SharePoint vs (?) ASP.NET MVC

2014-09-192014-11-30 Andy Burns.NET, azure, Development, MVC, SP2013 Development4 Comments

I’ve been studying ASP.NET MVC 4 over the last while; this is the subject of second of the 4 exams required for the SharePoint Developer MCSD, and I really need to spend some time on that.

The idea of an MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework is to separate the different concerns of your code, and that usually this allows you to design a data model, and then let your tools create a scaffolding of your site. Such things aren’t new; I implemented a Chinese Chess web site in Ruby on Rails which uses this approach in 2005. I loved the MVC approach. Continue reading “SharePoint vs (?) ASP.NET MVC” →

On the 70-488 – SharePoint Core Solutions Exam

2014-09-162014-11-30 Andy BurnsCertification, SP2013 DevelopmentLeave a comment

No brain-dumps or anything here; if you want the answers, go and study. However, it’s worth knowing about the structure of the exam.

Right, so this is one of the 4 exams you’ll need for the MCSD SharePoint Applications. We decided to fling me at this one without preparation – I’m a SharePoint developer, so shouldn’t I be good at this one without lots of learning?

Continue reading “On the 70-488 – SharePoint Core Solutions Exam” →

Website Bandwidth Usage

2014-09-022014-11-30 Andy Burnsbandwidth, CDN, Coding, Development, jQuery2 Comments

Off topic a little for SharePoint, but we all know the value of a Content Delivery Network (CDN), right? In particular, using services that host commonly used files, like jQuery.js, etc.? This has the advantage that other sites that use that CDN may have already cached that file in your visitor’s browser, but it also reduces the bandwidth used by your site.

Well, I found that my site was spending a lot of bandwidth serving jQuery.

Yup, 10% of my site’s bandwidth was being spent on… serving jQuery. That’s not efficient, so I found this post, which describes how to make the site use a CDN instead. Note that the functions.php file it mentions is the one in your theme.

Hopefully, that’ll reduce the bandwidth used. I also changed the css files for the theme, by minimising them; that should save another 200Mb per month. In total, that should be about a 12% saving on bandwidth.

It’s funny how this all mounts up!

Observations on Office 365 – Part 2

2014-07-082014-11-30 Andy BurnsOffice 365, QueryThrottleException, QueryThrottling5 Comments

Following on from customer related issues in Office 365, there are a number of technology issues that give me concern. I will caveat this that this is based on my last project, and by the time I write this the Office 365 SharePoint platform could have changed to address some of these problems. Continue reading “Observations on Office 365 – Part 2” →

Observations on Office 365 – Part 1

2014-07-042014-11-30 Andy BurnsOffice 365Leave a comment

We recently completed another Office 365 project, and I must confess, I’m still not sure about it. The project was reasonably successful – but there were a lot of tears shed, and we still have issues that are proving alarming difficult to deal with.

Broadly, I think, these issues can be broken down in to two categories – problems with the customer, and problems with the technology. Continue reading “Observations on Office 365 – Part 1” →

My Remote Event Receiver works in Debug, but not when published

2014-02-182014-11-30 Andy BurnsAzure, ProviderHostedApps, RemoteEventReceivers, SharePointAppsLeave a comment

Okay, I had exactly this issue – that my SharePoint App supporting my Remote Event Receivers would work when run under an F5 – debug deploy, but not when published properly. Annoyingly, I’ve found that I have to make a number of changes when moving between a ‘proper’ build, and an F5-deploy; I’ve mentioned those before, but they were turning off the AppUninstalling event, and replacing the ClientId in the app manifest with a *.

However, I’d checked these things, and my code still didn’t work. Continue reading “My Remote Event Receiver works in Debug, but not when published” →

Turn off the Minimum Download Strategy feature in CSOM

2014-02-062014-11-30 Andy BurnsCSOM, MinimumDownloadStrategy, SP2013 DevelopmentLeave a comment

I have found that the Minimum Download Strategy can cause issues with some of the JavaScript/JQuery I used in some of my pages – particularly when using Display Templates. I’m not the only person to have problems with it, either. Well, here’s the CSOM to turn it off:

private static void RemoveMinimalDownload(ClientContext clientContext, Web web)
{
 Guid MDSfeature = new Guid("87294C72-F260-42f3-A41B-981A2FFCE37A");
 FeatureCollection features = web.Features;
 clientContext.Load(features);
 clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
 features.Remove(MDSfeature, true);
 clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
}

Working with fields in CSOM

2014-02-052014-11-30 Andy BurnsCSOM, Indexes, SP2013 Development, SPFieldLeave a comment

I’ve already detailed how to create a new Taxonomy Field in CSOM – here’s the more generic how to create a general field on a list.:

internal static void CreateFields(ClientContext clientContext, List targetList, string xmlDef)
{
 targetList.Fields.AddFieldAsXml(xmlDef, true, AddFieldOptions.AddFieldInternalNameHint);
 clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
}

And as a bonus, here’s how to set a field to be indexed in the client side object model:

internal static void SetIndex(ClientContext clientContext, List list, string fieldName)
{
	Field f = list.Fields.GetByInternalNameOrTitle(fieldName);
	clientContext.Load(f);
	clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
	f.Indexed = true;
	f.Update();
	list.Update();
	clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
}

Upload a File with CSOM

2014-02-032014-11-30 Andy BurnsCSOM, SP2013 Development2 Comments

This is an example of how to upload a file with the C# Client Side Object Model (CSOM):

internal static File UploadFile(ClientContext clientContext, Web web, string filePath, Folder folder, string fileName, string title)
{
 string target = folder.ServerRelativeUrl + "/" + fileName;
FileCreationInformation fci = new FileCreationInformation();
 fci.Overwrite = true;
 fci.Url = target;
 fci.Content = System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes(filePath);
File uploadedFile = folder.Files.Add(fci);
 uploadedFile.ListItemAllFields["Title"] = title;
 uploadedFile.ListItemAllFields.Update();
 clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
if (uploadedFile.CheckOutType != CheckOutType.None)
 {
 uploadedFile.CheckIn("Initial Upload", CheckinType.MajorCheckIn);
 }
 clientContext.Load(uploadedFile);
 clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
 return uploadedFile;
}

Note that this method also lets you set a title for the document, as well as the file name, and it checks the document in for you if required.

What does TaxonomyItem.NormalizeName() do?

2014-02-012014-11-30 Andy BurnsCSOM, SP2010 Development, SP2013 Development, Taxonomy4 Comments

So, the client side application I’ve been working on has to sync a LOT of terms to the term store, and I’ve mentioned how I had problems with Managed Metadata labels and the ampersand – and how I fixed them using TaxonomyItem.NormalizeName().

Well, that was fine, but my application was slow – so I started looking at what I could do to eliminate client side object model calls (CSOM). My suspicion was that, as the function was static, it wasn’t doing anything that I couldn’t do in my application, and save a round trip to the server.

So, I opened up reflected and decompiled Microsoft.SharePoint.Taxonomy.dll. Inside I found the code for the following:

Regex _trimSpacesRegex = new Regex(@"s+", RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
//Normalize name as Taxonomy Service does
string name = _trimSpacesRegex.Replace(termName, " ").Replace('&amp;amp;', 'uff06').Replace('"', 'uff02').Trim();

That’s much, much faster than a round trip to the server, and I learnt that speechmarks are also converted from ASCII to Unicode too.

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