The other day we made some changes that caused some issues with how one of our web parts was configured. Unfortunately, I hadn’t wrapped the problem in a try/catch and my error blew up the whole page. I’m sure I’m the only one that’s ever done that. So obviously I’ve got some code changes to make, but what do I do in the meantime? Fortunately, there’s some straight forward Powershell that lets you change web part settings (even custom properties like mine).

I found the solution to this over on Aarebrot.net where he was using the technique to change a web part that automatically redirected the user. I’ve just reproduced his code here and added some explanation and background.

When I first went to solve this problem I tried the ?contents=1 querystring trick to pull up the Web Part Administration page. If you’re looking for a quick solution you can add that query string to the end of your page’s URL and then delete the web part from the page and start over. But a more elegant solution is to just change the offending property using some easy Powershell.

Using the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, run the following commands:

$web = Get-SPWeb "http://somedomain.com/sites/someweb"
$page = $web.GetFile("default.aspx")
$page.CheckOut()
$wpm = $web.GetLimitedWebPartManager("default.aspx",[System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.PersonalizationScope]::Shared)
$part = $wpm.WebParts[0]
$part.SomeProperty = "The correct setting!"
$wpm.SaveChanges($part)
$page.CheckIn("Fixed that property")
$page.Publish("Fixed that property")
$web.Close()

What Just Happened?

In line 1 we’re just getting a reference to the web site (SPWeb) where your web part lives using Get-SPWeb. Just replace the URL shown with yours.

Lines 2-3 and 8-9 are only required if the page you’re modifying is on a publishing site or check in/out is required. Feel free to skip these (go directly to line 4) if you’re just editing a simple page. If your page does require check out to be edited, line 2 is simply retrieving the file (SPFile) using the GetFile method using the relative location of the page. Then line 3 calls the CheckOut method which, of course, checks out the file.

In line 4, we’re grabbing a reference to the Web Part Manager for the page (SPLimitedWebPartManager) using the GetLimitedWebPartManager method. Just replace the first parameter with the relative location of your page. The second parameter is the PersonalizationScope enumeration and can be User or Shared. You’re going to want to use Shared to affect everybody. The Web Part Manager object is what lets us get access to all the web parts on the page and screw with em.

In line 5, we grab the web part (WebPart) we want by index using the WebParts collection. In the example above I already knew that the web part I wanted was the first one in the collection. You can also pass the uniqueID property of the web part (instead of the index). You can find out both by simply calling the WebParts collection by itself ($web.WebParts) and everything will get listed to the screen.

To see all the available properties of the web part you can just type ($part) and it will list everything out including any custom properties. Then you can just set them like we do in line 6.

Line 7 uses the Web Part Manager’s SaveChanges method to incorporate all your changes. Lines 8-9 are again only required if your pages library requires check in/out and publishing. If it’s a simple page just skip to line 10. Line 8 uses the CheckIn method which takes a string for a check-in comment. Line 9 uses the Publish method which also takes a string for a comment.

Line 11 just calls the Close method and ensures we clean up all our resources.

That’s it! Now you can wrap that up in a script to loop through multiple pages and change properties on all sorts of web parts or just one-off fix those web parts you might have broken.

Versioning is a great feature in SharePoint but can cause administrators headaches when it comes to something like branding or other resource files. I’ve previously shown you how to automatically publish a major version and to approve documents as your solution deploys. In a perfect world you’ll never touch these files except through your solution.

However, sometimes you’ll need to quickly fix something or tweak something and you end up in a common situation: You can see the change but no one else can. This happens when versioning is turned on and you either haven’t published a major version (versions below 1) or the changes you’ve made are in draft state (ie 1.1 instead of 2.0).

Tracking these down can be frustrating since everything works for those with the right permissions. So here’s a quick view to add to your library to help you identify these problems. We’ll be filtering the library on 2 columns: Approval Status and Checked Out To.

First thing to do is to create a new view (I’ve named mine Unpublished). Choose whatever columns you want but some helpful ones are Type, Name, Modified, Modified By, Checked Out To and Version. You’ll also want to scroll down to the Folders settings and choose Show all items without folders.

You’ll notice that your view is now showing everything in a giant list because we didn’t apply any kind of filter. The reason for this is that the browser based view editor won’t let us select either IsNotNull as our comparison type or the Approval Status column. Fortunately, both of these things can be done very easily in SharePoint Designer. So switch to the Library ribbon and choose Modify in SharePoint Designer (Advanced) from the Modify View dropdown.

In the Code view just paste the following into your View’s XML inside the Query element:

<Where>
	<Or>
		<Eq>
			<FieldRef Name="_ModerationStatus"/>
			<Value Type="ModStat">Draft</Value>
		</Eq>
		<IsNotNull>
			<FieldRef Name="CheckoutUser"/>
		</IsNotNull>
	</Or>
</Where>

Things should look similar to this:

What our view is doing is showing any files that are checked out (so the CheckoutUser column is not blank) or that don’t have a major version. For whatever reason Microsoft won’t give you easy access to the _ModerationStatus column unless your library is requiring approvals, but we can still use it. When it’s set to Draft then it’s a minor version.

Save and refresh in the browser and you should only see those documents that may be causing you problems. Check them in or Publish a Major Version as needed and things should be good. We’ve found this simple view to be very helpful, hopefully you do as well.

Editing the Filter Category Definition of a Refinement Panel web part can make your search result pages so much better. This is one of the first things we customize and every time we do, I get tripped up by a really annoying setting in the web part.

Problem Scenario

I replace the XML in the Filter Category Definition property in the Refinement properties section of the web part. I hit Apply and everything validates. I save the page and run the results – No custom refinements! In fact, when I open the web part back up for editing, my custom Filter Category Definition is totally wiped out! Why isn’t it saving!?!?!?! Why am I weeping ever so softly?!?!! Why would I confess that on the internets?!?!?!?!

Solution

There’s a checkbox at the bottom of the Refinement properties section labeled, Use Default Configuration. This is checked by default. Unless you uncheck this when you place your custom XML in the property, it is going to completely ignore you and replace it with the default XML.

I can see why things work this way, but it is extremely unintuitive. It would seem that the web part should recognize there is custom XML in the Filter Category Definition and understand that’s what it should use. Then a button (NOT a checkbox) that says something along the lines of “Revert to Default Configuration” would be used to reset that XML when needed.

Oh well, nobody is asking my opinion anyway. So do yourself a favor and remember to uncheck that box whenever customizing the Filter Category Definition.

We ran into an interesting problem the other day where a user called and said that everytime they clicked the Add New Document link they got a giant error message. I went to the site and was able to confirm that it was indeed blowing up.

This was only happening when the document library was being exposed through a web part on another page. Going directly to the library and clicking New Document or Upload Document in the ribbon worked just fine. The problem was obviously with the web part toolbar, which in this case was set to Summary Toolbar.

It appears this is something left over from our upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. I would’ve thought the Visual Upgrade would have fixed this and it’s amazing no one noticed for well over a year! It seems that Microsoft changed not only the look of the link (switching the icon from a little square to a green plus and removing the word new) the underlying address also changed.

