SharePoint

SharePoint App Deployment fails

Visual Studio does not tell you much if an app deployment fails. Fortunately SharePoint will log more information about the problem that occurred during the app deployment in the ULS-Log. So if you run into the “There were deployment errors.” exception, take a look at the ULS-Log. In this particular case SharePoint didn’t like my JavaScript: App Packaging: CreatePackage: Unexpected exception: There were errors when validating the App package: There were errors when validating the App Package.

The solution for warming up SharePoint

Most SharePoint Farms will have a solution for the long loading time after an Application Pool recycle or iisreset running. There are many different ways to preload websites, so your users have faster load times. So why another solution? There are some questions, that I think have not been dealt with before: Most solutions require some sort of Timer to be started (e.g. a Scheduled Task) When should the warmup occur?

SharePoint 2013 SDK

How could I miss the release of the SharePoint 2013 SDK in November? http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30722 Anyway. Finally the non-preview version has been released 🙂

Building a Visual Studio project for SP2010/SP2013 (.NET 3.5/4.0)

In this post I will show you how you can use MSBuild to target your project for .NET 3.5 or .NET 4.0 and use a separate app.config file for each. My Warmup Tool is supposed to work with SP2010 and SP2013. To achieve that compatibility, I have to change the TargetFramework of the project to be able to compile, as well as the app.config so the application uses the desired Framework.

Speed up SharePoint Update Installation

Installing Updates for SharePoint 2013 will take a long time, if you don’t disable some services prior starting the update process by executing the hotfix exe file. To simplify the installation, and speeding it up, you can use a PowerShell script to stop the necessary services, and start the update. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/russmax/archive/2013/04/01/why-sharepoint-2013-cumulative-update-takes-5-hours-to-install.aspx You need to copy the code, and save it as e.g. Install_SharePoint_Update.ps1 in the same folder as the exe file.

SQL Access to Configuration DB required

In many cases you pass an URL string to connect to SharePoint. In my case I wanted to verify the URL by using this code: 1: Uri requestUri; 2: if (!Uri.TryCreate(absoluteUrl, UriKind.Absolute, out requestUri)) 3: throw new ArgumentException(absoluteUrl + " is no a valid URL."); 4: 5: SPWebApplication webApplication = SPWebApplication.Lookup(requestUri); And here comes the “but”. I did not know that the account, which is executing the code, needs permissions to the Configuration Database!

When a Feature gets installed

Have you ever thought about the Features folder and when a folder will be created for one of you features? Well, I did 🙂 Why is this relevant, anyway? To be able to activate a feature on a given scope, it has to be installed first. That’s why. Action <td valign="top"> <strong>Result</strong> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top"> stsadm -o addsolution </td> <td valign="top"> The solution is added to the farm.

CKS – Dev for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013

The new release brings support for Visual Studio 2013 🙂 The CKS – Development Tools Edition for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 is a collection of Visual Studio templates, Server Explorer extensions and tools providing accelerated SharePoint 2010/2013 development based on Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010/2013 development tools. http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/cf1225b4-aa83-4282-b4c6-34feec8fc5ec?SRC=VSIDE

Activating Features after Solution Deployment via VS

Visual Studio allow a F5 Deployment. I guess you all know that. The part where you have to think carefully is, when you add Features to your project. Should you activate “Activate On Default”? Well, it depends (as always). Usually I don’t enable that setting, because features tend to be activated on scopes you won’t expect. The problem Take a WebApplication scoped feature for example. It might create SafeControl entries for your controls.

Slow DFS Crawling in SharePoint

If you are indexing you DFS with SharePoint 2007/2010, you should take a look at this hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967671. It addresses this issue “When you crawl the file shares in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, you experience poor performance”.

SPQuery for my tasks

Developing solution with multiple languages (or a language which is not English) sometimes can be a bit painful. To configure a Webpart to display only my tasks, I would filter for [Me] or [Ich]. To achieve the same via code / CAML, you can filter by UserID and not the string “Me”. 1: <Where> 2: <Eq> 3: <FieldRef Name="AssignedTo" /> 4: <Value Type="Integer"> 5: <UserID /> 6: </Value> 7: </Eq> 8: </Where> 9: <OrderBy> 10: <FieldRef Name="

Do long running operations on SPListItem creation

Events on SPListItems like ItemAdding or ItemAdded are nothing new. Many of you have already used them. Recently I had a requirement to create a new SPSite, when an item in a list has been created. So an ItemReceiver was my choice. But the customer wants something special 🙂 During the creation process, which takes some seconds, the user should see a loading animation. Here comes the problem. The ItemEventReceiver is running in the background, and has no knowledge about the GUI process.

CKS – Dev for Visual Studio 2012

The Tools have been released for VS 2012. Great! The CKS – Development Tools Edition for Visual Studio 2012 is a collection of Visual Studio templates, Server Explorer extensions and tools providing accelerated SharePoint 2010/2013 development based on Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010/2013 development tools. The current 1.0 release includes the following features: Server Exploration from CKSDev 2010 v2.4 – Visual Studio 2012 version of the Visual Studio 2010 exploration. Includes all the existing server explorer features.

Now Available: Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012

Finally! Now Available: Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 There are some points to mention, where the final release of the tools differ from previous preview releases: validation experience that helps you to find and fix common errors prior to submitting your apps to the Office Store A continuous integration workflow Windows Azure cloud service projects for creating provider-hosted Apps A dramatically improved Workflow designer The download link: http://aka.