sadomovalex's blog

Avoid “Cannot change Hidden attribute for this field” exception when remove field from Sharepoint list

2012-01-23T00:34:00.001+04:00

When you remove field from the Sharepoint list either from UI or programmatically you may encounter with the following exception (I faced with this problem when removed managed metadata field, but it can be also any type of field): Cannot change Hidden attribute for this field Microsoft.SharePoint.SPField.set_Hidden(Boolean value)

BadImageFormatException when call virtual methods from SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges

2012-01-20T01:11:00.001+04:00

Recently I faced with very strange problem. Consider the following console application which I made in order to reproduce the problem: 1: namespace ConsoleApplication 2: { 3: public class FooBase 4: { 5: public virtual IEnumerable GetAll() 6: {

One problem with cross-projects project items references in Sharepoint 2010 VS template

2012-01-14T14:19:00.001+04:00

Often when working on Sharepoint projects there are several projects of Sharepoint 2010 VS project template in single solution. E.g. if you develop Internet and Extranet you may have 3 wsp packages (and 3 projects in VS): Common – contains common functionality for Internet and Extranet Internet – contains only Internet-specific functionality Extranet – contains only Extranet-specific

Camlex.NET now supports donations

2012-01-08T02:11:00.001+04:00

Our open source project Camlex.NET and free online service for Sharepoint developers http://camlex-online.org now have Donate button. If you find it useful and would like to support development of the Camlex, you can now make donation with any reasonable amount of money via your PayPal account or by credit card. Camlex was, is and will be free. But as we work over it in the free time and pay for

Create complex dynamic CAML queries with Camlex.Net

2011-12-23T01:20:00.001+04:00

In one of my previous posts I showed how to build dynamic CAML queries based on query string parameters with Camlex.Net – open source tool for creating CAML queries via C#. I used WhereAll() and WhereAny() methods of the IQuery interface which allows to combine several conditions using AND (&&) and OR (||) logical operations. But what if you need to build your query using more complex rules and

Cache and security trimming in Sharepoint

2011-12-14T05:01:00.001+04:00

If you use cache (I’m talking about not only standard ASP.Net cache, but cache in general) in the Sharepoint web application, you should keep in mind that users with different permissions may see different content on the site. E.g. if you crawl site and all its sub sites for the documents which are tagged by particular managed metadata term in the custom web part and want to speed up the process

Use Telerik Rad Editor Lite without features activation

2011-12-11T02:11:00.001+04:00

In one my previous post I wrote how to use Telerik Rad Editor Lite for Firefox (and other than IE browsers). Here we will extend the control which we created in order to use it in all sites without additional actions from your side. In order to use Telerik Rad Editor you need to activate 2 features: Use RadEditor to edit List Items (located in RadEditorFeature) Use RadEditor to edit List

Fix problem in Fluent NHibernate Search with custom field bridges

2011-12-06T20:35:00.001+04:00

NHibernate search is the project from NHibernate contrib which allows you to integrate NHibernate and NLucene search. The basic idea of NHibernate search is similar to the NHibernate at common: if NHibernate allows you to map entities to the database tables, then NHibernate search allows to map entities to NLucene index documents (if you are not familiar with NLucene basic concepts, I recommend

Parameters matching in PowerShell

2011-11-30T23:54:00.001+04:00

In this short post I would like to share one interesting feature of the PowerShell: parameters matching by partial name. Suppose that you have the test.ps1 script with switch parameter: 1: param( 2: [switch]$recreateSite 3: ) 4: 5: if ($recreateSite) 6: { 7:

Enable Telerik Rad Editor Lite for FireFox and other than IE browsers in Sharepoint

2011-11-25T10:15:00.001+04:00

Sharepoint has own default editor for RichTextField. However if you are not satisfied with the functionality offered by this html editor, there are several other implementations available from other vendors. One of the popular editors for Sharepoint is Telerik Rad Editor Lite. Advantage of this control is that it is free (it was developed by Telerik using agreement with MS). However it works only

Bug with using Linq 2 Sharepoint in anonymous mode with managed metadata

2011-11-19T12:57:00.001+04:00

You most probably heard about problem with using Linq 2 Sharepoint in anonymous mode. August 2010 cumulative update fixed this problem. However recently we faced with one of variations of this problem: Linq 2 Sharepoint doesn’t work with managed metadata in anonymous mode. Below I will describe the problem. Suppose that you have a list of products which have Applications managed metadata column