Broken Old Style Link

Correct Style Link

Taking a look at where these links were pointed, I could see that the old style link was pointed at listform.aspx:

/_Layouts/listform.aspx?PageType=8&ListId={LISTGUID}?RootFolder=

While the new style link was pointed at Upload.aspx:

/_layouts/Upload.aspx?List=LISTGUID&RootFolder

Fixing this is pretty easy. Just edit the web part and change the Toolbar Type to No Toolbar and click Apply:

Then immediately switch the Toolbar Type back to Summary Toolbar and press OK:

Interestingly, other web parts sometimes show the old style link too (links, announcements, etc.) but since these all seem to still use the listform.aspx they continue to work. However, you can use the above technique to get them to match visually as well (green plus icon).

Every list in SharePoint automatically comes with two date columns (Created & Modified). Often times other date columns get added in there and it can be nice to format these to make the lists more intuitive. Out of the box you can format these a few different ways (mostly whether to show the time or not). With a little XSL you can use the ddwrt:formatdatetime function to really customize things (you’ll see a couple of examples of this below) - but can’t we do more?

Large lists of data (whether they are numbers, statuses, dates, etc.) can be overwhelming. One of the greatest improvements we can make is to provide visual clues or analysis on this data to help end-users understand what they are looking at. When it comes to dates, what most people really want to know is what that date means relative to now. This is especially true when it comes to Due Dates such as seen in a Tasks list:

We’ve greatly improved the readability of this list with some quick icons as demonstrated in my previous post: Showing Icons in a List View, but those due dates don’t really mean much at quick glance. We can do a couple of things to make these instantly understandable. We can add some color to indicate when the due date is near and/or missed. Even more powerful is showing how much time is left until the Due Date.

Adding Some Color

Flagging these dates with some quick color is pretty straightforward using SharePoint Designer. Designer will be generating some XSL and we’ll take a look at it at the end of this section, but we’ll be using the wizards and so no knowledge of XSL will be needed.

Open the site in SharePoint Designer (Site Actions > Edit in SharePoint Designer) and browse to the page/view you want to edit, or if this is a specific view just choose the Modify View dropdown and select Modify in SharePoint Designer (Advanced):

In Design view, click on one of the date values in the list and choose Format Column in the Conditional Formatting dropdown on the Options tab in the ribbon:

Our goal is to turn the cell red if the due date has passed; So in the Condition Criteria dialog set Field Name to Due Date, the Comparison to Less Than and the Value should remain the default of [Current Date]. Then press the Set Style button:

This formula reads: if the Due Date is older than (less) than now, set this style. We’re now setting up that style in the Modify Style dialog. In the Font category set the font-weight to bold (I’m also setting the color to Black since the default theme’s grayish font color doesn’t look great with a red background). Switch to the Background category and select a shade of red for the background-color and press OK:

I also like to provide a little warning before things get past due; So let’s make things turn yellow on the Due Date. So again, click on one of the date values in the list and choose Format Column in the Conditional Formatting dropdown on the Options tab in the ribbon. In the Condition Criteria dialog set Field Name to Due Date, the Comparison to Equal and the Value should remain the default of [Current Date]. Then press the Set Style button:

This formula reads: if the Due Date is today, set this style. We’re now setting up that style in the Modify Style dialog. In the Font category set the font-weight to bold (I’m also setting the color to Black since the default theme’s grayish font color doesn’t look great with the yellow background either). Switch to the Background category and select a shade of yellow for the background-color and press OK:

Save the view in Designer and refresh the view in the browser and you should see something similar to this (The date this screenshot was taken was 2/7/2013):

For those that are interested, here’s the XSL that designer generated:

<xsl:attribute name="style">
	<xsl:if test="ddwrt:DateTimeTick(ddwrt:GenDisplayName(string($thisNode/@DueDate))) &lt; ddwrt:DateTimeTick(ddwrt:GenDisplayName(string($Today)))"
	 ddwrt:cf_explicit="1">
		font-weight: bold; background-color: #DF1515; color: #000000;
	</xsl:if>
	<xsl:if test="ddwrt:DateTimeTick(ddwrt:GenDisplayName(string($thisNode/@DueDate))) = ddwrt:DateTimeTick(ddwrt:GenDisplayName(string($Today)))"
	 ddwrt:cf_explicit="1">
		font-weight: bold; color: #000000; background-color: #FAE032;
	</xsl:if>
</xsl:attribute>

Relative Dates

With Due Dates there are 2 things you want to know: which ones have been missed and how much time is left. Quick color indicators are very effective in drawing the eye to important information and the red and yellow rules we put in place above help quickly answer the first question.

So how do we communicate how much time is left? Calculated columns are no help here (you can’t use Today and even when you hack it, they only get evaluated on modifications, NOT on view). The answer is some XSL tweaking. We won’t be using the same wizard-like interface as above, but I promise the type of XSL we’re going to be doing isn’t too scary.

The first thing we need to do is add some XSL templates to help us perform some basic date calculations. The easiest way is to use Andy Lewis’ DateTemplates. We’re going to pull out the needed templates and paste them directly into our XSL (since I’ve had a lot of trouble referencing external XSL when using Designer). Here’s the templates we want:

<xsl:template name="getDayDelta">
	<xsl:param name="paramDateA"/>
	<xsl:param name="paramDateB"/>
	<xsl:variable name="dateADays">
		<xsl:call-template name="countDaysInDateWithLeapYearDays">
			<xsl:with-param name="paramDate" select="$paramDateA"/>
		</xsl:call-template>
	</xsl:variable>
	<xsl:variable name="dateBDays">
		<xsl:call-template name="countDaysInDateWithLeapYearDays">
			<xsl:with-param name="paramDate" select="$paramDateB"/>
		</xsl:call-template>
	</xsl:variable>
	<xsl:value-of select="number($dateADays) - number($dateBDays)"/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="countDaysInDateWithLeapYearDays">
	<xsl:param name="paramDate"/>
	<xsl:variable name="year" select="substring-before($paramDate,'-')"/>
	<xsl:variable name="month" select="substring(substring-after($paramDate,'-'),1,2)"/>
	<xsl:variable name="day" select="substring(substring-after(substring-after($paramDate,'-'),'-'),1,2)"/>
	<xsl:variable name="rawYearDays" select="number($year) * 365"/>
	<xsl:variable name="rawLeapYears" select="floor($year div 4)"/>
	<xsl:variable name="centurySpan" select="floor($year div 100)"/>
	<xsl:variable name="fourCenturySpan" select="floor($year div 400)"/>
	<xsl:variable name="boolYearLeap">
		<xsl:call-template name="isLeapYear">
			<xsl:with-param name="paramYear" select="$year"/>
		</xsl:call-template>
	</xsl:variable>
	<xsl:variable name="yearLeapAdjust">
		<xsl:choose>
			<xsl:when test="$boolYearLeap = 1 and (($month = 1) or ($month = 2 and $day != 29))">-1</xsl:when>
			<xsl:otherwise>0</xsl:otherwise>
		</xsl:choose>
	</xsl:variable>
	<xsl:variable name="yearDays" select="$rawYearDays + $rawLeapYears - $centurySpan + $fourCenturySpan + $yearLeapAdjust "/>
	<xsl:variable name="monthDays">
		<xsl:call-template name="ConvertMonthToTotalDays">
			<xsl:with-param name="paramMonth" select="$month"/>
		</xsl:call-template>
	</xsl:variable>
	<xsl:variable name="totalDays" select="$yearDays + number($monthDays) + number($day)"/>
	<xsl:value-of select="$totalDays"/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="isLeapYear">
	<xsl:param name="paramYear"/>
	<xsl:choose>
		<xsl:when test="$paramYear mod 4 = 0 and ($paramYear mod 100 != 0) or ($paramYear mod 400 = 0)">1</xsl:when>
		<xsl:otherwise>0</xsl:otherwise>
	</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="ConvertMonthToTotalDays">
	<xsl:param name="paramMonth"/>
	<xsl:choose>
		<xsl:when test="$paramMonth=01">0</xsl:when>
		<xsl:when test="$paramMonth=02">31</xsl:when>
		<xsl:when test="$paramMonth=03">59</xsl:when>
		<xsl:when test="$paramMonth=04">90</xsl:when>
		<xsl:when test="$paramMonth=05">120</xsl:when>
		<xsl:when test="$paramMonth=06">151</xsl:when>
		<xsl:when test="$paramMonth=07">181</xsl:when>
		<xsl:when test="$paramMonth=08">212</xsl:when>
		<xsl:when test="$paramMonth=09">243</xsl:when>
		<xsl:when test="$paramMonth=10">273</xsl:when>
		<xsl:when test="$paramMonth=11">304</xsl:when>
		<xsl:when test="$paramMonth=12">334</xsl:when>
	</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

