When making some changes to a client's SharePoint 2003 site I came across a page that had a content editor webpart, which had a JavaScript re-direct in it. This caused me all sorts of problems as I wanted to stop the re-direct as the client now wanted to use this page instead of taking the users else where. I knew that I could use the webpart maintenance page but for the life of me I couldn't remember how to access. After some investigation I found out that if you type in the URL of the page and add in ?contents=1 then this takes you to the maintenance page and from there I was able to close my problematic webpart.

This works on both SharePoint 2003 and MOSS 2007 so from now on if you need to get access to the webpart maintenance page you can use this technique

Just recently I have been studying for my MCTS foundation exam and as part of this I had created a windows for application for calculating golf scores. As part of this application I was storing the information in a generic list of a custom Person class. I decided to extend the functionality by allowing the user to export and import the information and thought it would be an ideally opportunity to practice serialization.

At first I was using a binary formatter and everything worked fine, however I decided to try using the SoapFormatter instead. I changed the code to use SoapFormatter and expected everything would just work as I had test it using the binary formatter but when I ran the program I got an error saying

"Soap Serializer does not support serializing Generic Types : System.Collections.Generic.List`1[GolfScores.Person]."

After spending some time researching the problem I found an interesting discussion on the MSDN forum about this error, http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/netfxremoting/thread/ee4a7a63-290e-432f-bd45-44f4cb7a3467/.

Apparently there are ways around this but for the purposes of my golf application I was able to use the XmlSerializer. Most people use generics these days so its something to consider when you are looking to use the to serialize information stored in a generic list.