I got an email from Jan asking me to comment on his Essentials webparts on his weblog. I really like them because they show what I have  been working on. I set up a quick and dirty homepage to use them as a simple status report. I used a default template and just dropped the Navigation webpart, the Whats New webpart, and the RSSReader webpart on to the left side. Simple but satisfying!

Since I had recently reinstalled Sharepoint to fix an unrelated problem, I had to reinstall the webparts. So I made sure I had the latest versions and started off with the RSSReader. It looked easy. It had an installer! The bad news is that it finishs with an error.

========= WPPackager install log started 3/26/2004 11:18:39 AM  =========
3/26/2004 11:18:58 AM: Error: Config file: 'd:\inetpub\wwwroot\web.config' for virtual server 'http://companyweb/' is missing or appears invalid. Could not apply required CAS settings to this server.
3/26/2004 11:18:58 AM: Error: Could not apply required CAS settings to virtual server 'http://companyweb/' during installation of 'Lead-it SharePoint RSSReader Webpart'
3/26/2004 11:18:59 AM: Success: Installation Successfully Completed

The good news is that the error does not matter!? The dll is in the GAC. The web.config is configured. The webpart is in the wpcatalog. Once you figure out how to configure your firewall you are set. That was actually quite hard. I decided to put my findings in a second post on my weblog since it is specific to ISA.

The installation of Essentials was quite easy if you knew the locations of your wpcatalog, web.config, and GAC. I found that I only needed to restart the sharepoint server to start using them.