There are several templates above. We’re only going to call the getDayDelta function (it calls all the others). Copy the above XSL and in the Code view for your view of SharePoint Designer find the <Xsl> element. Skip a few lines down just past the last <xsl:param> element and paste the above. It should look something like this:

Just putting these templates in the XSL doesn’t actually do anything yet. So switch to the Split view and select one of the Due Date values. The corresponding XSL should be highlighted in the code section:

Replace the highlighted section from above with the following:

<xsl:variable name="DateDueDayDelta">
	<xsl:call-template name="getDayDelta">
		<xsl:with-param name="paramDateA" select="ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string($thisNode/@*[name()=current()/@Name]),1033,'yyyy-MM-dd')"/>
		<xsl:with-param name="paramDateB" select="ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(ddwrt:Today()),1033,'yyyy-MM-dd')"/>
	</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:variable>

<xsl:choose>
	<xsl:when test="$DateDueDayDelta=0">
		<xsl:text>Today</xsl:text>
	</xsl:when>
	<xsl:when test="$DateDueDayDelta=1">
		<xsl:text>1 Day</xsl:text>
	</xsl:when>
	<xsl:when test="$DateDueDayDelta=-1">
		<xsl:text>Yesterday!</xsl:text>
	</xsl:when>
	<xsl:when test="$DateDueDayDelta&lt;-1">
		<xsl:value-of select="concat($DateDueDayDelta,' Days!')"/>
	</xsl:when>
	<xsl:when test="$DateDueDayDelta&gt;1">
		<xsl:value-of select="concat($DateDueDayDelta,' Days')"/>
	</xsl:when>
</xsl:choose>

In lines 1-6 we’re calling the getDayDelta function from the DateTemplates and storing the value in a new variable called DateDueDayDelta. This value is the number of days between the first parameter, Due Date, and the second parameter, Today. We’re using the ddwrt:FormatDateTime function to ensure the parameters are in the form expected by the template. We’re also using the ddwrt:Today() function to get the current date.

Lines 8-24 is an XSL switch statement. We’re using it to give friendly text based on the number of days between. If the dates are the same, then we print “Today“. If the Due Date is still 1 day in the future, we print “1 Day“. If the Due Date is 1 day in the past (-1), we print “Yesterday!“. If the Due Date is even further in the past (< -1), we print “# Days!“. If the Due Date is more than a day away (> 1), we print “# Days“. This will probably make more sense if you just save the view and refresh it in the browser:

WOO HOO! That’s a huge improvement – but it could be better. Although I think it makes more sense to see the dates as relative for quickly glancing at the list, I don’t like losing that information altogether. So let’s put it back in as a tooltip.

In the code view, right above where you pasted the <xsl:variable> element, paste the following:

<span>
	<xsl:attribute name="title">
		<xsl:value-of select="ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string($thisNode/@DueDate),1033,'dddd, M/d/yy ')"/>
	</xsl:attribute>

Then scroll down to the closing <xsl:choose> element and close the <span> tag. Altogether, things should look similar to this:

We just wrapped everything in a span so that we could set the title attribute (tooltip). We are again using the ddwrt:FormatDateTime function so that we can format the Due Date to show not just the date but the day of the week as well since this really helps people visualize the date when a calendar isn’t available. Save the view, refresh it in the browser and you should have something like this (The date this screenshot was taken was 2/7/2013):

You can quickly see how stacking these techniques can start to make lists much more intuitive and useful. WOWEE!

Displaying icons in a list view is a great way to make things immediately more understandable, look awesome and make things oh so pretty. It’s a pretty common request and there are some interesting methods out there to get it done. There’s everything from deployed solutions to give you specialized columns to throwing some magical jQuery on the page. I personally prefer to keep things simple with some quick use of conditional formatting in SharePoint Designer.

Technically this solution uses some XSL which I’ll show you at the end, but you don’t need to know anything about that to get it to work. A good example of a list this works really well for is a Task list. I most often show icons based on Choice columns (since there’s a nice one-to-one mapping between icon and choice value), but you can easily adapt this solution to apply icons based off of other calculations or combination of columns (for instance, showing a frowny face when a due date has been missed and the status is not completed).

Here’s the standard Tasks list that we’re going to iconize:

Right away you’ll notice there’s at least 2 easy targets for icons. Both the Status and the Priority columns would really get a big upgrade if turned into icons.

You can put your icons wherever you want, but the easiest place is going to be a picture library right on the site. So create a new picture library called Icons (Site Actions > More Options > Library > Picture Library):

Head to the Icons library you just added and upload some icons. We’re going to upload 5 status icons and 3 priority icons. They should all be the same size (16×16 works well, but I’ll leave that up to you). There’s plenty of great icon sets out there (famfamfam and all it’s varients work very well). I’ll be using icons from the Fugue Icons collection since they look nice, there’s tons of them and they’re free:

Now that the icons are uploaded, it’ll be easy to select them in Designer (You can also have designer upload them directly from your computer while you’re working but there is a bug that sometimes keeps the path relative to your machine rather than the picture library).

Open the site in SharePoint Designer (Site Actions > Edit in SharePoint Designer) and browse to the page/view you want to edit, or if this is a specific view just choose the Modify View dropdown and select Modify in SharePoint Designer (Advanced):

The basic steps we are going to perform 8 times (one for each image):

1. In Design view click in one of the cells for the column we are iconizing (Status or Priority)
2. On the Insert tab in the ribbon, choose Picture:
   
   
   
3. Choose the Icons library (double-click), and pick the appropriate icon image:
   
4. Fill out the Accessibility Properties dialog with the appropriate information:
   
5. With the new icon selected, type the value in the title field of the Tag Properties window (This will be the tooltip):
6. With the new image still selected, choose Hide Content in the Conditional Formatting dropdown in the Options tab on the ribbon:
   
7. In the Condition Criteria dialog, select the Field Name as the column, the Comparison as Not Equal and the Value to the value the icon should represent. This basically says when the value of this field isn’t the value this icon is meant for, then don’t show this icon:
   
8. Repeat for all remaining icons

Once you save in SharePoint Designer you should see something like this on the page (after a refresh of course):

That’s it, so super pretty! I’d recommend taking the actual text values away (you’ve got them in the tooltip) or at least adding some spacing.