Camlex.NET became bidirectional and goes online. Version 3.0 is released

2011-11-11T02:32:00.001+04:00

Today 11.11.2011 (nice date) I have several good news. I’m happy to announce that several months of work which we made for new version of Camlex is finished. Today we released Camlex 3.0 (available on the project’s site: http://camlex.codeplex.com) with reverse engineering feature. Also we started new online service based on Camlex: http://camlex-online.org (see below). What actually “reverse

Synchronize properties of SPUser with AD without User profiles synchronization in Sharepoint

2011-11-05T11:15:00.001+04:00

On the production you may face with situation when User profiles service is not enabled for your web application, e.g. if your are developing Internet solution which doesn’t require intensive using of the UPS (most often UPS is utilized for Intranet and Extranet solutions). However you may still need users properties to be synchronized with AD. E.g. if you send emails using SPUser.Email property

VSDBCMD: fix possible reason for “The target database schema provider could not be determined” error

2011-10-31T23:30:00.001+04:00

As you probably know VSDBCMD is utility which can be used in order to create database from the output of Sql Server 2008 database project (.dbproj file). Command line which creates database may look like this: vsdbcmd /a:Deploy /dsp:SQL /dd+ /manifest:MyDatabase.deploymanifest /p:DeploymentConfigurationFile=MyDatabase_Database.sqldeployment /p:SqlCommandVariablesFile=

“No coercion operator is defined between types” error in expression trees

2011-10-29T16:28:00.001+04:00

Suppose that you have 2 inherited classes: 1: public class Bar 2: { 3: public static explicit operator Bar(string s) { return null; } 4: } 5: public class Foo : Bar 6: { 7: } As shown above in the parent class Boo there is explicit cast operator

VMWare became slow on SSD

2011-10-25T20:47:00.001+04:00

Some time ago I faced with strange problem: I have SSD with 200 Gb, 16 Gb of memory and 8 CPUs. Who works with Sharepoint knows that it is not so big for development :) Also I use VMWare for development. Everything was fine until someday my host computer was hang. After that virtual machine became very slow. It used 12 Gb and 6 CPUs, so I suspected hard drive (Task manager also showed that there

Taxonomy Update Scheduler triggers list item event receivers in TaxonomyHiddenList

2011-10-19T21:39:00.001+04:00

Update 2011-11-23: originally this post was written under impression (and it was confirmed by tests) that event receivers are triggered for any custom list which has managed metadata fields. However today my colleague found that event receiver is triggered only in TaxonomyHiddenList, but not on the exact supplier custom lists. The reason why my tests worked – is because event receiver was

Support of Scandinavian characters in Sharepoint URLs

2011-10-14T00:25:00.001+04:00

Often on the forms or on the work people ask me about whether or not Scandinavian characters (‘ä, ö, å) are supported in Sharepoint URLs. In order to have reference for the answer I decided to write it in this post. Mentioned characters belong to so-called high-ASCII characters set (http://www.lorem.biz/htmlcodes.asp - characters with codes from 128 to 256). According to the technet article

Fixing error “The binary operator LessThan is not defined for the types 'Type1' and 'Type2'”

2011-10-11T22:59:00.001+04:00

During the working over next version of Camlex.NET library we encountered with the interesting problem: when we tried to construct LessThan expression for our types the following exception was thrown: The binary operator LessThan is not defined for the types 'System.Object' and 'SomeType'. SomeType here is the inheritor of the class where operation “<” is defined. But at the same time there

Assembly binding redirect in Sharepoint 2010: how old code for SP 2007 works in SP 2010

2011-09-28T23:38:00.001+04:00

One of the nice features of Sharepoint 2010 is the automatic assemblies redirect which allows to use old code which was written and compiled for Sharepoint 2007 also in Sharepoint 2010. It is achieved by assemblies redirects in web.config. Let’s see what bindings are added when you create new web application: 1: 2: 2: (DataTypes.UserId)"123").ToString(); will produce the following CAML: 1: 2: 3:

Enumerate sites using javascript client object model in Sharepoint

2011-08-05T00:36:00.001+04:00

Recently I needed to enumerate all sub sites of the root site using javascript client model. As you probably know in order to perform calls using client object model in Sharepoint you need to create context, assign method call result to some local variable and then call load() method in order to get the data from Sharepoint. Looks easy. However there were several problems I would like to share.

