AJAX in SharePoint

I was surprised the other day at how easy it was to incorporate AJAX controls into my SharePoint installation. The hardest part is including all of the lines that are necessary in the web.config in order to get AJAX to work.

Portal Site Connection - What is it?

I was poking around in the Site Collection Settings and came across the link to Portal site connection. I always wondered what that did so I clicked on the link and was taken to a page where I could connect to a portal site and enter the Web address and name for the portal site. This didn't really help me figure out what it does if I put a site in there, so I did some searching and cam across Gavin's SharePoint Blog. He has a post that talks about the portal site connection and it made a lot of sense to me.



Basically it adds a link to the top level breadcrumb trail that can point back to a top-level site collection. This might not be handy in most instances of SharePoint development but if you create a new site collection for projects or areas of the company, it makes it nice to be able to have a link back to a 'home' portal.