For those that are interested, what designer’s really doing is generating some XSL templates for you. It’s the equivalent of choosing Customize Item in the Customize XSLT dropdown on the Design tab and adding some extra XSL. The XSL we’re talking about is a simple <xsl:if> element with the <img> tag inside. For instance the Completed Status icon looks like this in XSL:

<xsl:if test="not(normalize-space($thisNode/@Status) != 'Completed')"
  ddwrt:cf_explicit="1">
  	<img alt="Complete" longdesc="Complete"
  	  src="../../Icons/StatusCompleted.png" width="16" height="16"
  	  title="Complete" />
</xsl:if>

XSL isn’t nearly as scary as it seems, but Designer does a pretty good job of wrapping up a lot of basic formatting and conditional checks with some nice wizards – so why not use them?

In SharePoint 2010 the standard listviewwebpart adds a checkbox to the left of each row. These only show up on hover and when you check the box the entire row is highlighted. You can check multiple boxes (or even use the helpful checkbox up top to select/unselect them all at once). This allows you to perform the same action on the selected item(s) using the ribbon.

Generally, this is a good feature. However, not everybody agrees. If you’re doing some customization and you don’t want them to show up, you can do it through CSS. Although this is the technique I previously used, I ran across a post by Glyn Clough that made me face palm. I’ll leave the CSS technique in case it helps somebody and since I can think of at least one or two reasons you might want it (simple removal of all select boxes across an entire site or keeping the selection logic without the boxes) but if you want the simple answer just skip right to that solution.

CSS

If you’re deploying a branding solution or already using a custom style sheet just add the following:

.s4-itm-hover .s4-itm-cbx,
.ms-itmhover:hover .s4-itm-cbx,
.s4-itm-selected .s4-itm-cbx,
.ms-inlineEditLink .s4-itm-inlineedit,
.ms-itmhover:hover .s4-itm-inlineedit,
.s4-itm-hover .s4-itm-inlineedit,
.s4-itm-selected .s4-itm-inlineedit
{
    position: relative;
    top: 0;
    display:none;
    visibility:hidden;
    width:0px;
}

Bam! no more selection boxes! However, I’ve got no clue why you would want to hide those for an entire site. More likely you want to hide these from a specific list view or page. To do this you can slap a content editor web part on the page(Edit Page, Add a Web Part, Media and Content > Content Editor) and click inside it. Then choose the HTML drop down and pick Edit HTML Source:

Then paste this inside there:

<style>
.s4-itm-hover .s4-itm-cbx,
.ms-itmhover:hover .s4-itm-cbx,
.s4-itm-selected .s4-itm-cbx,
.ms-inlineEditLink .s4-itm-inlineedit,
.ms-itmhover:hover .s4-itm-inlineedit,
.s4-itm-hover .s4-itm-inlineedit,
.s4-itm-selected .s4-itm-inlineedit {
    position: relative;
    top: 0;
    display:none;
    visibility:hidden;
    width:0px;
}
</style>

Save the page and you should see that all the list views on the page no longer have the selection box (although you can still click on the item(s) and get selection and multiselection):

So what about that Select All box up there? Why you want to break all the interfaces!?!

Unfortunately this isn’t as straight-forward. Microsoft did provide a convenient class for the checkbox: s4-selectAllCbx. However, until you hover over the web part, that class is not applied to the input control – Very strange. So applying some styles to that class will only take effect after someone has hovered over the part.

If you really want to do this with CSS you can add an additional selector to the above styles to get this (the key is that last selector .ms-vh-icon input):

<style>
.s4-itm-hover .s4-itm-cbx,
.ms-itmhover:hover .s4-itm-cbx,
.s4-itm-selected .s4-itm-cbx,
.ms-inlineEditLink .s4-itm-inlineedit,
.ms-itmhover:hover .s4-itm-inlineedit,
.s4-itm-hover .s4-itm-inlineedit,
.s4-itm-selected .s4-itm-inlineedit,
.ms-vh-icon input {
    position: relative;
    top: 0;
    display:none;
    visibility:hidden;
    width:0px;
}</style>

This hides them all but doesn’t shrink the column. There’s probably a CSS way to do that too, but honestly let’s just use the setting below.

The Real Solution

So everything above has been overkill. I remember looking for a simple setting to turn those boxes off and not finding it. I can’t be the only one since you’re reading this article – but it doesn’t get much easier than this.

Just edit the view (either the view used by the web part or an actual view on the list) and scroll down to the Tabular View section and uncheck the box next to Allow individual item checkboxes:

Click OK and now those checkboxes are removed! Unfortunately so is all selection and multi-selection. So if you have some strange need to keep the selection but remove the boxes, see the CSS solution above. If you just wanted to remove them altogether, remember to always look at the settings!

If you take a look at the XML generated for the view you’ll see that all this is doing is adding a TabularView attribute to your View element and setting it to FALSE.

I love going to the movies. I enjoy going with friends, but going by myself is fine too. I find it relaxing and fun. So this past year I challenged myself to go to the movies 100 times.

For those of you with quick math skills you’ll realize that’s nearly 2 a week. Unfortunately, I really slacked off on my goal for the first 7-8 months of the year and so I spent a lot of time at the movies in the past few months. It was awesome.

This post is not going to have any technical content like most of my posts, but it’s my blog so… Oh well! Now for all my lists!

The Movies

Here’s the full list of the movies I saw in theatre last year in the order I saw them:

Top 10

10. Lincoln

Daniel Day-Lewis was fantastic in this movie and so was the rest of the cast. I enjoyed this movie but probably not as much as everyone else. I thought it was a very interesting peek into a portion of Lincoln’s presidency but I found it strange that the Vampire Hunter movie covered more of his life. In fact, this movie didn’t show him cut the head off a vampire with an ax even once! Sure the 13th amendment was important, but to forget his courageous fight against those who lust for blood is to misunderstand and misrepresent a truly great man!

9. Cloud Atlas

I have no idea what this movie was about – but it sure was entertaining! It nearly gave me toxic shock syndrome since I didn’t want to go the bathroom in case they finally revealed the point of the movie (SPOILER: They don’t). I saw this movie a second time sure that I would figure it out; Nope. But it still makes my list because Tom Hanks, spaceships, cannibals, Tom Hanks, clone murder, Hallie Berry as an old Korean doctor, explosions, etc!

8. Celeste & Jesse Forever

I have no idea why this movie got such a limited release (less than 600 screens at it’s peak and only 4 opening weekend). It had pretty big names (Andy Samberg, Rashida Jones, Elijah Wood, etc.) and was a romantic comedy. Not only that, it was really funny and surprisingly touching. Rashida Jones deserved an Oscar nomination for both her script and her performance. You probably haven’t seen it so do yourself a favor and pick it up at Redbox sometime.

7. Brave

I love almost everything Pixar does (let’s pretend the Cars franchise doesn’t exist). They are funny without resorting to inappropriate adult jokes (I’m looking at you, Shrek), the animation is beautiful and the story is generally surprising or at least very well done (Bug’s Life = 3 Amigos, Cars = Doc Hollywood, Toy Story 3 = Brave Little Toaster, Your Mind = Blown). Brave was no exception. The characters were great and I was impressed that they had a Disney Princess who didn’t want to wear dresses all day and find herself a man! Good thing all the toys have her wearing the dress she hated and present her as a girly princess. So ignore the toys and go buy the movie.