Configure NH in code instead of hibernate.cfg.xml

2011-07-27T00:26:00.001+04:00

In one of my ASP.Net MVC projects xml file was used for NH configuration (hibernate.cfg.xml) because of historical reasons. It was annoying because settings were stored in several files: web.config and hibernate.cfg.xml. It was double annoying because Fluen NHibernate contains API for configuration (in my project Fluent NH was used as well). But as it often happens I had no time to fix it.

Change page URL for social comments without SP1 in Sharepoint

2011-07-23T00:40:00.001+04:00

Social comments are part of Sharepoint 2010 social computing features. They allow users to comment content on the site built on Sharepoint. There is one problem with using social comments – internally they are bind to the page using absolute URL of this page. It means that if you e.g. move page from one site to another or change URL of the whole site – comments will be lost. About a month ago

One reason for “HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable” in IIS

2011-07-20T00:36:00.001+04:00

Recently I faced with interesting problem. I resume work over ASP.Net MVC application which I didn’t touch some time (I think all of us have such projects in the private SC repository). It is configured to use local IIS in web project settings in Visual Studio. However when I build and and run without changes IE showed me “Service Unavailable” error page (HTTP Error 503. The service is

Provision hierarchical managed metadata via feature receiver in Sharepoint

2011-07-10T02:24:00.001+04:00

Provisioning of the managed metadata during creation of site collection is quite often requirement in Sharepoint development. It is common case when with site collection or web site creation you need to provision some initial content in order to simplify work of the content producers (e.g. content pages, lookup lists with data, etc). Metadata also can be provisioned during site collection

Using of ASP.Net Cache in Sharepoint farm environment

2011-07-01T21:12:00.001+04:00

Often in order to improve performance of Sharepoint web application developers use standard ASP.Net in-memory Cache (see HttpContext.Cache). As cached objects reside in memory of appropriate AppPool it works very fast. However you should be aware about potential problem with using of ASP.Net of multiple web front ends environment. In Sharepoint world farms are often used in production. At

Speaking on Finland Sharepoint User Group

2011-06-15T21:03:00.001+04:00

On the previous week I had a speech on the Finland Sharepoint User Group in Helsinki. It was nice to met new people and participate in Finland community’s professional life. Hope that my presentation about data retrieving methods in Sharepoint (LINQ 2 Sharepoint, CAML, Camlex.Net, ContentIterator, etc.) which was mostly developers-oriented was not so boring for non-developers who presented on the

Show exception details on the client side for WCF RESTful endpoints

2011-06-12T23:12:00.001+04:00

In one of my previous posts I described how to create custom error handler for the RESTful endpoints in WCF service. It uses simple idea: store exception message into Status Description field, so e.g. if with standard handler you got something like this: HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error Then in with custom error handler you will get the following: HTTP/1.1 500 InternalServerError: Customer

ContentIterator for Sharepoint server

2011-06-07T21:51:00.001+04:00

In this post I would like to describe useful class which can be helpful in your every day Sharepoint development: ContentIterator. This class is defined in Microsoft.Office.Server.dll assembly and helps address common tasks like iteration through list items (SPListItem), files (SPFile), sites (SPWeb), etc. The cool thing is that it is implemented via SPQuery and so it has very good performance on

Problem with updating current navigation settings via object model in Sharepoint

2011-06-04T02:44:00.001+04:00

Recently I faced with interesting problem. There are a lot of publishing sites in the intranet and we needed to update current navigation settings on all sites with “Display the same navigation items as the parent site” option: I created a small tool which updates current navigation on all sites: 1: class Program 2: { 3: static void Main(

Get .Net assembly full name using built-in Windows features without Reflector

2011-05-31T00:40:00.001+04:00

If you work with Sharepoint then most probably quite often you need to know assembly full name (e.g. for adding it to the Assembly directive on your application layout page). Until the recent time preferred way for me to investigate assembly full name was .Net Reflector: load assembly under question in it and check full name in the bottom of the window: However as you probably know Red gate

Publishing pages auto save mechanism in Sharepoint when user leaves edit mode. Part 1

2011-05-28T19:12:00.001+04:00

In this series of posts I would like to describe the internal mechanisms used by Sharepoint for auto saving publishing pages. Publishing pages are part of publishing infrastructure feature of Sharepoint (basic WCM feature) and content producers may add content on these pages on behalf of business needs. In order to add content on a page user should switch page to Edit mode (Site Actions > Edit

