Following is the list of MUST HAVEs if you are developing scripts using PowerShell,- PowerGUI tool - an extensible graphical administrative console and IDE for managing systems based on Windows PowerShell. Mastering PowerShell eBook - Comprehensive...

Recently I was exposed to Powershell for developing scripts to automate deployment steps for SharePoint. I have become a great fan of powershell since then. Once the scripts were ready, the deployment procedure looked awesome. Few hits to the command...

Auditing events is an important feature of SharePoint. Read this article to understand more around the list of events that can be audited when audit logging is enabled. Audit settings can be configured at the site collection level only. The logs are maintained...

A SharePoint farm is an extremely "chatty" environment. A lot of inter server communications keeps on happening all the time. I had been looking for a consolidated list of such things, when I came across this blog of the MCS (U.K) SharePoint Team. This...

While upgrading a SharePoint farm to the December Cumulative update, there was an unprecendented growth of the databse log file for a large content database (size ~200GB) during the upgrade process. The database upgrade was failing as there was no space...

The March 09 issue of MSDN magazine contains a very interesting article on " SharePoint: 10 Best Practices For Building SharePoint Solutions ". This is a must read for all SharePoint developers. It contains a summary of key practices that should be followed...

Recently I was working on ControlAdapters and came across a strange error,- System.Exception: Server could not create <classname> Upon subequent research I figured out that this error will occur when the class is inaccessible. You need explicitly...

Orphaned records can cause a lot of trouble. The content databses should be inspected on a periodic basis to check for orphaned records. The following STSADM command may be used to check for corruption,- stsadm -o databaserepair -url { http://servername...

Prescriptive guidance around the best "design and operational practices" for SharePoint environments is now at Technet . The guidance is based on real-world experience of SharePoint consultants across various customer engagements.

Recently, I came across a scenario where in the "Central Admin" site had become unresponsive. The server might have developed a temporary snag which could have resulted in this. If you would know, during any farm setup, the Central Admin web site is created...

Source code for the Silverlight blueprints for SharePoint which works with Silverlight beta 2 release is now available at CodePlex. Developers can now easily learn to integrate silverlight applications with SharePoint. Refer the following link for...

Let's spread the word of "SharePoint" . There is a whole set of trainings targetted for all kinds of audiences on the various features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Thought of providing a consolidated list for the benefit of one and all...

Ever wondered why the custom properties (such as author, title, subject, etc) associated with a file are automatically picked up during the upload process? This is due to the "Document Property Promotion and Demotion" feature available in SharePoint...

In the case when we need to get the absolute url for any item, we can make use of the instance method SPSite.MakeFullUrl. Example use,- using(SPSite site = new SPSite(mysiteurl)) { using(SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb()) { //.. Other lines of code...

Lot of us might be interested to know the schema information for SharePoint configuration and content databases. Read the documentation here . Warning! Do not modify any of the tables in the database directly. It is strictly not supported by Microsoft...

Just observed that during initiation of SharePoint Disater Recovery Backups (via STSADM or Central Admin), it expects the same amount of free space to be available on the UNC path irrespective of whether you are taking a full or incremental backups. This...

SharePoint best practices analyzer (available for download from here ) is an interesting tool that provides a quick preview of which of the best practices have not been followed in the MOSS environment. It typically executes a set of rules to check the...

If you thought that moving content from one environment to the other using SharePoint backup and restore was as simple as the click of a button, then read this blog to understand why it is not. Due to the differences in the "environmental factors'...

The following code block contains an optimized code for uploading large files (>500 MB) to a SharePoint document library. This code may be used to circumvent Out of Memory exceptions when the process loads the entire file in memory for uploading. ...

Came across a requirement where we needed to hide the "Upload Multiple" toolbar menu item from the default view of document libraries. Observed that using the "HideCustomAction" section in a custom feature file doesn't work for this. Workaround...

Enumerating a SPListItemCollection object should be avoided for data querying purposes. for e.g. in the following code is not optimal, using(SPSite site = new SPSite(siteURL)) { using(SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb()) { SPList tasksList = web.Lists...

For a DEV guy, it is a common phenomenon wherein he ends up saying "this is not supported OOTB". But customers are not happy to hear that. They believe that "software" was meant to solve each and every problem they could have. In an effort to pacify...