I've mentioned in the past how I run a Windows Server 2003 mail server in order to use the POP3 service for basic e-mail functionality, and that I didn't have any interest in finding an alternative when I discovered POP3 is no longer available in Windows...

In my previous post , I provided an overview of the process of upgrading from TFS 2008 (and Windows SharePoint Services v3) to TFS 2010 (and SharePoint Server 2010). In this post, I provide more details about the upgrade process. Note that if you are...

Hmmm...how should I phrase this? It has been a very educational couple of weeks on my current SharePoint project. During the rebuild of our Test environment, the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard failed when it was unable...

Shortly before I headed out to the airport last Wednesday, I received the fateful email from my customer notifying us that they have decided to abandon using the variations feature in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Note that the original...

If, like me, you happen to encounter the following user experience when attempting to edit a master page... Figure 1: SharePoint Designer - "Error Creating Control" See full-sized image. ...then follow these steps to resolve the issue: ...

Here is yet another of the SQL scripts that I like to keep handy in my toolbox: Count Records in All Tables.sql Sometimes when I get "dropped into" a consulting situation with a new customer, I need to quickly get acquainted with one or more of their...

In an earlier post today, I described how I recently upgraded from Team Foundation Server 2008 (and Windows SharePoint Services v3) to TFS 2010 (and SharePoint Server 2010). While most of the upgrade went fairly smooth, during the process I discovered...

In my previous post , I provided the step-by-step process I use for configuring claims-based authentication in SharePoint Server 2010. If you follow those steps, then when you browse to the home page of the site and click Sign In , you'll be redirected...

This morning I thought I'd share one more very useful PowerShell script for SharePoint Server 2010. When using Central Administration and/or the Farm Configuration Wizard to create and configure the Search Service Application, the resulting databases...

Last summer I wrote a post introducing my simple, but highly effective approach to logging -- including a Logger class that is really just a thin wrapper around the System.Diagnostics.TraceSource class. A few months ago, I enhanced the Logger class...

I was digging through my blog dashboard this morning and I came across this post that I started back in January but apparently never got it past "draft mode." I figured it was time to finish it off. If you've been using Windows SharePoint Services...

Yesterday I introduced the concept of linked files in Visual Studio solutions with a follow-up on my recommendation for configuring a custom dictionary to eliminate CA1704 code analysis warnings. Another practical application of linked files is what...

While cleaning off my Desktop this morning, I came across a file that I created back in December capturing my notes from a problem I was having with Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). Evidently I intended to blog about the issue, but apparently this...

Up until about an hour ago, I'd been using post-build events on my Visual Studio projects to create SharePoint solution packages (WSPs). However, while this worked reasonably well, this method always bothered me a little because the post-build events...

About four years ago, one of the partners that I was working on an engagement with commented on how developers tend to have their own unique way of managing files, but that mine was one of the most bizarre he had ever seen. It has been four years, but...

Several weeks ago, I converted our deployment process to use SharePoint solution packages instead of the batch scripts that we had been using in our Development environment. One of the issues that I discovered along the way is that SharePoint is rather...

In my previous post , I introduced my "TFS Lite" SharePoint site template that I've been using for years as a simple scenario/task/bug/risk/milestone tracking "application" with various projects and customers. In today's post, I'll discuss some of the...

In part 1 of this post, I provided my high-level thoughts on doing Test Driven Development (TDD) in the real world, but I didn't get around to walking through an actual sample.

To start off simple (but still real world), let's imagine we have a scenario where we need to truncate a string to a limited number of characters for display or output purposes. However, instead of just chopping off the string at the specified number of characters, we want to apply a little "intelligence" -- such as trying to break on complete words, and adding an ellipsis (...) to the end.

For example, if we pass in "Some really long string with lots of characters" and specify to truncate the string to 15 characters, then we should get back "Some really...".

[Note that if you are trying to conserve real estate on a Web page, there is actually a much better way of doing this with CSS, so please don't think of this scenario in that context.]

Applying the principles of TDD, we know we should:

1. Write the unit tests first.
2. Add the minimal amount of code necessary to get the unit tests to compile.
3. Run the tests and ensure they fail ("red").
4. Write the code to make the unit tests pass ("green").
5. Repeat steps 1-4 until you consider the feature "done." (Note that you should also consider checking in your code each time you successfully complete step 4.)

So for this simple scenario, what unit test(s) should we write first?

Let's say we want to implement this functionality...

...

In part 1 of this series, I talked about my current customer's decision to abandon the use of the variations feature in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 after we encountered several major issues prior to deployment. The first issue that...

There might be occasions where you need to "decode" the feature GUID in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v3 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. For these (admittedly rare) situations, I have attached an Excel spreadsheet containing the...

Here is another SQL script that I keep handy in my toolbox: Shrink All Database Files.sql . Unlike the script that I shared in my previous post that simply truncated all transaction logs to free up disk space, this script is suitable for running in a...

I came back from a nice long vacation only to find that my local development VM for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 was corrupted. By "corrupted", I mean to say there were lots of errors in the event log about the SharePoint_Config database...

This morning I received an email from a customer inquiring about making it easier for users to determine the unique identifier for each document in a library. Typically, users don't really care about this "List Item ID" for a document, but there are scenarios...

Back in February, Roger Lamb kicked off his MSDN blog with a great post ( SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0 Dispose Patterns by Example ). It provides numerous code samples that demonstrate memory leaks commonly produced when working with the SharePoint object...

Along with my Visual Studio macros for unloading/reloading projects in a solution , another macro that I use just as much, if not more frequently, is my CollapseAllItems() macro: Public Sub CollapseAllItems() Dim solutionExplorer As Window = _...