Use Sharepoint 2007 sites look and feel in Sharepoint 2010

2011-05-28T16:59:00.001+04:00

During upgrade from Sharepoint 2007 to Sharepoint 2010 you may want to preserve look and feel of some of your sites in order to use previous UI version. Most of changes in Sharepoint 2010 were made in UI: Sharepoint 2010 uses ribbons in UI and it makes its look and feel similar to other Office products. However in your business web application you may still want to have old UI used in

Add Enterprise keywords field into custom content type

2011-05-08T20:29:00.001+04:00

In this post I would like to describe how to add OTB Enterprise keywords field into custom content type declaratively. Enterprise keywords – is a standard managed metadata field which is binded to the standard term set in Term store: System > Keywords. It allows users to specify keywords in content metadata, e.g. users can apply some keywords to the document, to the page or to the list item.

Sharepoint variations guide. Part 2– propagation use cases

2011-05-01T13:03:00.001+04:00

In the 1st part of this series I made overview of basic features and configuration settings of the variations in Sharepoint. In this part I will describe basic use cases and show how configuration settings affect them. As you remember from 1st part there is possibility to specify how content (pages and sites) will be propagated: manually or automatically (Site settings > Variations > Automatic

Change default location of Sharepoint management console

2011-04-16T17:34:00.001+04:00

In this post I want to share small tip which will help you to run Sharepoint management console (or management shell) in any custom folder. If you work with automatization of Sharepoint administrative tasks with PowerShell, then this tip may be helpful for you. The problem is that when you run OTB Sharepoint management console in runs in default home folder (e.g. “c:\users\myuser”). But in real

Add custom AD attributes to People search results in Sharepoint

2011-04-09T11:51:00.001+04:00

In one of my previous posts (see Create custom AD attribute and map it to Sharepoint user profile property) I showed how you can extent your AD schema with custom attributes and how to add them into User profiles properties. Here I want to show how to use these custom attributes in standard People search and how to customize People search results for displaying them. Once you mapped attributes,

AD attributes used in standard configuration of People search in Sharepoint

2011-04-06T23:12:00.001+04:00

Sharepoint 2010 uses CoreResultsWebPart on People search page in standard Search center. You can control what properties can be shown by this web part using SelectColumns and PropertiesToRetrieve properties (or via web part properties in UI: Display Properties > Fetched Properties). Here you need to specify names of Managed properties (you can find them in Central Administration > Manage Service

Simple custom error handler for webHttpBinding in WCF

2011-04-05T00:28:00.001+04:00

When use standard webHttpBinding in WCF (e.g. for RESTful endpoints) you may face with the following problem: standard error handler WebErrorHandler which ships with WebHttpBehavior returns generic “Internal Server Error” message for any exception you throw in the WCF service. Or to be more precise it returns response message which contains exception message like this: 1: HTTP/1.1 500

Sharepoint variations guide. Part 1 – overview

2011-04-03T19:54:00.001+04:00

In this series of posts I would like to summarize available configuration options for Sharepoint variations and show how they are used in content production. In this first part I will make an overview of Sharepoint functionality, available configuration options and add my comments with details of these options. This material is necessary in order to go with part 2, where I will focus on actual

Sharepoint MVP 2011

2011-04-01T23:51:00.001+04:00

Hello to all readers of my blog. This is the first non-technical post in my technical blog, but I hope that you will forgive me because it worth it :) Today I received a good news from Microsoft: I’ve became Sharepoint MVP 2011: Thanks to community and thanks to Microsoft for the honor! I really hope that my efforts help people in their hard everyday work and thanks in the comments are the

Make SocialCommentWebPart read only dynamically in Sharepoint

2011-03-23T12:35:00.001+03:00

SocialCommentWebPart is one of the new features of Sharepoint 2010 which allows users add comments to the pages where this web part is added. This web part makes Sharepoint site more social and increases users communication level. One of the common requirement with this type of functionality is that not all users should be able to leave their comments on site. For example, you can decide that

SPGridView with filtering by multiple columns and support of TaxonomyFieldMulti

2011-03-06T11:47:00.001+03:00

In this post I would like to share implementation of advanced SPGridView control which has more features comparing with OTB SPGridView. As you probably now SPGridView control can be used in Sharepoint in order to display list-like data. I.e. with its header you can sort item, filter them – and it will work with OTB look and feel. However there is a lack of important features in OTB SPGridView: it

