Archive51 posts

Optimize a build process in a monorepo in Azure DevOps using all new features like Yaml pipelines, Pipeline Artifacts, Cache Beta and Azure's Rest API.

In our project we agreed that content editors do not use inline styling in Rich Text Fields. We did not make it impossible in the Rich Text Editor of Sitecore to use it. This can be done, but for several reasons we didn’t do this (yet).

When working on Sitecore and deploying modules to a Sitecore site we only want to deploy artifacts that are ours and not from Sitecore. This way we want to keep the deployment packages clean and fast. To manage the contents and behaviors of deployment packages we can use a wpp.targets file.

You probably have on sites with pages that show how often these are visited. This is done to show visitors that the page has attracted more people to read it and encourages them to read the article as well. This blogpost has been written using Sitecore 8.2. In older versions of Sitecore, different solutions can be used.

Sometimes in SharePoint you get errors that were not very clear when you start. However if you develop for some time in SharePoint you’ll learn the best practices and you will avoid some simple mistakes. One of these errors is Attempted to use an object that has ceased to exist.

To try to get my head around the differences of the factory’s, services and provider in AngularJS. This can be all very similar on first sight. However there are some differences between the three of them. I’ll try to explain how they work and which to choose when.

Writing e2e can be very valuable when developing clientside based web app’s. The de facto standard for writing e2e is protractor. This is since the introduction of AngularJS v1.2. The AngularJS team switched from Karma (aka scenario runner) to Protractor, Karma was used as the default e2e runner.

Lessons learned from mixins, render props, HOCs, and classes.

Minifying your clientside code is a best practice. Minification performs a variety of different code optimizations to scripts or css, such as removing unnecessary white space and comments and shortening variable names to one character. This last thing can be problem with Angular if you do it right.

There are many different ways to communicate between different Angular controllers in the same app. I will show what's the best way in my opinion for now. Communicate with events. The alternative way is by using a inherited scope.

Sometimes you want a number of a certain length. If it’s not of that length it needs leading zeros. AngularJS provides the number filter. However this lacks the possibility to have leading zeros.

MVC5 came with some really nice stuff. In this blog post I’ll dig into the authentication with external logins as Microsoft calls them. We call them often social logins. The way this is done is quite different than in MVC4. Where MVC4 depended on webmatrix MVC5 makes use of OWIN security

NuGet, the package manager that is widely used in Visual Studio, has a lot of features that are really nice to use. However some things can be challenging. For example creating a NuGet package. It looks quite simple if you read the documentation on NuGet.org. Creating this in an automated process has some obstacles, like versioning.

Recent in my project we had a problem with a TFS build when calculating the code metrics of the code. The error we ran into was the CA0055 Could not load file. Searching on the internet gave me some hints but not the solution in my case.

Once you publish an Web API, it’s set stone. Publishing an API is not a trivial move to do. Users or customers rely on the API not changing after publishing. But however requirements will change always. So there’s a need to evolve the API without breaking existing clients.

Testing your code can be a time consuming business with SharePoint. You’ll to F5 Build. Deploy, And test. This cycle is extremely slow and you don’t want to do this often. Then there’s unit testing. But SharePoint is a complex system. It needs loads of infrastructure to get anywhere. The best to speed up is to get rid of SharePoint when testing your code.

SharePoint has the capability to show all checkout page of web. Manage Content and Structure has several built-in filters like: All Draft Documents and Checked Out to Me.

Managed metadata service applications are administered from within SharePoint Central Administration, where you get an overview of all available service applications. But everything over there can also be done in Powershell i.e. creating a Managed Metadata Service Application.

Introduced into SharePoint 2010 as a security feature and the same applies to SharePoint 2013. When a user requests a file within SharePoint, the web server (IIS) will respond including the “X-Download-Options: noopen” HTTP Response Header if Browser File Handling is set to Strict and the file (MIME) type accessed is not on the Web Applications trusted file (MIME) type list. This header works in conjunction with Internet Explorer (version 8 or higher) to prevent potential security risks when accessing files online and will stop files from being directly opened.

In a previous post I explained about Word Automation Services in SharePoint 2010. It worked and the converted files were of a good quality. However there was still some space for improvements. I’ll show what changed in SharePoint 13 in the Word Automation Services.

When you need to convert documents, like Word documents to PDF or XPS in SharePoint 2010 we can use the service application: Word Automation services.

We have a website with a lot of PDF documents. In content hyperlinks are made to these documents. The design that is given us, says we need to show a PDF icon in front the hyperlink. SharePoint has an option with hyperlinks to show a pictogram in front of a hyperlink. But there’s no default support for PDF icons. I’ll show how to add the PDF icon.

Working on an internet facing site there was a requirement to show frequently asked questions (FAQ’s) as related items to a page. The amount of FAQ’s is about 500.

Working on a SharePoint 2010 site we had a requirement to make the site HTML5 valid. To test this we use the W3C validator on internet. After a lot of improvements we got stuck with just these kind of errors.

