Just a little productivity tip. If you use git on Windows, you probably already have the Github for Windows application. This application adds the Git Shell:

The Git Shell will open a PowerShell window and execute shell.ps1 from the Github directory:

What it won’t do is to load your personal PowerShell profile. I want to use my PowerShell profile that creates some links and adjust the look-and-feel and the promt of the shell. By the way I have published my profile.ps1 as a gist:

In this post I want to share an unusual, nevertheless interesting conceptual idea of loading content from SharePoint 2013 apps on many pages. The original awesome concept was proposed and developed by my colleague Martin Villysson at Bool.

The problem we are trying to solve

SharePoint apps are great to extend functionality in SharePoint and integrate other systems (full page apps available through Site Contents), they also provide tools to enrich the default SharePoint experience by App Parts (Client Web Parts) and Custom Actions (additional menus).

Recently I have switched from VMWare to VirtualBox for my SharePoint Development. So far it really works good. I have prepared this guide for configuring VirtualBox for SharePoint-hosted apps. That means we need a new adapter with a static ip address. All the steps done inside the virtual machine are applicable for VMWare and Hyper-V, too. This guide does not cover the full configuration of the app environment, it covers only the network and dns settings needed for SharePoint-hosted apps on Premises in a Development machine.

Yesterday I had a little presentation about PowerShell basics in the SharePoint context. Here you can see the presentation I’ve published on slideshare. The text is in Swedish.

[slideshare id=37316916&doc=sharepoint-140724063012-phpapp01&w=600]

PowerShell is powerful. You can write concise, well formulated, functional-style code. Recently I got the following quiz:

You’ve got $100. You have to buy exactly 100 animal, at least 1 dog, 1 cat and 1 mouse. 1 dog costs $15, 1 cat costs $1, 1 mouse costs $0.25.

There can be  many ways to solve it. But look at this one line solution. It is quite impressive what you can do with PowerShell [code language=“powershell”] 1..98 | % { $dog = $_ 1..98 | % { $cat = $_ @{ “Dog” = $dog “Cat” = $cat “Mouse” = 100 - $dog -$cat } } } | ? { $_.Mouse -gt 0 } | ? { $_.Dog * 15 + $_.Cat * 1 + $_.Mouse * 0.25 -eq 100 } [/code] This solution uses ranges, dynamic objects (PSObject), nested for loops, implicit returns and advanced filtering. All that is is out-of-the-box PowerShell.

This is a must-read for all SharePoint Developers who use Angular.

In our project we still have to support Internet Explorer 8. The CSS issues in IE8 are most difficult to debug and solve. You can not add a new rule in Developer Tools or toggle the state of an element to hover as in moder web browser dev tools. One solution that I’ve come up to today, is to add a style with javascript or jQuery, open the script pane in IE8 Dev Tools and add this line: [code language=“javascript”] $(’.ms-srch-item:hover {filter:none !important;}’) .appendTo($(‘body’)) [/code] This will fill update the hover effect of the .ms-srch-item directly.   That’s it, just a little tip.

Recently an issue was reported about count mismatches in SharePoint 2013 Communities. The number of replies in category tiles sometimes is different compared to the community stats in the web part called “What’s happening”. The actual number of replies is 1 in the figure below. The user who has reported has tried to add, update and delete discussions and replies.       I have invested some time debugging this issue. It would be pity to not share my findings. Well the first thing to do was to determine the type name for the “What’s happening” web part. To do so just edit the  page and export the web part. In the exported .webpart file I saw that the type was Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.DashboardWebPart. With that knowledge it is time to open ILSpy, an awesome and free(!) assembly browser and decompiler. Load the “Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal” assembly from GAC into ILSpy. Then use F3 to search for DashboardWebPart: The number of replies is retrieved from SPWeb.AllProperties: If the Property Bag does not contain it, it gets the number of replies from the list. The formula is as follows: [code language=“csharp”] list.ItemCount - list.RootFolder.ItemCount [/code] It means that it gets the number of both discussions and replies: ItemCount of Discusssions List. The number of Discussions is determined by the ItemCount in the RootFolder of the Discussions List. Discussions are List Items in the RootFolder (num2 in the figure below). Replies are saved in the subfolders, every discussion gets an own folder. The number of all replies are num3 in the figure below. After checking the web properties I could see that the number of replies there were wrong: 2. The next step was to determine where and when the Web Properties are updated. The first guess every SharePoint Developer has in such cases is an EventReceiver. Here are all EventReceivers connected to the Discussions List: [code language=“powershell”] $list.EventReceivers | select class, Type, Synchronization | Out-GridView [/code] Allright, CommunityEventReceiver then: Found where the actual update happens: CommunityUtils.UpdateWebIndexedPropertyBag The method is used in DiscussionListCommunityEventHandler.HandleEvent There is a flag, flag5 that is used to determine if the Web Properties should be updated: But the flag5 is not true on Delete operations in some code flows:   That’s it. So deleting a reply will not have any effect on “What’s happening”. But adding a new discussion will also update the stats: To summarize the debug session, there is an issue in the OOB code that misses to update community stats when deleting a discussion or a reply. Adding a new discussion, or a reply will synchronize the stats.

Comments from Wordpress.com

Anatoly Mironov - May 3, 2014

Thank you Hugh! It explains the syntax!

It happens because it is using .net and reflection Type.GetType(“ParentClass+NestedClass”)

I want to use shortcuts. I prefer the IntelliJ keyboard scheme. Which do you use?