Problem with SPSiteDataQuery and TaxonomyFieldTypeMulti

2011-02-28T21:40:00.001+03:00

Recently I encountered with problem in Sharepoint with looks like a bug: SPSiteDataQuery doesn’t work properly with TaxonomyFieldTypeMulti fields, i.e. with taxonomy fields which allow multiple values. As you probably know SPSiteDataQuery class can be used for retrieving data from Sharepoint lists and document libraries from several sites at once (you can retrieve data from one web site, from web

Create custom AD attribute and map it to Sharepoint user profile property

2011-02-20T12:17:00.001+03:00

In this post I would like to show the guide of how you can expand your AD schema with custom attributes and then map them on User Profile properties in Sharepoint. Although there is a lot of standard attributes which can be used for storing information in AD, this is common situation when they don’t match requirements of enterprise infrastructure. Imagine situation when company has various

Programmatically change background color of the web part header

2011-02-15T00:00:00.001+03:00

Recently I faced with the following problem: we had requirement for particular custom web part: its header should have appropriate color (which differs from default color of all another web parts headers). During investigation I found that there are not so much solutions, which match all our requirements. It is relatively easy to change header color of all web parts on your site: you just need to

Converting ASP.Net MVC 2.0 application to 3.0

2011-02-12T11:47:00.001+03:00

Recently I converted medium size project to ASP.Net MVC 3.0. In parallel I decided to move from web forms view engine to the Razor as it is wordless and more clean. In this post I would like to share my experience and show problems which I found during migration. First of all check the following article of Scott Guthrie: Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm

Get “Manage Hierarchy” and “Approve” role definitions programmatically in Sharepoint

2011-02-05T19:55:00.001+03:00

In Sharepoint there are several OTB role definitions which are created during site creation: Role name Description Full Control Has full control Design Can view, add, update, delete, approve, and customize Contribute Can view, add, update, and delete list items and documents Read

Show reusable data on the master page in Sharepoint

2011-01-25T23:03:00.001+03:00

When you create site collection based on OTB publishing portal template, root site contains Reusable Data list. It stores pieces of information (it can be plain or html formatted text) which can be shown on different pages in your portal. In order to show reusable data on the publishing page you need to create or edit existing page and when focus will be on the page content field (rich html field

Submit html form using Content Editor Web Part in Sharepoint

2011-01-17T00:17:00.001+03:00

Recently I faced with the problem of submitting of html form which should be added on the page using CEWP. The problem is that in most cases master page of Sharepoint web part already has top-level html form: 1: And all placeholders are inserted

What to do if Take snapshot option is disabled in VMWare

2011-01-10T23:11:00.001+03:00

We often use virtual environments for Sharepoint development (VMWare and VirtualPC are most frequently used virtualization platforms in our case). I also often use snapshot feature of VMWare if some risky configuration changes are required. It is really useful when you can rollback system changes to the last stable snapshot in a few minutes comparing with spending hours on restoring failed system

Quick way to count site collections and web sites in Sharepoint

2010-12-19T17:50:00.001+03:00

Often we need to check how many site collections (SPSites) and web sites (SPWeb) are created by content producers in living production system (e.g. when dealing with performance issues). For those cases if you don’t want to check it manually via Central Administration or Sharepoint site UI, you can just perform the following SQL queries on content database: 1: select count(*) from

Cross-site and cross-site collection navigation in Sharepoint - part 2: publishing sites

2010-12-19T15:53:00.001+03:00

In my previous post I described how you can implement consistent cross-site navigation for non-publishing sites (i.e. those sites which are created using WSS site templates). As statistics shows mentioned post is very popular. So I decided to postpone other themes and finish this series as they are so interesting for people. Before to continue I recommend you also see my post The basics of

Use C# 3.0 features in application layout pages in Sharepoint

2010-12-16T00:54:00.001+03:00

During everyday Sharepoint development we often use application layout pages (aspx pages which are located in 12/Templates/Layouts folder on file system of web server) for tracing and debugging. It is useful technique, as you can include server-side script directly into the page and show results on the page in context of the living site. Suppose that we have sub folder 12/Templates/Layouts/Test

Install Sharepoint designer 2007 and 2010 on single machine

2010-12-03T17:23:00.001+03:00

Today I encountered with interesting problem: I needed to install both versions of Sharepoint Designer (2007 and 2010) on single machine. The problem was in architectural versions of the application. On my host I have Windows 7 x64 and Office Professional Plus 2010 x64 installed. Sharepoint Designer 2007 doesn’t have x64 version so I just installed available x86 version first (by going from

