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”
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!
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”
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”
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”
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();
}
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();
}
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.
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('&', '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.
Document events are a perennial problem in SharePoint. This is, in part, due to the way documents are put into SharePoint:
So, my problem was that our customer wanted an email sent when a document was first ‘added’ to SharePoint – except that by added they meant “Has been uploaded and it’s metadata completed for the first time”. While SharePoint does, technically, fire the correct events at the correct times, it’s pretty easy to see this ‘business event’ is probably more useful. Continue reading “Remote Event Receivers: Identify when a document's metadata is first completed”
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