March'14 in Shares

A new initiative in the blog: Month in Shares.

I usually read a lot about SharePoint and technology in my own time and I believe good content deserves to be shared. Every month I'll take a look at the retweets I've made and do some sort of curation work with the highlights.

Here's March'14.
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Changing to a UNC path in the command line

Ok, so this one's a quickie. I was invoking some PowerShell from the command line (a batch file) that would iterate a Web Application, gather some info and generate a CSV report into a local folder.

Suddenly, there was a requirement to save these reports to a network shared location. The current solution had a variable for the location of the reports, but it wouldn't support a network path.
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Word not saving to SharePoint by default

Recently, I had an intermittent issue with the Save button in Word 2010. It was a SharePoint 2010 project and I was creating a new document using the New > Content Type button in the ribbon of one of the document libraries.

The Content Types were custom and so were the document templates behind them. When I was saving for the first time, it would default to the local Document library and not the document library in SharePoint. Bugger!
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PowerShell Tip #1: Loading custom assemblies

PowerShell is a great trick to have in your bag, it allows easy and flexible scripting using SharePoint objects. Whether you're automating a certain one-off(ish) task, or just debugging a certain strange behaviour, it is always the tool I resort to.

This time, I was having an issue with an Event Receiver. PowerShell came to the rescue!
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Thoughts on Release & Deployment Management

A friend of mine, Carlos Nogueira, wrote a great article on some of the best practices that should be applied on release and deployment processes.

It was very interesting to read, especially considering he works with non-Microsoft technologies and tools, that the challenges on the "other side of the fence" are exactly the same, something we sometimes forget.

This has been one of my focal points (...)

Iterative upgrade to SharePoint 2013

Migrations and upgrades are not a new problem in the SharePoint world, nor the problems associated with such projects, especially on installations that have been highly customized.

But because it's not a new problem, the approach taken in these projects might not be the most modern one. I recently read the upgrade process strategy followed by Tobias Zimmergren and found it to be an interesting one.
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HTML Masterpages and UpdatePanels in SP2013

Although this seems to be an old problem (at least from 2010), I just faced this issue a few days ago, so it is still live and kicking in SharePoint 2013.

We had a custom webpart that had an UpdatePanel to asynchronously execute some actions. So far, nothing unusual.

The problem was it worked on a Dev box, but not on the soon to be Live site. Ever heard this one? :)

How to Quickly isolate and remove a problematic WebPart

 Here's a nice tip of the day, for anyone wanting to solve those annoying WebPart exception issues.

A lot of times, when you start tweaking with WebParts, you can end up breaking the whole page unexpectedly. To quickly resolve this issue, one thing you can do is close the offending WebPart.

To do this, you can simply add a special query string parameter called "contents" and set it to "1".
For example: (...)

Central Admin's 'New' Web Application button greyed out

This is a replay, but always good to remember - pops up every now and then. I was questioned about this today and decided to give a brief explanation.

It has happened to me in the past, wanting to create a New Web Application and the button was greyed out. I couldn't quite understand why, since I could perform the remaining administrative tasks I was looking to do at the time.
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SP2013 & VS2012: .ascx.g.cs missing!

I've been working with SharePoint 2013 for a while now, on and off...well, mostly off to be honest, as the main client I'm working for - 80% of my time - is still on SP2010 (will be very interesting to get them moved to SP2013!).

The first annoying issue I got was with missing .ascx.g.cs files for the Web Parts. I couldn't actually understand what the hell was happening, for a while! We're using a farm solution (we have full control on the environments) and Visual Studio 2012 to develop.
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