6. Looper

Besides some pretty big plot holes (that some nerd can probably talk his way through), this was a cool, well done sci-fi movie. I especially liked watching that guy from There Will Be Blood get killed again. He’s probably a nice guy and he’s a good actor, but his character in There Will Be Blood was so awful I wouldn’t mind if every character he plays gets killed too. In fact, a There Will Be Blood/Looper mash-up movie would be awesome! “I drink my own future self’s milkshake! This makes no sense!”

5. The Muppets

This was technically released in 2011, but I didn’t see it until 2012 so it counts. I love the Muppets and this was probably their greatest movie. It had one of the best songs ever (Man or Muppet), a sing along by Chris Cooper, and the Muppets. Can’t ask for much more.

4. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

This movie started a little slowly, had some weird dwarf singalongs and a guy who lets a bird poop all over his face. Despite all that, I thought this movie was just as good, and in some ways better than, The Fellowship of the Ring. Don’t believe me? Try watching that one again and see if you can stand it when Frodo tries to have any emotional depth. This movie was full of adventure, there was sword fighting, epic battles, and British Jim from the office was able to pull off a great impression of the Bilbo Baggins from LOTRs while actually making him likable.

3. Moonrise Kingdom

Great performances, great script and Wes Anderson was at his most Wes Andersonny. I could have done without the middle school girl in a bra getting felt up scene, but I still liked this quirky movie. The movie was really funny and if you liked any of his other films (especially Fantastic Mr. Fox or The Darjeeling Limited) you’ll really like this one. If you thought The Guilt Trip was the height of hilarity: steer clear.

2. Beasts of the Southern Wild

I knew nothing about this movie going in, I just knew I needed to see another movie but was very pleasantly surprised. This story was fascinating and I might have cried a little, maybe. Quvenzhané Wallis was only 5 but gave one of the best performances I saw all year and I hope she wins Best Supporting Actress (although she was clearly the lead). It’s a little artsy at times but the story is so interesting and the characters so different than anything I’ve seen in a long time, that it’s totally worth it.

1. Django Unchained

I like Quentin Tarantino films but am not a die hard fan like some. Regardless, this was probably his masterpiece and was the best film I saw all year. I saw it twice and am planning on seeing it a couple more times. It’s extremely bloody, there’s some awkward nudity, some very hard to watch scenes, etc. But taken all together it’s a great film. Tarantino soundtrack’s are generally pretty good, but this one is especially awesome. It ranges from cowboy songs to rap but they’re all good and placed very well in the film. The performances were all great, but Leonardo DiCaprio as Calvin Candie was a thing to see. I’m still shocked he wasn’t nominated for an oscar – especially if they’re going to nominate Bradley Cooper for Silver Linings Playbook instead! If you haven’t seen it in theatre, get to it before it’s gone! You can still watch it at home, but you need to experience random white people awkwardly laughing at inappropriate times.

Worst 10

10. The Woman in Black

Some lady dies and sad lawyer Harry Potter has to go take care of her estate because he’s so sad that he will be fired for all of his sadness if he doesn’t. He goes to the creepy house and then kids die. Turns out some kid died and his dead mother is really mad; so now she makes kids kill themselves and she totally wears black all the time! But she can only do this if the dude that goes to her house (Harry Potter) looks at the kids. So then they dig up some dead kid, cause she obviously likes dead kids, but she’s still angry and kills some more kids. Then the guy behind me takes a phone call during the last 2 minutes to talk about his truck maintenance.  Unfortunately, the truck maintenance may have been the highlight.

9. 7 Psychopaths

Acting was terrible, story was terrible, and the whole thing was like an inside joke for screen writers. I did, however, get a promotional dog with a bloody paw that was pretty cool. I like to throw it at coworkers and shout “Bloody Puppy!” – So there’s that.

8. War Horse

Boy loves horse. Dad is a drunken idiot and buys the horse then tries to kill the horse. That horse is good at plowing – ship it to war! Everybody that comes into contact with horse must die. Seriously, war heroes, multiple children, bad guys, and even other horses! Boy who loves horses gets everybody around him killed too then finds his horse during the battle – despite temporary blindness, cause that’s real love. Hugs for everyone! Unless you’re dead! Bottom Line: This was a Romantic Comedy about Boy/Horse love that replaces comedy with death. If you are not a boy who loves a horse or a horse that loves a boy, nothing can save you.

7. Wrath of the Titans

To be honest, I knew what I was getting into. I’d seen the first one and yet I still had hope that they would find a way to make it better. Instead they decided on this strategy: “Viewers like CGI, let’s give them viewers some CGI! Money!!!” I have nothing against CGI, but you also need a couple of other things like plot, acting, etc. To be fair, I fell asleep a little bit and probably missed the really good scenes (right?). What’s really sad is that I’ll probably still show up for the third one. Le Sigh.

6. Holy Motors

I’m sure if I was more cultured I would have liked this film more (just kidding, I’m extremely cultured). But I left the theatre wondering what the heck I just saw. A dude drives around the city taking people’s places as they die. Somehow this involves weird latex sex performance capture, graphic leprechaun erections and talking limos. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of boring, drawn out craziness between to ensure you have no idea why this movie is happening to you.

5. Project X

We went to Project X knowing very little. My friend thought it was some kind of spy movie and all I knew was that it was “Super Bad on Crack” and produced by the same guy that brought us Hangover. So when it turns out to be another highschoolers-plan-a-party-that-goes-crazy movie, we were more than a little disappointed. Turns out that whole Super Bad comparison must have been taken out of context because it was indeed “super bad” and you would need to be “on crack” to enjoy it. It was so bad they should have named it Project Awful (Oh Snap! High-fives all around!!!).

4. The Raven

“Everybody liked Sherlock Holmes! Edgar Allan Poe was a detective too, right? Let’s go after fans of pretentious literary references who also love extreme gore and action! They exist, right?” said someone who makes far too much money.

3. Silent Hill: Revelation

John Snow and his father, Eddard Stark, in a video game based movie with Pan’s Labyrinth graphics!?! So much potential thrown away. I am one of the 4 people who saw this movie and we were all disappointed.

2. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

I have no words. I’m most disappointed in myself for having stayed until the very end.

1. Branded

An open letter to those responsible for Branded: Die in a fire.

Biggest Surprises

• Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Cabin in the Woods
• 21 Jump Street
• Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
• Celeste and Jesse
• Argo
• Anna Karenina – I ended up really liking both the music and the play style scene changes

Most Disappointing

• Dark Knight Rises – Why does the third superhero movie always have to be awful?
• Taken 2 – This was a near perfect example of filmakers not understanding their first success
• War Horse – Guy on a Buffalo was better done
• Spider-man – Who thought Spiderman needed more angst?
• Les Misérables – Besides Anne Hathaway’s one song, I’d take Liam Neeson’s version any day

Best Performances

• Leonardo DiCaprio – Django Unchained
• Tilda Swinton – We Need to Talk About Kevin
• Rashida Jones – Celeste & Jesse Forever
• Quvenzhané Wallis – Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Christoph Waltz – Django Unchained
• Daniel Day-Lewis – Lincoln
• Tom Hanks – Cloud Atlas
• Marion Cotillard – The Dark Knight Rises (haha, nope.)

Quick reminder – My opinions are my own and are probably not shared by my employer, my family, my pets, your pets, myself, etc., etc.

I try and keep things safe by using a separate admin account for when I need special access in SharePoint. This really helps with testing as well. By having a separate account as the Site Collection Administrator I’m able to move my regular account around in the SP groups to test permissions.

