John W Powell

Sometimes you need a local copy of an assembly from the GAC and here is a quick tip on how to do it. The GAC can be found in the c:\windows\assembly directory, but if you try to browse it, the following custom shell extension appears: This view...

A common SharePoint customization request is to copy or move items and documents between lists. This can be accomplished without development by creating a workflow using SharePoint Designer (SPD). With this approach, you may encounter issues with list...

Learn Key Bindings It's an obvious and trivial thing, but the timesaving will add up, especially for those actions you perform tens or hundreds of times a day such as building and debugging. Here are some basic bindings every Visual Studio developer...

I recently encountered intermittent 403 Forbidden errors on a Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) site. Most of the site would work, but when users accessed certain functions such as uploading a document or adding calendar items, they would receive a 403...

In this walkthrough, I’ll show you how to create a SharePoint 2010 localized feature using Visual Studio 2010. The basic mechanics of localizing a SharePoint 2010 feature are the same as localizing a SharePoint 2007 feature, and is well documented. If...

If you want to achieve your highest aspirations and overcome your greatest challenges, identify and apply the principle or natural law that governs the results you seek . How we apply a principle will vary greatly and will be determined by our unique...

If you are building or testing SharePoint customizations, you should use virtualization over physical servers. Virtualizing your SharePoint development and test environment has many benefits including easier debugging, the ability to rollback changes...

In this article, I'll show you how to create a reusable service host that can be run from either from the console (self-hosted) or installed as a Windows service. I'll also demonstrate how to use a configuration file instead of code to control which WCF...

If you've ever implemented an interface, you've probably encountered the requirement that the member you are implementing must be public. For example, you cannot define a property in an interface and then make the setter internal as demonstrated by the...

With few exceptions, developers like using the latest tools and technologies, but are often constrained by the development or production environment. There are many reasons organizations are unwilling or slow to adopt new technology, and these can range...

When developing JavaScript solutions, I like to provide a tracing mechanism that can be turned on and off to aid debugging.  The IE Developer Tools, debugger and Fiddler are very robust debugging tools, but they don’t enable client script code to...

In this post, I'll demonstrate sandbox solutions resource quotas and show you what happens when they are exceeded. When sandboxed code executes, certain metrics are collected such as % processor time and # of unhandled exceptions. Timer jobs compile the...

The SharePoint developer community has produced a wealth of knowledge and code samples that demonstrate how to consume SharePoint web services and leverage them in domain-specific applications.  This information is often task-centric, such as ...

In this article, I'll show you how to handle a common scenario when a user leaves the company and returns later. Many organizations delete user accounts after a period of time and when a user returns they often get a new Windows account with the same...

One of the shortcomings of the RSS Viewer web part is that it can only be bound one feed. In this walkthrough, I’ll show you how to make the RSS Viewer web part dynamic with filter web parts and web part connections to enable binding to multiple feeds...

In a previous post I made a case for following a database naming standard for SharePoint databases.  What started as an investigation into how to rename the auto-generated SharePoint 2010 databases led me down a path bordering obsession.  I...

The SharePoint 2010 developer dashboard has three display levels (see SPDeveloperDashboardLevel Enumeration .): Off (default): The dashboard is not displayed, and there is no UI element to turn it on On : The dashboard is displayed, and there...

You don't need a course in advanced calculus to understand Lambda Expressions. In fact, you can learn the basics in 5 minutes or less. To accomplish this, we are going to revise a code snippet for an event handler from .Net 1.1 syntax to a syntactically...

Here is an easy way to search a SharePoint site from the IE toolbar without having to develop a custom add-in. Before showing you how to implement it, let's examine how custom search providers work. How Custom Search Providers Work When you browse...

In this walkthrough, I’ll demonstrate how to achieve automated builds and continuous integration by creating a build script for VSEWSS 1.3 solutions. The patterns and practices SharePoint Guidance (11 drop) contains an example build script that this article...

This article provides a workaround for installing the BizTalk WSS Adapter on MOSS SP1 when you receive the following error: "Make sure the site is extended by Windows SharePoint Services. (CWssAdaCfg), " or "The data is invalid. Click on the error icon...

I like writing code, but I love solving problems using the simplest possible approach even more.  In this article, I’m going to show you how to enable users to zip and download all documents in a document set with no code.  The document set...

In this walkthrough, I'll show you how to import data from a line of business (LOB) system into SharePoint user profiles and make that information searchable. Using this approach, you can leverage information that is stored in other LOB systems and create...

Call me picky, but I think it’s important to consistently name your SharePoint databases—especially on a shared SQL Server hosting multiple farms and applications. Not only is it a good practice, but by showing that you care about the databases, you’ll...

One of the new features of Internet Explorer 8 is Web Slices. This feature enables you to subscribe to a section of a web page and notifies you when the content changes. By design, SharePoint Web Parts are a natural fit for this feature, and in this article...