Dynamic OrderBy CAML statements via Camlex.NET

2010-12-03T00:08:00.001+03:00

Today new version of Camlex.NET was released. A new feature was added to it which is called dynamic OrderBy statements. Camlex.NET was created for Sharepoint developers and its purpose to simplify creation of CAML queries. As many other features dynamic OrderBy statements was initiated by discussion in Camlex project page on Codeplex, i.e. it is initiated by developers feedback (thanks to umike

Build and deploy Sharepoint solutions using bat functions

2010-11-25T11:43:00.001+03:00

Today for solution administration in Sharepoint we can use great opportunities of PowerShell. However there is interesting feature available in simple cmd (or bat) files which can be used in every day development – bat functions. Of course it is not so powerful as PowerShell, but is it very simple and doesn’t require any additional components in the system. We used this approach in several

Retain object identity during export and import of subsites in Sharepoint into different site collection hierarchy location

2010-11-14T21:21:00.001+03:00

As you know Sharepoint object model contains several classes which allow to perform export and import of sites. Most important of them are SPExport and SPImport. If you don’t familiar with content deployment API then before to read this article I highly recommend you to read series of articles of Stefan Goßner: Deep Dive into the SharePoint Content Deployment and Migration API. Mentioned classes

Upgrade single SPWeb from Sharepoint 2007 to 2010

2010-11-02T21:50:00.003+03:00

In my previous post I showed several useful links to start with if you plan to perform upgrade from Sharepoint 2007 to 2010. There are 2 possible upgrade approaches mentioned in MS guide: in-place upgrade; database attach upgrade. You can use them if you need to perform upgrade of whole farm or at least whole web application or site collection. But what if we need to upgrade single SPWeb

Useful links for upgrade from Sharepoint 2007 to 2010

2010-10-29T10:03:00.001+04:00

Here I would like to provide useful links which I found during investigation of the upgrade process from Sharepoint 2007 to Sharepoint 2010. I’m planning to update this post in the future with more resources. Currently there will be links from official MS technet guide which are located in various places. For convenience I summarized them in one place as flat list: Upgrade and Migration for

Create custom sites in Sharepoint using site definitions: step by step guide - part 2

2010-10-28T01:11:00.001+04:00

In the previous part of this series I finished on creation of portal web manifest for branches of Contoso company. In this second part I will continue explanation of site creation customization for Sharepoint. So we created portal web manifest file with portal structure. For convenience I will duplicate it here: 1: 2: 2: System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT

Fix NullReferenceException after adding new controls on Sharepoint page

2010-09-27T23:58:00.001+04:00

I would like to share a little trick which allows to fix NullReferenceException (object reference not set to an instance of an object) when you add new server control on your application _layouts page or user control in control templates folder. So you add e.g. new control and add appropriate protected Textbox txtEmail into codebehind class of your

Create custom sites in Sharepoint using site definitions: step by step guide - part 1

2010-09-24T23:55:00.001+04:00

If you work with Sharepoint then this theme is most probably well known for you. Any business have its own requirements and rules many of which are not fulfilled with OTB Sharepoint functionality. In this case we perform customization of OTB features for real life business needs. With this article I would like to start a series of post where I will try to describe one of the important and widely

Fix “CSC : error CS0006: Metadata file could not be found” after update to TFS 2010

2010-09-12T10:05:00.001+04:00

We use CI for our Sharepoint projects. Some time ago we performed upgrade to TFS 2010 from 2008 version. After migration when all functionality of source control was working we encountered with problem that our build server failed to build solutions. One of the solutions contains ~ 40 projects. During investigation of build logs I found that it contains the following errors: CSC : error

Publish pages during provisioning in Sharepoint

2010-08-16T10:12:00.001+04:00

In Sharepoint you can provision publishing pages via Module element using the following xml: 1: 2: 3: ... 4: 5: However with this

Fix “The security validation for this page is invalid” error in Sharepoint

2010-08-13T15:45:00.001+04:00

Recently we encountered with strange error. On production environment during saving of publishing page (draft or publish) we got the following error: "The security validation for this page is invalid. Click Back in your Web browser, refresh the page, and try your operation again." or on Russian (I add it in order to simplify searching for developers from Russia because I needed to create