I highly recommend doing this. It ensures that you can see sites you are working on as an end user will, while still providing you an account that can do all the things you as an administrator need to do. I often will be working on the site using my admin account and when I’m ready to test the permissions with my regular account I simply start a new session in IE (File > New Session). This allows me to have an IE window on each monitor using totally different sessions at the same time.

If you don’t see the File menu, just press Alt.

Generally when I’m editing a site in SharePoint Designer 2010 I’m prompted for credentials since only my admin account has enough access (Designer or above) and I’m logged into my machine with my regular account. This works great. But what happens when my regular account has enough permissions to use SharePoint Designer? Or maybe I’ve got some other account I need to switch to?

By default, SharePoint Designer will only prompt you for credentials to a site if the user you are running as doesn’t have adequate permission. For whatever reason the “hold shift and right-click on the shortcut to choose Run As…” option isn’t available in Windows 7 for SharePoint Designer 2010. You can find some advice about creating batch scripts to get around this, but there’s a really simple solution to the problem.

Unfortunately, Microsoft made it a really hard option to find. Once you know about it it’s incredibly easy and you’ll probably feel stupid for having Googled it and read a blog post about it, but it is not intuitive and they chose a poor location for it. To login as a different user in SharePoint Designer 2010:

1. Open the site (this will use your default credentials)
2. Click the tiny little user icon in the bottom left corner:

3. Press OK in the confirmation dialog:

4. Type in your new credentials in the Windows Security prompt:

5. Everything will close and open again using the newly specified credentials.
6. Don’t tell any of your coworkers that you had to find this solution on the internet. Just show them the button and make them feel stupid for not having known about it.
7. Hop on your flame covered Harley and kick a puppy as you ride off into the sunset.

I just got back from DevConnections 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada. I learned several things that the made the trip worthwhile and I’m glad I got to be a part of it. I choose DevConnections over SPC because I wanted to take workshops from a variety of tracks including SQL, .NET and HTML5. Choosing DevConnections also meant I didn’t have to go alone.

There were several good speakers and I received plenty of swag (8+ T-Shirts, an RC helicopter, a book and more). Not surprisingly, I enjoyed the SharePoint Connections track the most and Dan Holme was my favorite speaker.

For all those that didn’t get to go I thought I’d share my notes from the sessions I attended and any insights I gained as well. My notes are not a total reflection of what was said, but represent things I found interesting or useful.

Where Does SharePoint Designer 2010 fit in to Your SharePoint Application Development Process?

Asif Rehmani – SharePoint-Videos.com

My Notes:

• Always use browser first when possible
• Anything Enterprise wide should be VS or buy
• DVWP also called Data Form WP
• DVWP multiple sources to XML with XSLT
• LVWP specific to SP lists
• Browser limits in views don’t apply in Designer (Grouping, Sorting, etc.)
• Import Spreadsheet is only through browser – NOT SP Designer
• Conditional Formatting in views including icons (put all icons in cell and change content conditional formatting on each).Pictures automatically go in SiteAssets
  • Sometimes img uploads retain local path (switch to code and correct src url)
• Formulas: select parameter and double click the function to have the selection become the 1st parameter
• DVWP can easily be changed to do updates: switch from text to text box, then add a row and insert a form action button and choose the commit action (save)
• Parameters for all sorts of stuff (username, query string, etc)can be used all over including in conditional formatting
• SPD was designed and intended to be used in production – not a lot of support for working in Dev and moving to Production
  • WP can be packaged (DVWP) for import elsewhere
  • Reusable workflows can also be packaged

Key Insights:

• SharePoint Designer is fine to be used in production (and in fact requires it in certain cases). However, there are things you can do to minimize the amount of work done in production.
• SP Designer is pretty powerful and can replace a lot of extra VS development

Overall Impression:

Just as in his videos, Asif was a great presenter. He was very personable and knowledgeable. The session ended up being less about when SP Designer should be used in your environment and more a broad demo of what can be done with Designer. This was a little disappointing but I learned enough tips and tricks that I really didn’t mind too much. Interestingly, some people in the audience asked about an intermittent error they’ve been receiving in SP 2010 for some Web Parts they’d applied conditional formatting too. This was almost certainly the XSLT Timeout issue and I was able to provide them a solution.

Data Visualization: WPF, Silverlight & WinRT

Tim Huckaby – Interknowlogy

My Notes:

• WPF is great at 3D, cool demo of scripps molecule viewer (codeplex)
• Silverlight is dead
• Winforms is dead
• HTML 5 hysteria is in full swing
• HTML 5 has a canvas and SVG support
• ComponentOne has neat HTML 5 sales dashboard demo

Key Insights:

• Silverlight has lost to HTML 5 and we shouldn’t expect another version.

Overall Impression:

This was obviously a recycled workshop from several years ago (he actually said so) that he added a couple of slides to. In his defense, he planned to show a WinRT demo but the Bellagio AV guys were unable to get the display working. Regardless it seemed more like a bragging session. He showed pictures of him with top Microsoft people, showed his company being featured in Gray’s Anatomy, and alluded to all the cool things he’s involved with that he couldn’t mention.

This was pretty disappointing. I am already aware that .NET can do some pretty awesome things including some neat visualizations. I was hoping to get some actual guidance on getting started. Instead I got Microsoft propaganda from 3 years ago about why .NET (specifically WPF) is awesome. Tim Huckaby is obviously a very smart guy and has a lot of insight to share. Hopefully I’ll be able to attend a workshop from him in the future on a topic he cares a little more about.

Building Custom Applications (mashups) on the SharePoint Platform

Todd Baginski - http://toddbaginski.com/blog/

My Notes:

• Used Silverlight but recommends HTML 5
• Suggests that all mashups should be Sandbox compatible
• Bing Maps has great examples requiring little work
• SL to SL: localmessagesender use SendAsync method. In receiver setup allowedSenderDomains list of strings. Use localmessagereceiver and messagereceived event. Be sure to call the listen() method!!
• Assets Library great for videos
• Silverlight video player included in SP 2010/2013. 2013 has an additional fallback HTML 5 player.
• External Data Column: Works as lookup for BCS
• OOTB \14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUT\MediaPlayer.js: _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push(‘mediaPlayer.createOverlayPlayer’); after you’ve made links hook ‘em up: mediaPlayer.attachToMediaLinks((document.getElementById(‘idofdivholdinglinks’)), ['wmv','mp3']);
• OOTB \14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUT\Ratings.js: ExecuteDelayUntilScriptLoaded(RatingsManagerLoader, ‘ratings.js’); RatingsManagerLoader is huge, see slides. Then loop through everything you want to attach a rating to.
• SL JS call: HtmlPage.Window.Invoke(“Jsfunctionname”, new string[] { parameter1, parameter2})
• JQuery twitter plugin
• SP 2013 has geolocation fields. Requires some setup & code. He has app to add GL column & map view to existing lists.
• Even in SP 2013 the supported video formats are really limited
• AppParts are really just iframes.  Connections work different. Not designed to communicate outside of app.

Key Insights:

• Silverlight to Silverlight communication is pretty simple but will be pretty irrelevant in SharePoint 2013
• Getting the Video Player to show your videos when using custom XSLT takes some work
• Adding a working Ratings Control when using custom XSLT is even more complicated and convoluted
• New GeoLocation columns in SP 2013 will be really cool, but adding them to existing lists is going to be a pain.

