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Helpful Debugging with SharePoint C Sharp Code
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By: Arjun Chakraborty Let’s face it; try as we may, rarely does our code come out perfect, and then we need to debug it to death, until we cry ourselves to sleep for being inadequate programmers. Fortunately, clever debugging practices can make the debugging process relatively painless. Practices such as: 4) Using a Notes Column: If you are using a workflow, timer service, event handler, or even a custom app which handles SPItems, then consider adding a temporary multi-line text column called, say, CustomNotesField. There are two ways to use this field. You can keep replacing this field’s value with a flag value (item[“CustomNotesField”] = “flag 1”;), and then you will know how far your code went before crashing. Secondly, you can keep concatenating to a string log variable, and at the end of your try/catch/finally block, post the entire log file, and you have quite a verbose log of what occurred in your code. Another advantage of this method is that while the workflow history list usually truncates stack traces, an entire stack trace (in fact, multiple stack traces) can be stored in the CustomNotesField field. 3) Using a Notes List: If you cannot use a notes column or absolutely do not want to update the SPItem, then consider using a custom list called DebugNotes. This is really useful with event receivers. At appropriate points in the receiver code, have the receiver add an item to the DebugNotes list, and change that item’s title to some useful message. This will help you see if the receiver did in fact kick off, or if it went through the correct logical paths. This will...
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Posted Monday, July 26, 2010 by richardm \|Email This Post \| Permalink \|
Sleazy Reporting: SharePoint 2010 Lists
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By: Christian Holslin Back in the Day Back in the day of SharePoint 2007 and SQL Server 2008 (before R2) it was very difficult to create reports using native SharePoint lists and libraries. Short of hand-coding a SOAP package for the SharePoint web services layer, or dealing with the immaturity of PerformancePoint Server 2007, you really had very few options. If you needed the power of SQL Server Reporting Services you might as well just shadow-copy the List data into a SQL Server data mart using an Event Receiver. This method, while effective, was simply a sleazy work-around to an otherwise unmanageable problem. With SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 this problem is gone. Reporting Services can now natively communicate with SharePoint 2010 Lists. Set Yourself Up To see how easy it is now you will need a couple things: (1) SharePoint 2010, running on (2) SQL Server 2008 R2 SharePoint doesn’t have to be running on SQL Server 2008 R2, but if you’re planning an installation for development, testing, experimentat...
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Posted Tuesday, July 20, 2010 by richardm \|Email This Post \| Permalink \|
Document Previews Won’t Open In FAST Search Using HTTPS
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--By: Neil Barkhina Installing FAST Search for SharePoint is by no means an easy feat, and after going through this long and arduous task you can imagine my dismay at finding that I couldn’t view document previews in the FAST Search Center. I thought I did every step exactly the way it was described on MSDN, and I was hoping to be rewarded with a wonderful search results experience. But instead I was rewarded with an annoying JavaScript error in the bottom left corner of Internet Explorer: I tried many different things, but in the end I realized it had to do with my site running in SSL. The interesting thing is it seems the error only affects document previews, whereas all other features of FAST are unaffected. If you actually look at the JavaScript error, you will see one of two messages: Message: Syntax error Line: 2 Read The Full Post

Posted Friday, June 18, 2010 by richardm \|Email This Post \| Permalink \|
Quick Rundown: Multi-line Text Columns
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By: Arjun Chakraborty Introduction: This article quickly goes over the programmatic handling of multi-line text columns. Multi-line columns are useful within SharePoint because they allow a large quantity of descriptive texted to be stored as metadata, while only using a single column. They can hold specifications, use conditions, history, notes or even pictures. However, the more extensive the functionality of the text column, the more difficult the field will become to handle. When creating a multi-line text column, you will find the following options: The “Number of lines for editing:” number box indicates how many lines a SharePoint user will have to type text into this field, when editing the corresponding item. It does not limit how many lines of text this field can hold. If this field contains more than 6 lines of text, a scroll bar will be provided to the SharePoint user to look through the entire text. In order to demonstrate the programmatic implication of the three radio buttons, the rest of this article will go as follows: 1) First, I will briefly explain the benefits of each option. 2) Read The Full Post

Posted Friday, June 04, 2010 by richardm \|Email This Post \| Permalink \|
Using JQuery to add charts to your Data Views
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By: Omar Stewart While at SPC 09, I attended an excellent session hosted by Dustin Miller on building composite apps using SharePoint Designer 2010. In one portion of the segment he used a JQuery charting library to add some visuals to a plain old Data View Web Part. I'm going to show you how to quickly do this using SharePoint Designer 2007. This is very useful for quickly jazzing up a data-view, while providing all the benefits of graphing / visualizing your data. We will go from this.... To This.... In just a few simple steps. This first thing to do is create our list. This could be a task list, a bugs list, anything you want displayed in your data view. For this example, I'll be logging our team members' interest in the iPad, based on the amount of web activity related to the iPad .. Fill in some sample data…. Now we will open SharePoint Designer 2007, open our SharePoint site, and create a new .aspx page.
