21 posts from: Chris' Comments
Moving on...
(Indexed 2007-03-17):
Today's post will probably be my last from this location - I'm not disappearing entirely from the blogosphere, however I will be moving on from here as I got word this past Wednesday (”pi” day) that I was being let go from imason due to restructuring of the company.While I'm disappointed, I understand that business is business and it's not personal. I've had an amazing time with imason and I've got nothing but great things to say about the firm and its people - they're all bright an...(truncated)...
(Almost) One-touch Continuous Integration setup with CI Factory
(Indexed 2007-03-09):
[Image] Scott Hanselman's latest podcast is about a best-practice I and a few colleagues have been looking into here at imason: Continuous Integration. Part of the challenge with CI is that it's a little tricky to get all your bits and bobs straight, and more than once we've wondered why there wasn't a CC.NET in-a-box we could run and get started with straightaway.Well, wonder no more: In the podcast, Scott interviews Jay Flowers, a rather sharp guy who figured out how to package up CC.NET an...(truncated)...
Broken windows and blog comment spam
(Indexed 2007-02-08):
An act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them. Frederic Bastiat - That Which is Seen, and that Which is Not SeenI'll admit it: I've been pretty tardy as of late when it comes to keeping on top of this blog. My posts tapered right off starting in Oct...(truncated)...
New WSS 3.0 application templates online...
(Indexed 2007-02-01):
Ah. Memories of the early WSS 2.0 days.Arno Nel has posted a great aggregation of the 20 new web app templates MSFT released recently on his blog. Download, install, enjoy, lather, rinse, repeat! And there's apparently another 20 in the hopper.Great place to start from for mods to create your own flavours of templates.[Image]
64 Bit MOSS Development
(Indexed 2007-01-16):
From an erstwhile colleague, this MSDN tidbit about 64-bit development on a 32-bit machine. Choice excerpts:"Visual Studio 2005 will install the 32-bit version 2.0 CLR on an x86 machine, and both the 32-bit and appropriate 64-bit version 2.0 CLR on a 64-bit Windows machine. (Visual Studio 2005 is a 32-bit application and when installed on a 64-bit Windows operating system will run under WOW64.)" and "Beginning in Visual Studio 2005 you can compile your application and specify that it should run...(truncated)...
MSFT Product Lifecycles and XP SP1/1a
(Indexed 2006-10-02):
Mary Jo wrote up a reminder today that Windows XP SP1 support officially ends October 10. Not much of a concern for me as I've been running SP2 plus the bazillion various upgrades and patches that have accrued through live update over the interceding years.But, I know that there are patch luddites out there who may need this as a kick in the pants to get moving, download the free rollups and get on with it.That said, all this talk of planned support expirations caused me to look up Microsoft's ...(truncated)...
Clean up orphaned items in SPS 2003 config database with SPSADM
(Indexed 2006-08-15):
[Image]Just noticed this item in my collection of RSS feeds that describes a tool included in the SPS 2003 Post-SP2 Hotfix Package:Description of a new command-line operation that is available for the Spsadm.exe command line tool that you can use to clean up orphaned items in the configuration database in SharePoint Portal Server 2003Does anyone at MSFT support know how to write better titles? Sheesh!The article details using the repairorphans command argument for the spsadm.exe tool to remove ...(truncated)...
Items of Interest
(Indexed 2006-08-02):
Mark Harrison is one busy blogger. Through his posts, I find more information about what's going on in the larger world of Microsoft development than I'd ever find on my own. Via his blog:Steen Molberg has released BlogParts 1.2, a set of SharePoint web parts for implementing a blog. Very cool! By bringing this now middle-aged technology into the enterprise, new avenues for communication can be opened up that would have previously been difficult to do. Imagine managers or supervisors being ...(truncated)...
Weird little mailto: multi-lingual character encoding issue
(Indexed 2006-08-01):
So, I've been farmed out to one of our satellite teams who are busily working away at knocking off some pre-launch bugs in a SharePoint solution we developed for an enterprise client. The dev lead approached me today with a request to look into a very odd little bug that has had them stumped for a little while.They have a ASP.NET (1.1) page that contains an anchor tag with a mailto: link that contains a subject heading that is bi-lingual (French and English):Request Access/Demander d'accès...(truncated)...
Unit testing SharePoint - Fixed the Archives
(Indexed 2006-07-11):
Some may remember waaaay back in February I blogged about how I created an NUnit test fixture base class for exercising SharePoint 2003 code. Some may also remember how our webserver went down not long thereafter and some of my images and archives got foobarred.Well, I finally got around to replacing the archives, for the above post and its sequel.Yes, it only took several months... :-P[Image]
Dude! Where've you been?
(Indexed 2006-03-21):
... you very well may be asking.Good question! Totally busy. Yes, I've said that before and I'll say it again.On my To-Do list for this weekend are two posts:We recently did a demo for the Toronto SharePoint Users Group this past Wednesday about a skunkworks project we put together that combines ASP.NET 2.0 / Atlas / Ajax and SharePoint. My post will go into more detail, but the basic concept is (surprise!) visualizing SharePoint list data via Virtual Earth.The first entry for my “Agile...(truncated)...