Scale images in web applications with examples on ASP.Net MVC

2010-08-09T21:51:00.001+04:00

Before to start I would like to save a few words. Initially I wanted to write post about scalable image action result for ASP.Net MVC. But after that I realized that it will be more useful if I will expand the post and show how to make similar tasks using several ways (client-side and server-side) . So this post will not be ASP.Net MVC specific – it will also contain information general for web

Set Summary view for ListViewWebPart programmatically

2010-08-06T12:35:00.001+04:00

As you probably know there is possibility to set

in ListViewWebPart via UI when you select “Modify Shared Web Part” on your ListViewWebPart: But is it possible to do it programmatically? I saw many questions on forums how to do it but there were no solution for this problem. I investigated it and found how to set Summary view for ListViewWebPart programmatically. But what is

View mode panel for Sharepoint

2010-07-29T10:28:00.001+04:00

If you used publishing infrastructure in Sharepoint then you probably know OTB EditModePanel control defined in Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.dll assembly. Using this control you can define what content on your publishing page should be shown only in edit mode: 1: 2: ... 3:

Using NVelocity installed into GAC with example for Sharepoint

2010-07-25T23:19:00.001+04:00

In this post I will describe how you can use NVelocity template engine in Sharepoint and what issues will occur with it. Main problem is that NVelocity works well if it is installed in bin folder of you web application. But in Sharepoint development most common case when assemblies are installed into GAC. Ofcourse you can still add NVelocity.dll into bin folder of target Sharepoint web site (if

Create associated Sharepoint groups (AssociatedOwnerGroup, AssociatedMemberGroup and AssociatedVisitorGroup) programmatically

2010-07-20T00:32:00.001+04:00

If you create web site in Sharepoint and choose “Use unique permissions” option then after site template will be applied to the newly created site you will be redirected to the standard page “Set Up Groups for this Site” (_layouts/permsetup.aspx page): Using this page you are able to create 3 standard groups for new site: Visitors, Members and Owners. But how these groups can be created

Internal mechanism of showing indicator of long operations in Sharepoint using SPLongOperation

2010-07-13T21:33:00.001+04:00

In this post I’m going to show how implemented indicator of long operations in Sharepoint internally. Most of posts about SPLongOperation are limited by examples of using it. I will go further and show how it is implemented internally. So lets start. If you worked with Sharepoint then you will probably saw OTB indicator of long operations: This indicator also can be used in your custom code,

Speaking on LINQ-building in Sharepoint seminar in Microsoft

2010-07-03T09:42:00.001+04:00

Yesterday I and Vladimir Timashkov were speaking on developers seminar in MS office in Saint-Petersburg. Vladimir made an overview of data retrieving in Sharepoint and summarized their advantages and disadvantages. I told about Camlex.NET open source project – show its internal architecture, examples of practical usages and how we worked over it. Also we told about our experience of participation

Build dynamic CAML queries based on query string parameters

2010-06-25T01:01:00.001+04:00

In this article I would like to show one of the practical usage of free and open source Camlex.NET library in real life scenarios of Sharepoint development. In various Sharepoint forums I often see questions where people ask how they achieve mentioned goal, i.e. how they can build dynamic CAML queries based on set of parameters specified e.g. in query strings. In most cases I answered by giving a

Fix “Console Configuration File Error: XML Exception: Access is denied” in Sharepoint

2010-06-24T01:29:00.001+04:00

This error can occur on publishing sites in Sharepoint when you have site collection and subsites with unique permissions. The following fix helped me: Go to Site Settings of the root web site of the site collection and select Master pages and page layouts Go to Document library settings inside _catalogs/masterpage doclib and click Permissions for this document library Grant “Read”

How to determine when users accounts were created in Active Directory

2010-06-17T13:29:00.001+04:00

If you use Active Directory as users storage for your Sharepoint site with LdapMembershipProvider and LdapRoleProvider then sometimes it will be useful to know when user or group account was created in your AD. It can be achived by using LDIFDE command line utility: 1: ldifde -d ou=myusers,dc=example,dc=com -l whencreated -p onelevel 2: -r "(ObjectCategory=user)" -

ReSharper live template for Sharepoint utilities

2010-06-17T02:09:00.001+04:00

In everyday Sharepoint development we often need to create many console utilities for various maintenance tasks which should be performed on production or staging environments (e.g. install bugfix on living Sharepoint site, trace some information from production site, etc). Before to run program on remote server we test it on our development environment and then copy it to remote server and run

