It is such a simple and common requirement but it can be a nightmare to achieve out of the box with SharePoint. I spent quite a bit of time working out how a user can be authenticated via https and maintain their login cookie over http pages (without having to sign in again). More...

One of the annoyances about SharePoint alerts seems to be that the functionality of an alert template and existing subscriptions on an existing list, seem to be disjointed. When you update an alert template property for an existing list, the change is not applied to any existing alert subscriptions on that list. As a follow up to my previous post SharePoint 2010 custom alert template, I will try to describe the limitations and issues surround existing alert subscriptions and the options available to work around them. More...

Having gone through the experience of adding a custom alerts template to SharePoint 2010, I thought I’d share my learning during this process. This is the first part of two posts regarding custom alert templates. Updating existing alert subscriptions in SharePoint 2010 describes the challenges around updating existing alert subscriptions. In this post, I hope to cover what you need to know to create a custom alert template. More...

I recently needed a way to be able to deploy a web service project to different environments, where each environment was either using http or https to offer the web service to the multiple clients. If you find yourself in the same situation, then this technique might save you a bit of time.

If you’re trying to get going with GNUstep, you follow all of the instructions but you come accross the following message:

File NSData.m:1413 In[NSData writeToFile.options:error:] Open (/home/USER/ProjectFolder/Filenamea12345) failed – The system cannot find the file specified. More...

Issue when you reference Microsoft.SharePoint.dll in Visual Studio 2010. If you’ve already put in the using statements like bellow:

using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration;

You issue a build and it fails and you get the following message:
’The type of namespace 'administration' could not be found’

The fix: Change the target framework to .Net Framework 3.5 (Right click the project in visual studio and go to ‘Properties’)

Recently I had to investigate why a certain virtual machine’s hard drive had filled up. I discovered that this was caused by a massive SharePoint database that I had imported. The log file for this database was nearly 30gb. More...

Recently I had to convert a few child windows into popup windows. Doing this was pretty easy. I simply changed the child windows into user controls, then added them as child controls of popups at runtime. One of the behavioural difference between the child window and pop up box is that by default, a child window opens in the middle of the Silverlight application whereas the Popup appears in the top left corner. After a bit of google-ing, I did not find an out of the box way to make the pop-ups sit in the centre of my screen. Therefore I formulated a way of doing this via code and some basic maths. More...

If you need to copy a web part from one place to another, you can use the out of the box import/export functionality that SharePoint provides. A scenario where you have been asked to add a web part with specific configurations, to ten different locations, can present quite a challenge to perform manually. Here I will explain how you can do this in a more efficient manner. More...

On nearly all of the SharePoint implementations I've participated on, there has been a requirement to customise the look and feel of the search results page. This makes sense because it would be odd from the user experience for the SharePoint look and feel to change all a sudden when the user decides to search for a keyword.
Here I will try to explain how to create a custom search site template that uses one custom search results layout for all different types of search results. More...