Reidar Husmo

Minimal SharePoint 2013 development environment

2013-02-10T22:25:0601:00:00

What kind of hardware do you need to do SharePoint environment?

Microsoft recommends a minimum of 32Gb for SharePoint Server, less for SharePoint Foundation.

But there are not many laptops in the wild with 32Gb; certainly none that I'd like to have in my lap. (My Dell 4600 does have 32Gb, but I'm a wee fellow at 1.87m, and rather too many kilos.)

This is written on a Samsung 900somethingsomething, a beautiful ultrabook with 8Gb of ram and a 256 SSD.

Probably the nicest thing about this machine is what Apple-users have taken for granted for years now; instant on.

I open the lid, and I can start typing almost immediately (I've disabled "require password when resuming).

So, given that this is the PC I like to use when I'm pretending to watch "When Harry met Sally" or "Eurovision Song Contest," wouldn't it be nice if this machine can run SharePoint?

Purchase Win8Pro, enable hyper-v, and...

Joy!

I chose to install SP with the minimum of services. No search, workflow, excel services or similar for me. If I want to play with those things, I'll do it at work.

I gave the vm 5550Mb, which win8 claimed was the maximum.

With VS2012 and IE with a couple of sites open, I'm still juuust south of 4Gb.

Which isn't bad.

I've also configured my Samsung for silent running (i.e. max battery lifetime, and slow down the cpu so that the fan doesn't need to spin). So it isn't fast. But the things I want to play with, team sites, apps, ecm, do work.

Use "Add as link" to unit test SharePoint

2013-02-06T21:25:1901:00:00

Unit testing SharePoint is difficult for a number of reasons.

One of the better known ones is perhaps that of the GAC; the .net loader ("Fusion") will use assemblies from the GAC even if you specify the full path to the newly-built-but-not-yet-tested-dll.

If you are unaware of this, it can be an extremely frustrating experience - or so I've been told... ("...but... how can that code possibly still be wrong?! I've commented it all out!")

In the past I've attempted daft things like renaming the dll to "something that has never been gacced" (ie. <whatever>2.dll), and adding that dll as a reference in my test project. (in case you want to know: No, it doesn't work)

Today I came across a better way in a presentation by Bill Ayers. And by better, I mean it actually works.

Briefly: In the test project, "add as a link" the class you want to test. ("Add existing item...", browse to the cs file in the SharePoint project, select it, and add as link - it's a drop-down button.)

Of course, the linked cs-file is now (also) a part of the test-project, so if the file makes calls to code in other files, they have to be linked to, too. Etc.

Installing SharePoint 2013 preview on a standalone, workgroup server

2012-07-21T21:44:0002:00:00

If you try to install SP2013 on a standalone (i.e. not joined to a domain controller), you will eventually get an error.

"Service running under Network Service account in workgroup environment is not supported."

To avoid this error, create the configuration database after the main setup before you run the “Configuring SharePoint Products” wizard.

Open Powershell, add the usual snapin if necessary (depends on what you do when I say “Open Powershell”!), ignore the warning about missing implementingType for education.institution.dll, and then do a

New-SPConfigurationDatabase

That’s it! Now you can run the Config wizard, and everything should be ok. Well, things were ok on the three servers I’ve tried it on so far.

Note: Do not do this if you ever intend to do any workflow stuff. Things will not work.

Html 5 clock, part ii - CSS marker classes and getElementsByClassName

2012-07-05T10:11:5902:00:00

The clock I made in part i displays the time in "long" - "It's a quarter to ten" (but in Norwegian).

To save space, some letters are shared, "sevenineight" is four letters shorter than "seven nine eight".

We only want to highlight the "correct" parts of this, for example "sevenineight".

When I started programming the clock, each letter had its own unique ID, and my script would "get" each element individually, and highlight / hide each element according to some obscure logic.

I quickly realized, despite being in a post surgery haze, …this is a stupid way to do it.

And, to paraphrase NPH, if you find yourself doing something stupid, stop, and be awesome instead.

We want an easy way to get all the items we want to highlight.

Perhaps we can use the new getElementsByClassName function?

Try to mark each element with a classname or two.

So in "sevenineight": 's' is marked as 'h7', and the first 'n' is marked with both 'h7' and 'h9' (h for hour).

getElementsByClassName('h9') will return the four letters of "nine".

Notice that these classes are not backed by any CSS, they only appear directly in html (and are used in javascript).

I have not seen classes used this way elsewhere, and have chosen to call them "marker classes" - similar to marker interfaces - until somebody comes up with a better name.

Html 5 – new size units

2012-07-04T22:50:5502:00:00

There are some new size units with CSS 3, which allows you to resize elements relative to the viewport size. They are vw, vh, vmin (that’s vm in IE), and perhaps vmax. (Viewport width, height, smaller of the two, larger of the two.)

8vw is 8% of the viewport width – or 205 pixels on my 2560 screen.

I created a tiny demo clock which sizes the elements so that it uses the whole screen.

Clock – in Norwegian, but it’s the source that is interesting…

Bug: Resize does not work.