Managed metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define, and then use as attributes for items.

In a nutshell, SignalR allows you to pass data between client and server in realtime. It will run on .Net 4.0 or 4.5 and to get websockets running, you will need IIS8 or IIS8 Express. That said, it will run on older versions of IIS and will switch to different transport modes.

Working on a SharePoint 2010 WCM site I had the requirement to deliver a more content editor friendly SharePoint. Especially when it becomes to url fields. Content editors are asked to copy-paste urls in SharePoints out-of-the-box url fields. In contrast to the Publishing Content Field, the url field does not come with an asset picker.

Working on a new SharePoint site, we have to migrate old content to our new SharePoint. The old site was built in Tridion. To clean up HTML, the use of XSLT nifty way to clean things up.

Sometimes you want to find all content types and sitecolumns you created in SharePoint. A simple way to acomplish this is the use of PowerShell. Conditional in this script is that all my custom content types and sitecolumns belong to the same group.

Sometimes you want to find all content types and sitecolumns you created in SharePoint. A simple way to acomplish this is the use of PowerShell. Conditional in this script is that all my custom content types and sitecolumns belong to the same group.

If you need to make a SharePoint site compliant and render pages without nested tables you will need to make use of a control adapter. They actually serve a purpose of providing a way of completely changing the rendering of a control based on the browser type of the client, which turns out to be useful in a number of situations.

A common feature on sites and wikis is the “open in new window” icon. It’s not very good idea for several reason to put them al over the HTML, they’re a greate candidate for using progressive enhancement.

This post will show you how to provision Site Columns that uses Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2010. Managed Metadata is one of the new and exciting features of SharePoint Server 2010. It allows you to centrally manage metadata terms and keywords.

The SummaryLinkWebPart has many styles in it, but if you need to brand it to your company’s then you can add custom styles.

Should I call EnsureChildControls in code?

In SharePoint 2010 it is possible to replace several application pages. This are: AccessDenied , Confirmation, Error, Login, RequestAccess, Signout, WebDeleted. This can be done in two ways. By using a eventreceiver or a Powershell script.

I wrote web part that uses Repeater control to create some repeating blocks of output. Each of these blocks has Button control in it. When I ran web part under SharePoint I got the following error: Invalid postback or callback argument.

Recently I was asked to write a unit test for some code that had a fluent interface. The code made calls to a database that should be mocked/faked. Faking and mocking is done by TypeMock Isolator.

When creating a new Secure Store Service Application in SharePoint 2010 I had this error: Creation of Secure Store Service Application SecureStoreService failed because of the following errors: SQL Server detected a logical consistency-based I/O error: unable to decrypt page due to missing DEK.

While working on a project I needed to create a InfoPath form a nested repeated table that will be filled with data from a SharePoint list.

When working with generated code, I don’t want this to affect my code coverage, code metrics or code analysis. All these statistics are interesting over code that really matters. To exclude generated code from these statistics you can use a few attributes.

Working on SharePoint you see and use a lot of GUIDs. Creating them can be done by using guidgen.exe. When you just need a few it works just fine. But I need a lot and I like my keyboard. So I wanted a shortcut key to generate GUID. This is how I did do it.

Developing a custom xslt for the search core results web part can be hard. It’s very helpfull to have xml to test it on. To view the raw xml use this xsl in SharePoint Enterprise Search.

When working on a SharePoint 2010 project search was done by using FAST for SharePoint. the FAST search engine is much more advanced than the enterprise search that comes with SharePoint. FAST for SharePoint will visually fully integrate with SharePoint. Maintenance will be done in the Central Administration. When the Central Administration is not enough PowerShell is there to rescue.

The layer diagram in the architecture tools for Visual Studio is a new type of diagram that allow you to describe the “logical” architecture of your application. Your code can be organized into different “layers”, allowing a better understanding of what objects perform what tasks. Layer diagrams can also be incorporated into the automated build process, allowing you to ensure that no architectural constraints have been violated.

Powershell script to automatic deploy SharePoint solutions. However when activating features that were already active an error occurs.

WCF client cannot be used inside a Using block because they may unexpectedly throw an exception. Even if you catch the exception, it is possible that a connection will be left open.

Using the SharpZipLib it’s possible to zip and unzip files. This can be a good solution when file size matters. Downloading files that are ziped can save many bandwidth. In this case a object is serialized to XML and put into a ZipOutputStream which belongs to SharpZipLib.

The XmlSerializer can cause serious problems in multithreaded environments.

When having hosted a WCF webservice that is secured by a certificate. Opening the service with a browser al the security stuff is handled by the browser. This situation is different. The caller is a .NET Click-once application, that is hosted near the webservice. This application has to handle the use of the certificate by itself.

NuGet is a package manager that simplifies the process of discovering, installing and using third-parties .NET libraries. It is free to download, open source and you are able to create your own package and submit them. In this post I’ll show how to create your own package and host them yourself.