[MOSS 2007 public facing site] access to MS Office documents in Document Library

I am less and less certain if this is a right product…
This is THE most incredible and discouraging experience that I ever had with this product, which I have been working on to maintain our public internet site.

First of all, MANY MANY MANY thanks to the author of this blog post.
http://www.theblackknightsings.com/RemoveLoginBoxWhenAnonymousUsersDownloadOfficeDocumentFromSharePointSite.aspx
# BTW, the design is very funny. I thought it was a genuine error screen at the beginning.

The explanation is very clear, and so is the code. So I went straight plugging it in to our production site.
# I have at least compiled the DLL myself, and did a bit of test though.

We know that this product i.e. SharePoint is now widely used, especially with intranets, sites for collaboration and so on, where you know the users, they are all authenticated. However, for public facing internet sites such as ours where majority of users are anonymous, there are points overlooked, including ones as obvious as this one. And we users by ourselves need to apply workarounds… Hope with the coming 2010, it comes as a WCM product fully ready for public sites.

Business Data Catalog.

Gaaaaa!!
Lately Sharepoint keeps disappointing me. Here is another one.
We can not make BDC available to anonymous users. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948729
Since I am using MOSS for an internet facing site, where majority of pages are supposed to be accessible anonymously, this is a big limitation.

And also, I just can not find the exahusted reference listing and explaining all possible values that a Property of an element in the application definision XML can take.

I expected that the BDC Definition Editor in the SDK would do the IntelliSense. But not. It just pops up a blank textbox where you have to type a valid value…

Hide Root web from Breadcrumb navigation

I do not think I am the only one who suffered from this.
If you use the Variations technique to do a multi-lingual site and you want to have a Breadcrumb navigation there.
Then, what you get is: root web > Home > site1 …

But actually you do not want the “root web” AT ALL.
With the Variations, it is just a redirection to one of the Variations root, depending on language setting of the user.
If I have my PC setup language being to French, I get: root web > Accueil > site1 … # “Accueil” means “Home”. It is our top page for French speakers.
So to me, the “root web” appearing there is completely stupid.

I thought it is an everybody’s problem but could not find anybody have come to solve it. I needed to find one myself. Here it is.

I extended the builtin PortalSiteMapProvider, overriding its method GetParentNode() so it returns null for those Variations root node; Home, Accueil etc.