Restore publishing site via Sharepoint Designer into root web site of site collection

2010-06-04T21:00:00.001+04:00

In one of my previous posts I summarized ways to copy sites in Sharepoint. In this post I will describe how to copy site into root web site of site collection (SPSite.RootWeb). Sharepoint Designer allows to backup and restore sites with its subsites. In order to do it you need perform the following steps: Open site you want to backup in Sharepoint Designer Select Site > Administration >

How Sharepoint determines whether or not to show Anonymous Access menu item in Site Permissions page

2010-06-01T17:32:00.001+04:00

As you know in Sharepoint it is possible to configure anonymous access to your site. In order to do it you should login under some administrative account into appropriate web application zone, which allows anonymous access, and go to Site Settings > People and groups > Site Permissions > Settings > Anonymous Access and select what option is suitable for you: Entire Web site Lists and

Problem with LdapMembershipProvider and users which belong to more than 1000 AD groups

2010-05-31T20:20:00.001+04:00

Recently I investigated unclear issue on production environment: from appropriate moment special user’s account which was used for special purposes (some kind of “common” user account) stopped login into Sharepoint portal. We have web application which was extended to Internet zone with FBA using LdapMembershipProvider and LdapRoleProvider, i.e. all users are stored in AD. What was strange is

Cross-site and cross-site collection navigation in Sharepoint - part 1

2010-05-22T01:13:00.001+04:00

In one of my previous posts I wrote about basic information about navigation architecture in Sharepoint. With this article I continue series of posts about navigation in Sharepoint. Here I will use information described in the previous post, so I recommend to read it before this one. In real life Sharepoint applications it is common practice to have consistent global navigation (or top

Localization of jQuery.undoable plugin

2010-05-20T01:26:00.001+04:00

Before to talk about exact subject of this post I would like to say some words about modality in web applications. As you probably know Phil Haack introduced undoable plugin for jQuery which allows to improve user experience for web apps by getting rid of modal confirm dialogs. You can find demo of this plugin here. I really like that because I think that using of modal dialogs in web

Fix dotless for IIS 7 with integrated pipeline mode

2010-05-06T15:23:00.001+04:00

Recently I installed ASP.Net MVC site with dotless on production server. Site worked well under Visual Studio built-in web server but after installation on IIS css styles were not applied. In our project we use file with .less.css extension in order to keep intellisense, syntax highlighting and in order to avoid problems with non-standard file extensions on web server. As documentation says we

Several extension methods to retrieve SPList from SPWeb safely

2010-05-04T15:32:00.001+04:00

Often we need to retrieve SPList instance from SPWeb by title or server relative URL. We can do it using the following code: 1: // get list by title 2: var list = web.Lists[listTitle]; 3: // or by URL 4: var list = web.GetList(listUrl); But the problem is that if list not found these methods have different

Determine whether SPWeb inherits AlternateCssUrl from parent site or not programmatically

2010-04-30T15:19:00.001+04:00

Sometimes we need to programmatically determine whether SPWeb has its own alternate css or inherits alternate css from its parent site. In UI we can find this option “Inherit Alternate CSS URL from parent of this site” in Site Settings > Master page (it is available for publishing sites only): If we will look at SPWeb class we will find that it has public property AlternateCssUrl of string

Change current UI locale using query string parameter in Sharepoint

2010-04-11T00:22:00.001+04:00

When we need to develop multilanguage solution for Sharepoint the common approach is to keep all language specific resources in resx files (I don’t mention site variations here as they are out of scope of this post). In this case it is useful to have quick testing tool which will allow us to see how page or user control looks like using different locales. In this post I will describe how to

Camlex.NET 2.0 for Sharepoint released

2010-04-02T12:21:00.001+04:00

I’m glad to announce that next version of Camlex.NET project is released. About 2 months ago I introduced release of Camlex.NET on codeplex. During this time we received feedback from community and took into account applied developers needs when worked over 2.0 version. Yesterday we published Camlex.NET 2.0. In this post I will describe new features and differences from previous version. 1.

Constructor injection for ActionFilters in ASP.Net MVC with auto-wiring

2010-03-26T22:49:00.001+03:00

As you know ActionFilters allow to execute your code when action is executed. It is very convenient extension point. But what makes it painful – is how to provide dependencies into your custom ActionFilter. There are some solutions for it. E.g. here mentioned solution for constructor injection. But it has a drawback. Instead of natural syntax like: 1: [AuthorizationFilter]