Trying to test SQL connections from servers that don’t have any SQL tools on them can be a little … awkward. Well, here’s a great tip from Doug Rathbone – Testing connectivity to Microsoft SQL Server without any tools installed.
Too long? Create a .UDL file, and use its property window.
Genius, and simple.
I keep having to look this up, so as a reminder:
<%# Container.ItemIndex %>
… will get the index of the current item in the markup for an ASP:Repeater control.
Sometimes it’s useful to be able to find GUIDs in your project – especially when a previous Sitecore partner has hard-coded GUIDs in various user controls and classes throughout the site.
Anyway, the regex to run in Visual studio is:
[0-9A-F]{8}-[0-9A-F]{4}-[0-9A-F]{4}-[0-9A-F]{4}-[0-9A-F]{12}
Okay, I admit, this made me wildly overexcited. I was asked by a colleague to add Azure App Insights to a Sitecore (i.e. ASP.NET) website we’ve been building. I’d not really heard of it before, other than vaguely for proper ‘Apps’, not websites. However, I added it – and it blew my socks off. Continue reading “Azure App Insights”
God, why is this so difficult? I needed to install the .NET framework 3.5 (for SQL Management Studio, dammit!) on my Windows 8.1 machine. You’re supposed to be able to do this from control panel (Programs and Feature > Turn on Windows Features > .Net 3.5). It didn’t work for me. Continue reading “Installing .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows 8.1”
Until recently, I’d hosted my own WordPress blog. I’d been thinking of moving to one hosted on WordPress.com for a while, but I hadn’t been bothered enough to move – though it would be cheaper.
Then I got hacked. Naturally, I investigated. Continue reading “Observations on hacked website”
In the Windows API the maximum length for a path is 260 characters.
Slightly edited for length, but that comes from MSDN. Yes, it’s 2014, we’ve dealt with the 8.3 filename limit, found the Higgs Boson, landed a fridge on a comet, but the Windows API still doesn’t play well 260 character length file paths. That’s unfortunate. Continue reading “File Path Lengths in Windows”
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”
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!
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”
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