June 27, 2014

A PowerShell one liner

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.

June 16, 2014

AngularJS Performance Tuning for Long Lists

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

May 23, 2014

Updating hover style in IE8 Developer Tools

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.

May 23, 2014

Debugging "What's happening" in Communities

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.

May 19, 2014

How to reference nested class or struct etc, in PowerShell

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”)

April 24, 2014

IntelliJ Keyboard Shortcuts

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

April 16, 2014

Tip: Use the weakest CSS selectors

I am reading Mobile HTML5 written by Estelle Weyle. It is an awesome recap and new knowledge about html, css and javascript. I want to highlight one of tips I got: Use the weakest CSS selectors (can be found on page 204). We all know, that inline CSS and !important are evil. They have a higher level of specifity and override the standard cascade of the CSS rules. If you use !important, then it will be hard to override CSS rules when you really need it. After these two classic “evils” the evil number three is overqualifying of CSS selectors. You should really never add more classes or ids or elements than needed. Consider this: [code language=“css”] .warning { background-color: red; } [/code] It is often enough, you don’t need those: [code language=“css”] html .warning div .warning div.warning, div > .warning body p#myP.blue strong.warning [/code]

April 13, 2014

It is time to standardize the Chuvash Keyboard Layout

[caption id=“attachment_3165” align=“alignnone” width=“630”] Proto-Bulgarian Runes (Chuvash language is the closest language to the Proto-Bulgar language). Wonder if they are supported in Unicode :)[/caption] The Chuvash Computer Keyboard layouts have existed since 2001, but due to the lack for Unicode support we were forced to use the look-alike letters from other latin-based keyboard layouts. On Linux The Chuvash keyboard layout was added in [2007](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11246 “The original “bug” in FreeDesktop bugzilla”) and Linux is still the only operating system that has a native keyboard layout for Chuvash language. On Windows we have used the Keyboard Layout Creator and distributed it as an executable file. Today, when Windows XP is not supported anymore, the majority of users now have full support for the correct Chuvash letters from the Extended Cyrillic table. These four Chuvash letters are “additional” to the Russian alphabet: Ӑ, Ӗ, Ҫ and Ӳ. Now when new “keyboards” appear on Android, in web browser (they use the standardized letters) and hopefully in Windows and iOS, we have to consider put the correct letters into the keyboard layouts. For Linux the /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ru file has to be updated: [code] // Chuvash language layout // Anatoly Mironov @mirontoli partial alphanumeric_keys xkb_symbols “cv” { include “ru(winkeys)” name[Group1]= “Chuvash”; key.type[group1]=“FOUR_LEVEL”; key { [ Cyrillic_u, Cyrillic_U, 0x010004f3, 0x010004f2 ] }; key { [ Cyrillic_ie, Cyrillic_IE, 0x010004d7, 0x010004d6 ] }; key { [ Cyrillic_a, Cyrillic_A, 0x010004d1, 0x010004d0 ] }; key { [ Cyrillic_es, Cyrillic_ES, 0x010004ab, 0x010004aa ] }; include “level3(ralt_switch)” }; [/code]

March 25, 2014

Using CAML with SharePoint REST API

Do you prefer REST over CSOM as I do? I’ll skip the whys. Andrew Connell put it already in wrtiting so nicely. Well, if you do prefer REST, then you must have discovered some shortcomings of REST, or its incompleteness compared to CSOM. I think of:

Inability to filter items based on multivalued taxonomy fields
Inability to filter items based on user fields where user is added through a group, rather than directly, e.g. AssignedTo=[Me] combined with a SharePoint group.
…

In such situations I was forced to use CSOM. Until yesterday. Yesterday I learned that we can actually use CAML queries in REST requests. This enables using REST in all situations. The REST API is still developed and many features are added. Maybe a particular operation that needs a CAML query today, can be supported in the core REST API and can be easily refactored then. But until then, we can use CAML queries in REST requests. Here are the important things about it:

March 23, 2014

Pragmatic Responsive Design

I have been curious about the responsive design but have not had time to try it out. To learn more I decided to make an existing website more responsive. A friend of mine drives a Chuvash Dictionary website: samah.chv.su. Today it looks like this in a mobile browser: The site is a classic 1000px-ish centered page with header and two columns. The left column is for the main content and the right column for additional “aside” information. Can it be more classic? This current version works, you can still use the dictionary on a mobile phone. But there are several improvements that can be done: