By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
January 4, 2010 at 3:53 PM A great new feature in SharePoint 2010 is the content organizer. In SharePoint 2007, the only way to manage your documents was to use the Record Center Site template which didn't really provide flexibility. Now in SharePoint 2010, the routing engine and supporting settings are encapsulated in a feature that can be activated in any site. Enable the feature 'Content Organizer' at the site level: Once the feature activated, you will notice two new settings links appearing on the site settings pa
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
October 27, 2009 at 10:28 AMWith SharePoint 2010, LINQ to SharePoint is now fully supported. It now offers the ability to work with strongly typed objects as well as the ability to use the LINQ syntax which is easier than using CAML. Another great advantage of using LINQ to SharePoint is that you can join SharePoint lists which can be very powerful.
In order to use LINQ to SharePoint, you will need to have entity classes created. Rather than having to create them manually which would take a long time, Microsoft provided a
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
October 26, 2009 at 11:33 AMSharePoint 2007 didn't have any client object model; as a result, only the server side api could be used to access SharePoint data when creating a Windows, WPF, Console, Silverlight or ASP.NET applications.
SharePoint 2010 now provides the infrasctucture to easily use SharePoint data from those client applications thanks to the client object model. You can now have your client applications easily access SharePoint properties, Lists and Document Libraries eventhough those client applicaitons mi
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
August 20, 2009 at 10:11 AMI recently started to work with Hyper-v to build a 64 bit environment as Virtual PC 2007 is not supporting it.
I started to go back and forth between Hyper-v and Virtual PC 2007. I immediately noticed that my all my vms in Virtual PC 2007 would not perform well. They would take forever to start, the Active Directory indices would systematically be rebuilt on start, some services could not be started properly, and the overall performance was very poor.
The problem is coming from the fact that Hy
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
June 15, 2009 at 12:12 AMI have encountered a few issues when working with STSDEV under source control and if you are not aware of those issues, you might end up wasting a lot time trying to figure out what is going wrong.
Updating the targets file
When changing the target file, you would think the changes would instantly take effect but they don't. For example, the path of your STSDEV might be different from the path your colleague has so naturally , you would go and update it properly so that is works in your environm
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
June 15, 2009 at 10:23 AMI thought it would be useful to post an entry on how to retrieve recurring events from a calendar list. If you ever had to display recurring events, you probably noticed no list items are created for those events in the calendar list.
In order to display those items, I had to do a bit of digging... I noticed that the "Current Events" view from the calendar list would display those recurring events giving the illusion that they were actual unique list items.
Using SharePoint Solution G
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
June 11, 2009 at 4:55 PMMaybe you have wondered what is the difference between the SPWeb.AvailableContentTypes and SPWeb.ContentType, I know I did. Reading intellisence, I couldn't really tell which one to use, they both seem close to being identical:
I decided to work with SPWeb.AvailableContentTypes but ran into problems when trying to update my content as I was continually getting the "The collection cannot be modified" error.
Turns out that the SPWeb.AvailableContentTypes is a read-only property. No
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
June 11, 2009 at 4:35 PMOne of the requirements on my last project was to have a tag cloud web part to link to various articles and blogs. I found a web part that does just that here.
If you have to customize the html of those tags according to their weight, check out an updated version of the previous web part posted on codeplex that let you do that. Find it here.
Another cool little web part is the SharePoint Quick Surverys. Sometimes, it makes more sense to have a user fill out a survey from a home page ra
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
May 12, 2009 at 4:41 PMTalking with a colleague of mine today, I was explaining how sites in SharePoint are lost once deleted. Meaning, a deleted site will not be saved to the recycle bin like a list/item/document would be for example. This is the expected behavior out-of-the-box.
Now, you could use an event handler to override the WebDeleting method
and either prevent the user to delete the site or make a copy of the site and its content somewhere so that it can be retrieved if it is ever needed.
A solution was al
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
May 7, 2009 at 2:06 PMI worked with event handlers on my last project and I wanted a quick and easy way to add/delete my event handlers. I found a pretty cool application on CodePlex that let you manage your own events. After enabling the feature, I was able to view all my events, add new ones, edit or delete them, and all this from the UI. Before using this application, I was using SharePoint Manager 2007 and went to each list to see what events would be associated to it.. that application centralizes all the events
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
March 9, 2009 at 1:19 PMThere is no easy way to deploy a SharePoint Designer workflow and manually creating a workflow from scratch when wanting to move it from one environement to the other is definitly not a solution either. Though web packages are part of the solution, I will show you additional tricks you will need to know in order to make sure you can 'deploy' sucessfully your workflows.
Export the workflow
Go to SharePoint Designer, click on 'File' -> 'Export' -> 'Personal Web Package...'
Add the work
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
January 23, 2009 at 11:41 AMI have been playing with ADO.NET Data Services framework recently in its preview state and am excited about this new upcoming technology with what it has to offer! This new framework really facilitates the surfacing of server side data. Its appealing aspect resides in the fact that it is reaching for server side resources using HTTP and the underlying verb of HTTP such as GET, POST or DELETE. The surfacing of the data is done using REST web services which use URIs to identify results on the serv
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
January 20, 2009 at 2:31 PMIt seems that SharePoint Designer performs poorly when dealing with anything other than really basic workflows. From what I have noticed, it seems that the time to open the workflow gets exponentially longer with the number of activities present in a workflow. The same can be said with editing those activities, in fact I often spent minutes staring at my screen after updating simple activities waiting for the Workflow to surface back from its coma.
Increasing Performance Tip
The real problem her
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
January 19, 2009 at 10:23 AMFPCleaner
If you are working with SharePoint Designer, you will most likely notice some annoyances here and there related to cache. FPCleaner is a pretty useful little tool that I found that helped me clear quickly temporary files and other cache files that are most of the times the root of those inconveniences. Some of the best features are the ability to clear the web cache files as when those .web files are corrupted, they will prevent you from opening/closing/publishing a web site. Deleting
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
December 18, 2008 at 2:51 PMIn some instances, the OR logic in fulltextsqlquery works as an AND which could be very confusing when trying to build queries. For example, let's say you have two managed properties that are both mapped to two different crawled properties. Now if you execute a query and search for a term that is available in one item and that this item meets one of the filtering criteria set up in your OR logic but not the other one then you will not get no results back (!). Suddenly your OR looks and behaves m
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
December 17, 2008 at 12:47 AMHere are a few gotchas that I ran into while working with SharePoint search.
BETWEEN doesn't exist: I made the mistake to assume that I could use the BETWEEN clause in my fulltextsqlqueries when it is not usable! Luckily, one simple work around is to use >= and <= instead. I lost a lot of time with that one just assuming that the BETWEEN clause would work in my queries and that the problem must have come from something else.
Sorting columns: If your columns contain null values and tha
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
December 15, 2008 at 3:28 PM
Be cautious when using the results table count if you are planning to build a paging control to wrap around your results.
After a query gets executed, a results table gets returned back. The count of the results table should be helpful in theory in order to build your paging feature so that user can go through all the results. Now, one thing to keep in mind with the table count is that it can either be an exact or an estimate count. The more results get returned, the greater the chance you w
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
November 7, 2008 at 1:27 PMIf you are working with fulltextsql queries, be sure to get Sharepoint Search Service tool. It is a very helpful tool that will help you create and test your queries.
Download here:http://www.codeplex.com/SharePointSearchServ
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
October 4, 2008 at 12:55 AMIf you have been working with SharePoint Search, you might have noticed a weird behavior with the highlighting search string feature. We discovered that we were unable to consistently get the highlighted keyword in the search results summary. Sometimes it would show up, sometimes not... and this would happen especially with items containing a lot of content. I opened a ticket with Microsoft to get more information on this behavior and to see if there would be a way to fix this or go around it
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
September 28, 2008 at 12:49 AM
When working with InfoPath, a weird behavior can occur with SharePoint site columns where the columns may seem to disappear when editing their type.
Recreating the Problem:
Let's say we create a simple form that will capture users' comments with their first and last names as show here:
The first and last name fields are single line textfields while the comment field is a multiline textfield.
The next step would be to publish the form and create a content type with SharePoint columns
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
September 28, 2008 at 12:47 AM
When working on a project, my team and I ran into problems with the SharePoint auditing feature. The issue wasn't so much about the feature itself but more about the data it was generating and the consequences it implied.
In our case, less than an hundred users accessed and worked on the site but the auditing was set up in such a way that all documents and items events as well as all list, libraries, and sites events were being audited. The company's users did a massive amount of publishing
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By: Thomas DuPont
Posted:
September 28, 2008 at 12:45 AM
What goes up must come down. The same idea pertains to what is created, generally must be disposed of. The issue of garbage collection has always plagued programmers in just about every programming language. SharePoint has implemented automatic garbage disposal in a few ways. Still, a conscious effort for disposal must be made in many situations.
The SPSite and SPWeb objects use resources that need to be disposed of properly once their purpose no longer exists. If not disposed, those objects
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 ConsultantThomas DuPont is a consultant for PointBridge. Thomas has deep experience in the SharePoint practice and prior to PointBridge was a lead developer for a Chicago-area company on a multilingual SharePoi... [more]
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