Creating an NUnit base test class for SharePoint applications: Part 2
(Indexed 2006-02-15):
In my last post (which seems to have touched off a lot of interest judging by my logs) I introduced how I approach unit testing SharePoint code with NUnit with a base class test fixture that aggregates some common test methods that make writing descendant test fixtures a snap. In today's post, I'll be demonstrating how this test class is used drawing on the test fixtures I wrote for a document migration app.My Approach to Making SharePoint Code Unit Test-FriendlyThree words: Separate your tiers....(truncated)...
Creating an NUnit base test class for SharePoint applications
(Indexed 2006-02-14):
One of the primary demotivators that I've been encountering among SharePoint developers when it comes to unit testing their code is how to do it easily. TDD is a conceptual stretch for most folks to begin with, never mind the complexities that can arise when testing code that has to run under a secure web app framework like SharePoint.So, when I was tapped last fall to create an application to migrate documents into a SharePoint 2003 server taxonomy, I took the opportunity to stop the kvetching...(truncated)...
Windows Folder Web Part
(Indexed 2005-12-07):
When I saw this web part I literally had a “whoa” moment. Graham Tyler has just released a web part into the wild that provides users with a UI to access a shared network NTFS folder to store and retrieve files. From his blog:"This means that if your users need to work with file types that do not work well when stored within SharePoint, you can now continue to store them in NTFS, but users can locate them in SharePoint alongside the rest of their files that are stored within SharePo...(truncated)...
SharePoint Holy Grail: Offline file synchronization
(Indexed 2005-12-05):
Just got an email from the folks at Colligo Networks in Vancouver inviting me to participate as a beta-tester for their new .NET client for offline synchronization of SharePoint content, Colligo for SharePoint. This is, from my recent experience, one of the Holy Grails for SharePoint developers and consultants (the others being seamless multilingualism and GUI development of web parts) as it often ranks high in the “need to have” vs. “nice to have” category for clients.I...(truncated)...
Microsoft's missed opportunity with TDD VSTS 2005
(Indexed 2005-11-30):
I've been working with the new Visual Studio Team System 2005 since late this past summer, specifically in two respects: the new ASP.NET 2.0 design elements (web parts, master pages et. al) and the testing tools. It was the latter that excited me the most, as it was promised to embed Test Driven Development tools.Indeed, over the course of the year a number of developer tools began to appear for converting your NUnit or csUnit tests to the new VSTS format so that you could hop on the integrate...(truncated)...
Crawling SharePoint content with Google Search Appliances
(Indexed 2005-11-11):
Stephen Cummins over at SPSFAQ posted an interesting item recently about a firm that has released a beta SharePoint webpart that allows Google Search appliances to traverse SharePoint/WSS content. The article links to a story about a Chicago based company, MC+A, that has partnered with Google under their Google Enterprise Professional Program, to develop the innovative product.The web part is in beta and available for free download here.The ramifications of this advancement are intriguing, to s...(truncated)...
How to use multilingual character sets in your web.config
(Indexed 2005-10-05):
While working on a project here at imason, we had a requirement for maintaining localization string resources in the web.config for a WSS site. The first few tries at this had us a little stymied when we realized that we may have to resort to escape-sequencing each and every special character that would end up in the config, or having to write a custom section handler to parse the data. It was not a fun prospect.Then, I had the notion that maybe, just maybe, the XML encoding type for the web.c...(truncated)...
80-20 Compliance Server - Free Beta Review
(Indexed 2005-09-12):
Uggh. Still wading through my enormous TODO: list, and this item needed some front-page attention. Earlier this summer I was invited by the CTO for 80-20 software (along with dozens of other SharePoint bloggers) to participate in a private beta review of their new document retention application built on the SharePoint platform.I'm still checking things out, but this application definitely fills a niche for enterprise clients who are bound by such regulations and laws as Sarbanes-Oxley to retai...(truncated)...
Thinking asynchronously in .NET
(Indexed 2005-07-27):
Quick post on some thoughts-du-jour I'm researching surrounding the implmentation of asynchronous requests in ASP.NET 2.0 and web-based applications in general. I've come across some resources that I want to keep track of and share with others:Script Callbacks in ASP.NETImplications of Script Callbacks in ASP.NETAsyc Pages in ASP.NET 2.0Async Tasks in ASP.NET 2.0Remote Scripting Resources - Javascript Remote Scripting LibraryMSDN - Life Without Refresh - Creating dynamic UIs using Javascript RP...(truncated)...
SharePoint error messages and how to translate them into English
(Indexed 2005-07-27):
From Mart Muller, a bang-on post about the crazy world of SPS/WSS error messages. I think Mart is getting a little shack-wacky with his enthusiasm for these things, but his mini-catalogue of the error gremlins and links to associated KB articles is a handy reference.I must say that I am a huge (if unwilling) fan of the KB 827841 error, myself... ;)[Image]