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Posted Friday, May 28, 2010 by Administrator \|Email This Post \| Permalink \|
Upgrading SharePoint 2007 RTM to SharePoint 2010
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By: Neil Barkhina The task of upgrading SharePoint 2007 RTM to SharePoint 2010 involves a number of tasks. The main thing to be aware of is in order for your SharePoint 2007 environment to be a candidate for upgrade to 2010, it needs to at least be Service Pack 2 (or content database version 12.0.0.6421). In our staging environment, we ran into a situation where the server wasn’t upgrading to SP2 and was constantly throwing errors. So what we did was upgrade the content database using an in between staging environment which had SharePoint 2007 SP2 already installed and then moved that database to 2010. Here is a breakout of the steps you would need to take: 1. Backup the SharePoint 2007 RTM Content database. You can do this from SQL Management studio (if you don’t know which content database is the correct one, go into central administration and click on manage content databases and point to the correct web application). If this is a production environment you will want to put a Site Collection Lock of read-only on the site so that users stop uploading content to the environment. If the content database is large (10 GB or more) the backup will take a while so just be patient: 2. Restore the backup onto a new database, make sure the SQL version is the same or higher or else it will say the MDF headers are not the same.
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Posted Monday, May 17, 2010 by richardm \|Email This Post \| Permalink \|
SPQuery Hacks Part 2: Workflows
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By: Christian Holslin Have you ever created a custom document approval / document routing Workflow with Visual Studio which triggers off a change from another, out-of-the-box Workflow? Were you rather upset when your Workflow Item Changed Activity implementation got lost in the woods because SharePoint reported the incorrect out-of-the-box Workflow value to your custom Workflow? On an old project, before I conceived of the notion of an SPQuery Hack, we discovered this particular issue was happening on a client's SharePoint site. I was unable to confirm the precise version number of the installation; however similar issues along these lines have happened since to SharePoint installations with the latest Cumulative Updates released after Service Pack 2 (see the older blog post SPQuery Hacks Part 1). What did we do? We turned to the SPQuery object for help. This article is the second in our SPQuery Hacks series. Use Case Scenario NOTE: I'm not dealing with a simple use case here. As with many of our clients, their "Approval Workflow" procedures are less than straight-forward. SharePoint provides an out-of-the-box approval workflow which, if you're a configuration management buff, is fabulous because... it's already developed, tested, and bundled with SharePoint 2007. To a Project Manager this means less risk, to a tester this means less test cases, and to a developer this means less code to write when putting together a complicated approval process involving multiple stages and, especially, a dynamic list of users. Ergo, the Custom Approval Routing Workflow is born.
