Updating Visual Studio Extensions

By Henning Eiben in .Net 0 Comment

Today I wanted to do some overdue updating of Visual Studio extensions. Among others there where an update of NuGet from version 1.6 to 1.7 and for the Visual Studio Achievements from Version 1.6 to 2.0.

But unfortunatly the updated didn’t work as expected. For the Visual Studio Achievements I got an error, that the digital signature did not match and therefore the update could not be installed. For NuGet the message was different, but with the same result. I just got a message, that the update could not be installed.

Doing some quick google research revealt for NuGet, that problemes during updates are somewhat expected. The recommended solution is to uninstall NuGet and to reinstall the new version of NuGet.

I found however a hotfix for Visual Studio, which is supposed to resolve the update problem with the not matching signatures I encountered with the Visual Studio Achievements. This hotfix actually did resolve the problem for the NuGet update as well 🙂

Populating sharepoint discussion boards using code

By Henning Eiben in .Net 0 Comment

I recently was tasked to import a legacy discussion board into SharePoint 2010. So I wrote a small application, that could dump the old discussions to XML and then import them into SharePoint 2010 using the SharePoint Object model. Nothing more easy than this. A discussion-board is just some kind of list after all.

Well, kinda. If you look closely, you will notice, that discussion-boards differ in some details from regular lists. For one: a discussion-board has threads and replies. The replies can be shown threaded, so I have to maintain which post is a reply to what other post.

SharePoint does some strange stuff to manage this. Each discussion thread is a folder. With this knowledge one might expect to find all replies in this folder, which sound total reasonable to me. But that’s not the SharePoint way. Instead all replies are siblings. Folders are just the SharePoint-way to distinguish threads from replies. I don’t really know how SharePoint manages the reply-hierarchy, but it does work – somehow.

Well, after these discoveries, let’s write some code. I assume the new discussion board already exists and all there is to do is to import the existing posts from the old forum. First I have to create a new thread like this:

var newThread = SPUtility.CreateNewDiscussion(discussionBoard.Items, oldPost.Title);
newThread[SPBuiltInFieldId.Body] = oldPost.Text;
newThread[SPBuiltInFieldId.Created] = FormatDate(oldPost.Date);
string author = CheckUser(oldPost.Creator, web);
newThread[SPBuiltInFieldId.Author] = author;
newThread[SPBuiltInFieldId.Editor] = author;
newThread.Update();

Then I check the oldPost for replies and append them to my newly created thread.

foreach (var oldReply in oldPost.Replies)
{
    var newReply = SPUtility.CreateNewDiscussionReply(newThread);
    string replyAuthor = CheckUser(oldReply.Creator, web);
    newReply[SPBuiltInFieldId.Body] = oldReply.Text;
    newReply[SPBuiltInFieldId.Created] = FormatDate(oldReply.Date);
    newReply[SPBuiltInFieldId.Author] = replyAuthor ;
    newReply[SPBuiltInFieldId.Editor] = replyAuthor ;
    newReply[SPBuiltInFieldId.Title] = oldReply.Title;
    newReply.Update();
    newThread.Update();
}

The replies can be created recursively for replies to replies as well.

This is actually all that is needed. So with some little magic of the SPUtility namespace I was able to import a couple of thousand messages in no time.

Going multi-tenancy with SharePoint 2010

By Henning Eiben in SharePoint 5 Comments

I recently needed to do a multi-tenancy installation of SharePoint 2010 for a customer. I was very impressed by the AutoSPInstaller scripts to do a full install of SharePoint, so I figured: I want to use this!

So I modified the script to handle multi-tenancy installations as well. This was actually not that complicated. I altered the Service-Applications to have an additional attribute “PartitionMode”, which can be true or false. This will trigger the corresponding PowerShell switch for creating the Service-Application.

When doing a multi-tenancy installation I also modified the installation of the root web-application for the hosting as described by Spence Harbar in his Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy.

I also added new Configuration-Elements to setup tenants (aka Subscriptions).

This code was originally based on the 2.5.5 version and was recently re-based to 2.5.7.

The patch can be found on the CodePlex project site.

Google, Ads and opt-out

By Henning Eiben in Internet 0 Comment

Since Google is putting a new Privacy Policy in place by 1st of march I took a more close look at the new policies.

I noticed, that Google is gathering quite some information about what kind of websites I’m visiting. I already noticed this, because recently I was surfing the web on my tablet researching some products and then a while later google would only show me this kind of products on ads. I was at first quite suprised, that Google as well as other sites only had ads for certain products, especially this kind of products I was recently interessted in. I then figured, that this is because of some ad-cookies that where stored on my tablet.

Well, looking at Googles new policies I noticed, that I could deactivate Googles gathering of products and using this information to personalize ads. This can be done via Googles-Settings page.

I also noted, that Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) is offering an opt-out mechanism for various ad-plattforms. So I did opt-out on all my devices from Google as well as NAI.

Besides opt-out I still use plugins such as AdBlock for Google or AdBlock Plus for Firefox. But at least for my tablet and my phone I don’t have such plugins, and I thing opt-out is a valid alternative.