reason SPD cannot authenticate using Windows Credentials is because the credentials pass first through the server. Unlike Excel or something which talks directly to SQL, in SPD you are talking to the Server first, then the Server is authenticating to SQL. It's called the "double hop" problem and causes a lot of confusion (search live.com and you'll see). What I think is a problem here is that you were seeing such a generic error. We purposely do that to help with security issues (we don't want to say "Your username or password are wrong" because then a hacker would know that he/she guessed the right name for a backend Server). Even still, we could do a lot better here and I hope we improve it next release. -John Jansen, Test Lead

• Anonymous
  April 14, 2008
  John, I did what Larry did, I created a local SQL Server acct. using the same name as my login name and password but I'm still getting the same "An error occurred while retrieving the list of Databases from" problem.  Is there something more that needs to be done?  I'm using SQL 2005, SPD 2007 on a Windows 2003 machine, my database is in the same instance as the SharePoint db, it should be simple, I must me missing something. Kevin

• Anonymous
  July 11, 2008
  John, I was checking out the trainingvideo for Sharepoint Designer 2007. While viewing I noticed some differences when using the Sharepoint Solution Generator especially when making changes to the Solution XML. I think that I have a different version then is used in the training series. Can you tell me if are there updates to this series. Where do you find the solution xml? Do you have to edit it manually now using the wsp view?

• Anonymous
  February 26, 2009
  I want to find some training that mainly focuses on the data manipulation portion of Designer.  I have a project where I have a user table and a notes table connected via userid field.  I am trying to enter many notes of the same user. Hence the one to many relationship.  So I bring up the user information on one page and have created a link called 'add note' that I want once clicked on will take ther user to a new screen (and carry the user id) where ther user can enter any note.  I cannot figure out how to pass the user id.

• Anonymous
  April 15, 2009
  The comment has been removed