Overall Impression:

Todd had a lot of good information and you could tell he knew his stuff. Unfortunately he has a very dry style. Regardless, I enjoy demos that show actual architecture and code and there was plenty of that.

I do wish he’d updated his demos to use HTML 5 as he recommends. It’s very frustrating to hear a presenter recommend something different and then to spend an hour diving into the non-recommended solution. Additionally, although I prefer specific examples (and his were very good) I prefer to have more general best practices/recommendations presented as well. But despite all that he gave a few key tips that I will be using immediately and that is the primary thing I’m looking for in a technical workshop.

Creating Mobile-Enabled SharePoint Web Sites and Mobile Applications that Integrate with SharePoint

Todd Baginski - http://toddbaginski.com/blog/

My Notes:

• AirServer $14.99 shows iPad on computer
• Mobile is much better in SP 2013
• Device channel panel allows content to target specific devices

Key Insights:

• Mobile is important. You can struggle with SP 2010, but you should probably just upgrade to SP 2013

Overall Impression:

I enjoyed Todd’s other session (see above), but this one was too focused on SP 2013 to have any real practical value for me.

Getting Smarter about .NET

Kathleen Dollard - http://msmvps.com/blogs/kathleen/

My Notes:

• Lambdas create pointers to a function
• LINQ creates expressions that can be evaluated everywhere
• int + int will still be an int even if larger than an int can be. No errors, but addition will be wrong. (default in C#, VB.NET will break for default)
• There is no performance gain by using int16 over int32, some memory is saved but is only significant when processing multimillion values at the same time
• VisualStudio 2012 will be going to quarterly updates
• Static values are shared with all instances – Even among derived classes!
• LINQ queries Count() does full query
• Func last parameter is what is returned
• Closure is the actual variable in a lambda (not copy) so multiple lambdas can be changing the same variable
• Projects can be opened in both VS 2010 and VS 2012 at the same time

Key Insights:

• Despite all the new and exciting things that keep getting added to .NET, a firm grip of the basics is what will really make a difference in your code and ability to make great applications
• Static sharing even among derived classes makes for some potential mistakes, but also for some very powerful architecture
• LINQ and Lambdas are some crazy cool stuff that I should stop ignoring
• .NET is very consistent and following it’s logic rather than our own assumptions is key for truly understanding what your code is doing

Overall Impression:

I really enjoyed this session. It was the most challenging workshop I attended despite it’s focus of dealing with things at the most basic level. Kathleen kept it fun (although she could be a little intimidating) and continued to surprise everyone in the room both with the power of .NET and the dangers of our own misconceptions. She pointed out several gotcha areas and provided the reasoning behind them. This was a last minute session, but it was also one of the best.

Wish I’d Have Known That Sooner! SharePoint Insanity Demystified

Dan Holme - Intelliem

My Notes:

• SQL alias: use a fake name for SQL server to account for server changes/moves. Use CLICONFIG.exe on each SP server in the farm. Do NOT use DNS for this (CNAMEs). Consider using tiers of aliases for future splitting of DBs: content, search, services – all start with the same target and changed as needed
• ContentDB sizing: change initial size and growth. Defaults are 50mb and 1mb growth. Makes a BIG difference in performance.
• ContentDBs can be up to 4 TB. Over 200 GB is not recommended.
• SiteCollections can be same as ContentDBs but 100 GB is as high with OOTB tools
• Limit of 60 million items per ContentDBs (each version counts)
• Remote BLOB storage: SP is unaware. Common performance measurements are mostly inaccurate because they are based on single files. Externalizing all BLOBs is significant performance boost. 25-40%! Storage can be cheaper too but complexity increases. Using a SAN allows you to take advantage of SAN features (ie deduplication – which really reduces storage footprint). RBS OOTB is fine, but you can’t set business rules.
• Office Web Apps no longer run on SP servers in 2013. These are great, test on SkyDrive consumer.
• Get office365 preview account
• Nintex highly recommended over InfoPath. InfoPath is supported but unenhanced in 2013, likely indicator of unannounced strategy.
• AD RMS allows the cloud to be more secure than on-premise. Allows exported documents to have rights management that restricts actions regardless of location. Very difficult to setup infrastructure. Office365 has this which is compelling reason to migrate.
• User Profile DB is extremely important and becomes much more so in SP 2013
• Claims Authentication is apparently a dude pees on a server and then gets shot with lasers:

Pee on a server

LASERS!

• Upgrade to 2013 should be done as quickly as possible. Much easier than 7-10. Fully backward compatible. Both 14 & 15 hives.
• Governance is very important!

Key Insights:

• Preparing for growth up front with SQL aliases is a great idea
• Nintex and Office 365 both need more investigation by me
• Remote Blob Storage is a good idea for nearly everyone – very different perspective than what I’ve previously been told!

Overall Impression:

This session was full of great tips and best practice suggestions tempered with practical applications. This was exactly the kind of information I came to hear. Dan did a great job of presenting a lot of information (despite a massive drive failure just previous to the convention) while keeping it interesting. The only thing that was probably a little much was his in-depth explanation of Claims Authentication. His drawings were pretty rough and his enthusiasm for the topic didn’t really transfer to the audience. Regardless, this was a great session.

SharePoint Data Access Shootout

Scot Hillier - http://www.shillier.com

My Notes:

• LINQ cannot query across multiple lists (unless there is a lookup connection)
• SPSiteDataQuery can query all lists of a certain template using CAML within a Site or Site Collection
• SPMetal.exe generates Object Relational Map needed for LINQ  (in hive bin)
• LINQ isn’t going to have much support in SP 2013
• SP 2013 has continuous crawl
• Keyword Queries are very helpful
• KQL: ContentClass determines the kind of results you get. (ie STS_Web, STS_Site, STS_ListItem_Events)
• Search in 2013 provides a rest interface to use KQL in JavaScript
• CSOM is very similar to Serverside OM
• CSOM is JS or .NET

Key Insights:

• Keyword Query Language (KQL) needs more consideration as an effective query language for SharePoint.
• LINQ isn’t actually a great way to access SP data despite Microsoft’s big push over the past couple of years.

Overall Impression:

This was a strange session. He didn’t go into enough depth about any one data access method to provide any real insight to those of us familiar with them and he moved so quick that anyone new to them would just have been overwhelmed. This session would have been better if he’d given clear and practical advise on when to use these methods rather than just demoing them. My guess is that he was trying to cover way too much information in too little time. However, I did enjoy hearing more about the Keyword Query Language since this is something I haven’t done much of and is rarely mentioned. Those tips alone made the whole session worthwhile.

HTML5 JavaScript APIs: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Christian Wenz - http://www.hauser-wenz.de/s9y/

My Notes:

• HTML5 is a large umbrella of technologies
• Suggests Microsoft WebMatrix is a good Editor
• Semantics for HTML elements is a powerful new feature: input type = email, number, range, date, time, month, week, etc. These customize the type of editor and adds validation
• Suggests Opera Mobile Emulator is a good testing tool
• Additional elements: aside, footer
• Requesting location: navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(result){console.log(result)});
• to debug local cache use Google Chrome by going to: Chrome://app cache-internals
• Worker() web worker allows messaging for functions
• CORS allows cross domain requests
• Web sockets do not have full support yet but will be very cool

Key Insights:

• HTML 5 is going to dramatically change how we think of website capabilities – eventually.
• Although exciting, HTML 5 has a long way to go and several of it’s most compelling features have little to no support in main stream browsers.