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Posted Thursday, May 06, 2010 by richardm \|Email This Post \| Permalink \|
Redirect SharePoint Navigation - NYC SDUG Quick Dip
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By: Kathryn Birstein NYC SharePoint Developer User Group - www.meetup.com/nycsdug Redirect SharePoint Navigation The SharePoint AspMenu navigation system and the SPNavigationProvider it users is sufficient for most purposes. However, there are a couple on instances when you might want to customize it. For instance, suppose you want a menu item in your intranet that points to an internet URL? Or suppose your intranet, due to content database size restrictions (should be more than 100 gigs) you are forced to split up a single-site collection web application into two web applications, but you will want to be able to address both of them with the same base URL. Originally, the internet URL was accessed from a SharePoint page with Javascript code on it. The “Show Pages” option in the “Navigation” menu (note that you get this menu only when you have the Publishing feature turned on) gave us a link in AspMenu but there was a noticeable page refresh with this solution that was deemed unacceptable. When one particularly large subsite was split off from the original intranet web application (using Metalogix Site Migration Manager, which works well for moving parts of site collections around), it was moved to a first level subsite in a separate web application on port 83. This was more of a problem than the internet URL since users would have to be able to navigate back and for...
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Posted Monday, April 26, 2010 by richardm \|Email This Post \| Permalink \|
What Is The Easiest Way To Mess Up SharePoint?
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By: Ben Au *Try “STSADM –O UNINSTALL” (A hidden comand)* The purpose of this post, of cause, is not to show you how to mess up a SharePoint environment; but to warn anyone from falling into the same hole that I did in the past. Awhile ago, I was trying to uninstall a SharePoint feature from a development environment. Since Visual Studio was not installed in the environment, I would need to do the action through Command Prompt. When I was trying to figure out what exactly the command for uninstalling a feature was, I typed “stsadm –o uninstall”, hoping the command list would pop up just like what would happen normally. Unfortunately, the command did get executed and the result was kind of surprising to me: it actually uninstalled my whole SharePoint Environment, including the SharePoint Central Administration! In this post, I will replicate what had happened and will talk about how I got SharePoint back up running. Here the story begins: At the beginning, SharePoint Central Administration is running perfectly fine. Inside the Command Prompt, I am searching for a...
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Posted Friday, April 16, 2010 by richardm \|Email This Post \| Permalink \|
Adventures in Excel Services 2010
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By: Neil Barkhina When the first version of Excel Services was released in 2007 with SharePoint Server, customers were excited and eager at the possibilities this would bring. From a BI Perspective, this meant people could finally bring the rich charting and visualization capabilities of Excel to the web. However, in my many years of working with this technology, Excel Services is probably one of the most misunderstood and underutilized features of SharePoint 2007. I believe there are several reasons for this. For one, the interactivity capabilities were minimal at best. You could send filter data to Excel Services in the form of Named Parameters, but few people used this feature (or even knew about it). Excel Services could also connect to SQL Data Sources. If you were to configure the SQL Connection inside the Workbook and only give people “View” permissions to that file, you could display LOB data in Excel without revealing login information or the IP behind the formulas driving the Workbook. I have seen a few examples of customers using this functionality but by and large, short of just adding an Excel Web Access Web Part to a page in order to display a spreadsheet, few people took advantage it. To me, some of the most compelling value adds of this technology was the rich programmability and platform capabilities. Excel Services exposes a vast API from both .NET and Web Services. Fast forward to 2010, and Microsoft has now built out this fledgling technology into a much richer platform. Everyone knows that with the 2010 release of SharePoint we now have Office Web Apps. With this, you can edit most of your favorite Office formats right in the web browser such as Word, PowerPoint, OneNote and of course Excel (with Excel in particular you could do multi-user authoring right on the web!) But what they’ve also done is enhance the programmability in a huge way with improvements to the web services layer, and the introduction of a new REST API and Javascript Object Model. I won’t be covering the...
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Posted Monday, April 12, 2010 by richardm \|Email This Post \| Permalink \|