Tested for IE 9 & 10 and Chrome. Firefox and Safari: does not work.

Creating large SharePoint structures from Powershell and xml, part ii

2012-06-30T19:21:5002:00:00

In this second part, we show how we can build an xml structure from information we get from SharePoint. This xml can later be edited, and used as input to the SharePoint creator from part i.

Creating large SharePoint structures from Powershell and xml

2012-06-30T18:25:0802:00:00

In this two-part series, we show how we can (easily) create large SharePoint structures using Powershell and xml - and hashtables(!?)

Creating SharePoint sites from xml using Powershell

2012-04-12T14:53:4402:00:00

It is frequently useful to create / delete web applications in a development environment.

If you need to create a structure, this can quickly become tedious.

Enter Powershell, xml and recursive functions.

Create the structure in xml. Something like:

Read this structure in Powershell, and recursively create the sites. Oh, and have cool progress dialogs, too.

$snap = Get-PSSnapin | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq "Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell" }
if ($snap -eq $null)
{
Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell"
}

function CreateSites($baseUrl, $sites, [int]$progressid)
{
    $sitecount = $sites.ChildNodes.Count
    $counter = 0
    foreach ($site in $sites.Site)
    {
        Write-Progress -ID $progressid -Activity "Creating sites" -status "Creating $($site.Name)" -percentComplete ($counter / $sitecount*100)
        $counter = $counter + 1

        Write-Host "Creating $($site.Name) $($baseUrl)/$($site.Url)"
        New-SPWeb -Url "$($baseUrl)/$($site.Url)" -AddToQuickLaunch:$false -AddToTopNav:$false -Confirm:$false -Name "$($site.Name)" -Template "STS#0" -UseParentTopNav:$true
        if ($site.ChildNodes.Count -gt 0)
        {
            CreateSites "$($baseUrl)/$($site.Url)" $site ($progressid +1)
        }
        Write-Progress -ID $progressid -Activity "Creating sites" -status "Creating $($site.Name)" -Completed
    }
}
# read an xml file
$xml = [xml](Get-Content "C:\Projects\Powershell\sites.xml")
$xml.PreserveWhitespace = $false

CreateSites "http://$($env:computername)" $xml.Sites 1

Easy!

Sensible real life implementations will also include templateid in the xml, will check for existence of a site before creating it, etc.

Powershell progress dialogs

2012-04-11T13:21:5502:00:00

Creating nested progress dialogs in Powershell is easy.

Let the code speak for itself:

for ($i = 1; $i -le 2; $i++)

{

Write-Progress -ID 1 -Activity "Outer loop" -Status "Tick $i" -percentComplete ($i / 2*100)

for ($j = 1; $j -le 3; $j++)

{

Write-Progress -ID 2 -Activity "Mid loop" -Status "Tick $j" -percentComplete ($j / 3*100)

for ($k = 1; $k -le 3; $k++)

{

Write-Progress -ID 3 -Activity "Inner loop" -Status "Tick $k" -percentComplete ($k / 3*100)

Sleep(1)

}

I.e. some text that explains what we're doing (Activity and Status), and ID numbers.

Easy.

Powershell ISE:

And in the console window:

CAML queries for humans

2012-03-28T10:40:1602:00:00

I've recently had to help a couple of splinq-challenged colleagues with some caml queries.

Here are some of my favourite ways to make caml edible.

Use '!
Too many developers seem ignorant of the fact that xml works just as well with single apostrophes as with double. This is, of course, also true for other things, like html.

Use @ and multiline
Use string.Format
Validate the query using a simple webpart or, much better, powershell

Don't use third-party clever stuff

I'm not sarcastic when I say "clever," I'm really impressed with what some people, like John Holliday, have done. But I have two major problems. You include a dependency to a dll which is outside your control, which can lead to all kinds of interesting deployment and upgrade problems. But more importantly, these additions seldom cover 100% of the functionality, and you may therefore think that something is impossible just because the addition doesn't support it.

So, examples.

var query = new SPQuery();

query.Query = "<Where><Eq><FieldRef Name=\"Severity\" /><Value Type=\"Choice\">Error</Value></Eq></Where>";

becomes

query.Query = @"

<Where>

<Eq>

<Value Type='Choice'>Error</Value>

</Eq>

</Where>";

Which, IMHO, is more readable.

Another example using string.Format:

query.Query = string.Format(@"<Where>

<Eq>

</Eq>

</Where>", filename); // GAH! sorry about tabification (blog editor)

And how do you test it in PowerShell?

$filename = "test"

$query = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPQuery

$query.Query = @"

<Where>

<Eq>

<Value Type='Text'>$($filename)</Value>

</Eq>

</Where>

# See? Powershell does multiline strings, too!

# yes, Powershell has string.Format - but in Powershell I prefer using the built-in mechanism

$items = $list.GetItems($query)

foreach ($item in $items)

{

Write-Host -NoNewline $item.DisplayName

}

Beautiful, just beautiful. Well, the PowerShell bit, not the CAML bit. Splinq is, obviously, much prettier.