Overall Impression:

Christian did a good job of keeping the energy up about HTML 5 and showing off some of the cool features. Unfortunately he seemed to lose site of the big picture in favor of really detailed samples. I enjoyed the presentation but would like to have had more guidance about how to get started and what to focus on with this new style of web development.

Roadmap: From HTML to HTML 5

Paul D. Sheriff - http://weblogs.asp.net/psheriff/

My Notes:

• Lots of new elements – but they don’t do anything. They make applying CSS easier and allow search engines to parse through a page easier.
• Browsers that don’t understand new elements will treat them as divs – but styles won’t be applied.
• Lots of new input types (color, tel, search, URL, email, number, range, date, date-time, time, week, month)
• New attributes (autofocus, required, placeholder, form validate, min, max, step, pattern, title, disabled)
• CSS3 has huge style upgrades but there are still a lot of browser incompatibilities
• JqueryUI, Modernizr = good tools, use VS 2012 with IE10 or Opera
• Modernizr allows you to use HTML 5 with automatic replacements in incompatible browsers. Uses JQuery and is included automatically with VS 2012.
• This stuff is not ready for the prime time except for mobile browsers. Modernizr fills in those gaps.
• Box-sizing can be either border-box or content-box, which helps with the div width interpretation problem
• Dude appears to hate JavaScript and HTML 5, sure love hearing a presenter complain about what we all came to learn about!

Key Insights:

• Use Visual Studio 2012 with Modernizr to make HTML 5 websites

Overall Impression:

This session really annoyed me. Paul was very knowledgeable and had a lot of information to share. Unfortunately, he was so busy bashing the technology we all came to see that it was hard to know why we were even there.

Scaling Document Management in the Enterprise: Document Libraries and Beyond

Dan Holme - Intelliem

My Notes:

• Can store up to 50 million documents in a single document library
• SP 2013 allows documents to be dragged onto the doc library in the browser to upload – no ActiveX required
• When a User is a member of the default group for a site they get the links in office and on their mysite. Site Members is the default group by default, but this can be switched in the group settings. Suggests creating an additional group that contains everyone on the site and has no permissions, then this can be the default group.
• Email enabled document libraries can be very helpful for receiving documents outside of your network
• Pingar is a recommended product he briefly mentioned
• Big improvements in navigation using managed metadata service in SP 2013
• Content type templates can use the columns as quick parts in Word

Key Insights:

• Separating Site Membership from Site Permissions by creating an additional group just for managing memberships is a great idea.
• A lot can be done with SP 2010 but SP 2013 will add a few key features to make things easier (drag and drop on the browser will be awesome).

Overall Impression:

The tip about site membership was worth the whole session. Additionally he reviewed a lot of the basics of content types and the content type hub. While this wasn’t particularly helpful to me, I can’t wait to get ahold of his slides for both this and his other sessions. He had way too many slides for the amount of time he was given.

This session reminded me of how powerful SharePoint is at so many things. Document management is not a particularly exciting topic to me but it is one of the key reasons we are using the SharePoint platform. A review of the features available to maintain the integrity of our data and to simply the classification of that data was very helpful.

SharePoint in Action: What We Did at NBC Olympics

Dan Holme - Intelliem

My Notes:

• Keep SharePoint simple. Use OOTB features as much as possible
• 300 hours of content broadcasted per day
• NBCOlympics.com streamed every competition live
• Most watched event in TV history
• 3,700 NBC Olympics team members
  • 1 SP admin/support
• PDF viewing was turned on despite security concerns
• Set as default IE page – very difficult to do, they used a script to set a registry entry to account for multiple OSs and browser versions
• All additional web applications were exposed through SP using a PageViewer WP
  • Phone Directory, Calendar application
• WebDAV was used to allow other apps to publish documents
• Global Navigation on top site using tabs (drop down menus)
  • Quick launch had contextual items to site
  • Navigation centric homepage, kept navigation as simple as possible. Only homepage had global navigation.
• No real branding (put picture on right and used a custom icon). They set the site icon to go to the main web page because it’s what users expected.
• Did not use lists or libraries as terms instead used Content (libraries, other lists) and Apps (Calendar, Tasks, etc.)
• Suggests hiding “I like it” and notes since they are not helpful and deprecated in SP 2013
• Site mailboxes for teams using OWA
• Embedded documentation: Put basic instructions right on the homepage of team sites as needed. Also above some document libraries – basic upload and open instructions.
• Focus on usability since there was no time for training
• Took out All Site Content link and all other navigation was on homepage of site. Sub sites had tab links to parent site.
• Used InfoPath to customize List Forms mostly to add instructions (placed below field title on left)
• Lots of calendars. Conference room calendars were very popular. Didn’t use exchange for this in order to accommodate outside users.
• Used InfoPath lists and workflows to replace paper processes. Kept them simple but effective. Although not used in this case, he recommends Nintex for more advanced needs.
• Self-service help desk: printer/app installs, FAQs. Showed faces of team.
  • PageViewer web part and point it to \\servername to show all printers and put instructions on right to get those installed directly out of SP
  • Kept running FAQ to show common solutions
• IT Administration site: ticket system used issue tracking list highly customized with InfoPath list forms.
  • Inventory lists in IT admin, also DHCP lease reports using powershell to dump that information.
  • List for user requests. WF for approvals, then Powershell took care of approved memberships directly in AD.
  • Used a list for password resets. Powershell would set password to generic password as requested (scheduled task every 5 min)
  • Powershell script to create team sites through list requests
• SP will never be used to broadcast the Olympics but very effective to manage those teams
• You must understand your users and build to what users really want/need
  • Don’t overwork, don’t over brand – It just clutters.
  • Don’t over deliver or over train.

Key Insights:

• Keeping global navigation centralized in a single location (without including everything) and providing contextual navigation as needed can keep things simple from a management perspective while still allowing things to be intuitive.
  • Ensuring all navigation needed is exposed through the Quick Launch eliminates the need for All Site Content (except for Admin) and ensures your sites are laid out well
  • As long as you allow users to easily return to the global navigation from any sub site (Using the site icon is very intuitive) there is no need to clutter every site with complicated menu trees.
• Request lists and Scheduled Tasks running Powershell Scripts can be used to create easy to manage but very powerful automation.
• Removal of “I like it” and notes icons is a good idea
• Embedding instructions directly on a given site/list using OOTB editing tools can increase usability dramatically
• InfoPath List forms can go a long way towards improving list usability by making things appear more intuitive and providing in line instructions.
• There are so many cool things in SP it can be easy to forget all the amazing things you can do using simple OOTB functionality. It is far too tempting to over deliver and over share when end users really only want to get their job done in the simplest way possible.

Overall Impression:

This was the best session I attended and made the entire conference worthwhile. It is unfortunately rare that you can see SP solutions in the context of an entire site. Seeing how SP was used to help manage one of the largest and most daring projects I can imagine was both inspiring and reassuring.

Besides the several tips of things they did (many of which will soon be showing up in our environment), he was able to confirm several things we were already doing that we were a little unsure about. Even better was his focus on simplifying things. I get so excited about SP features that sometimes I overuse them or forget the real power of simple lists. It was a fantastic reminder that we are often over delivering and therefore complicating things that just make SP scary and hard to use for end users.

Convention Summary

DevConnections 2012 was great. I had a great time in Vegas and I brought home several insights that have immediate practical value. Really, there’s not much more you can ask for in a technical convention.