Category Archives for Technology

Technology

Hey SharePoint, go PSCONFIG Yourself!

I recently was upgrading SharePoint 2010 out of the box, no updates installed to the latest Cumulative Update (February 2013).  Service Pack 1 needs to be installed in order to deploy the update, so I diligently installed Service Pack one, and the immediately ran the update installer.  After running the PSCONFIG GUI and receiving the [...]

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Managing History

One of my biggest challenges throughout my career has been working with management that manages the past.  There is a lot to be said of a manager with a good foundation in an organization that understands historical dynamics between customers, teams, and other leadership members.  On the other side of that coin is in order [...]

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How to create a Windows Store App side-loading install

Recently we needed the ability to distribute our Windows Store app called eBriefing on locked down devices without access to the Windows Store.  This required that we create a version that can be installed using side-loading.  While researching this I found that there is no single place on the web where it clearly describes the entire process [...]

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Where is the Windows Store developer console?

Finding the developer console for the Windows Store can be tricky.  A simple Google search of “Windows Store developer console” will not get you there very quickly, but if I type in “Android developer console” the first link is what I am looking for.  Is this some great conspiracy from Google?  I doubt it.  Maybe it is [...]

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.Net Queue vs ConcurrentQueue performance

Just recently I found out about a new set of collections introduced in .Net 4 within the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace which can make multi-threaded code easier since they are designed to be thread safe for the ground up which means when using them there is no need to use locks.  Aside from making the coding a bit [...]

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Caching a large number of key/value pairs within C#

Dealing with large amounts of data can make even the simplest of tasks significantly more difficult.  On a system I am currently working on I have the need to cache a rather large (potentially 20+ million) number of key/value pairs (key being a long/value being a byte), oh and I also need quick lookup/insertion times. [...]

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Creating a Dynamic Status Bar in SharePoint

In this quick example I’ll show how you can utilize a SharePoint list and the SharePoint 2010 Status Bar to provide messages to the user, which are dynamically updated every 10 seconds. And since we’ll be using the JavaScript Object Model, we’ll have all of the AJAX goodness we so desire, with minimal amounts of [...]

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Storing Connection String Information in the Secure Store Service

As a SharePoint developer, i’ve been tasked a few times with pulling data from an external database into SharePoint. More often than not, that data is secured SQL data and needs to be accessed using a SQL account, which means I’m going to have to access that data using a connection string. Generally that’s a [...]

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Race conditions within image onerror and onload

Recently I tracked down a bug which had been popping up occasionally for a while but which I could never seem to replicate in order to fix.  The scenario was this:  Load an image onto a page dynamically via JS and wait for the image to load before fading it in (to make sure the image is loaded [...]

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Farm, Sandbox, or Client Object Model?

When developing solutions for SharePoint 2010 there are 3 primary options for development. These options are as follows: Farm Sandbox Client Object Model (Managed, Silverlight, and Javascript) It’s great that we’ve been provided options, however with these options we’re also presented with a choice. And in my opinion you should choose wisely, because each option [...]

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