Category Archives for Tips & Tricks

Tips & Tricks

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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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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Open XML in the Sandbox

Sometime back I was given the task of taking information in an email and automating it into a specifically formatted word document (kind of a strange request I know). With me being a complete OpenXML noob, I have to admit it turned out to be much more difficult than I originally thought. Also, I had [...]

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Upgrading Azure SDK from 1.7 to 1.8

I recently installed VS2012 which required that I upgrade an Azure Solution of mime from 1.7 to 1.8. The automatic solution upgrade worked pretty well except for one issue. The upgrade didn’t update the reference to the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime DLL from 1.7 to 1.8. This didn’t cause any problems when compiling but when trying to run [...]

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Jenny’s SharePoint Tip: Using SharePoint Features within Office 2010 Applications

Applies to SharePoint 2010 Users can work with SharePoint features from within Office applications without navigating to a SharePoint site. Save documents directly to SharePoint from an Office application Using Office applications, users can save files directly to SharePoint, without uploading documents to a library. Save a document to SharePoint Using the Office Save to [...]

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Jenny’s SharePoint Tip: Sum Calculated Columns

Applies to:  SharePoint 2010 About Summing Calculated Columns Calculated columns are great, but if you expect to be able to total calculated columns using the Totals feature in the View Settings, think again.  To sum calculated columns in a list you need SharePoint Designer 2010, a web part page, a data source, and a line [...]

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Jenny’s SharePoint Tip: Color Coded Calendars – Out of the Box Solution

Applies to:  SharePoint 2010 Color Coded Calendar – How it Works With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has provided out of the box functionality to color code SharePoint calendars.  This is achieved using the Calendar Overlay feature which utilizes list views and calendar overlay views called New Calendars.  Prior to SharePoint 2010, if a user wanted to [...]

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