In the Malmöfestivalen for Android where I participate we wanted to show thumbnails of events in lists. We have urls of thumbnails from Malmofestivalen API. This information is stored in a sqlite database and a SimpleCursorAdapter is used for getting the events from the database. It is possible to bind the urls to ImageView objects (by downloading the stream: 1, 2, 3). The problem is in a listactivity with many images it will freeze. So it must be an AsyncTask, and it should be some kind of local cache to avoid loading same images over and over again. Fortunately there is already ImageDownloader class provided in the android blog post: Multithreading For Performance . The next step is to create custom adapter and extend from SimpleCursorAdapter: EventCursorAdapter, like described on Android-er and and SP-Technolab:

If you have an external web service reference in your sharepoint solution, you can use web.config configuration like:

<system.serviceModel>
    <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" />
<bindings>
        <wsHttpBinding>
            <binding name="WSHttpBinding\_ISuperService" >
                <security mode="None">
                    <message clientCredentialType="None" />
                </security>
            </binding>
        </wsHttpBinding>
    </bindings>
    <client>
        <endpoint address="http://super.domain/SuperService.svc"
            binding="wsHttpBinding"
            bindingConfiguration="WSHttpBinding\_ISuperService" 
            contract="ISuperService"
            name="SuperServiceEndpoint">
        </endpoint>
    </client>
</system.serviceModel>
```security mode is set to "None". Then in code just get this configuration:

var proxy = new SuperServiceClient(“SuperServiceEndpoint”); var result = proxy.GetSomething();

Why

I need to to activate a feature in PowerShell and specify some properties. Simple? Yes. Possible? No. In the default Enable-SPFeature cmdlet you can’t specify any properties:

Enable-SPFeature –Identity "b5eef7d1-f46f-44d1-b53e-410f62032846" -URL http://dev

We can of course easily add properties when activating features in onet.xml:

<!-- Publishing Resources -->
<Feature ID="AEBC918D-B20F-4a11-A1DB-9ED84D79C87E">
  <Properties xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
    <Property Key="AllowRss" Value="false" />
    <Property Key="SimplePublishing" Value="false" />
  </Properties>
</Feature>

So I went to SharePoint StackExchange and asked the question. Then I realized: the standard Sharepoin API doesn’t support this neither. The methods of SPFeatureCollection which have SPFeatureProperties as parameter are internal. So the only way is to use Reflection like Hristo Pavlov (2008) and Yaroslav Pentsarsky (2010) suggest. So why not to try to create a cmdlet?

Did you know that we can pipe the output from PowerShell into a graphical GridView? I have used PowerShell for one year and only now I discovered this nice feature. You can add filter criteria, you can filter by typing in a textbox:

Other useful output cmdlets

• out-file
• out-clip
• out-null

If your solution has two or more languages to support, I can recommend an open source tool ResxCrunch. Btw, you can even use ResxCrunch for localization of Android applications.

To run powershell remotely is really easy. First enable it on the machine which will receive the remote commands:

Enable-PSRemoting

Then go to another machine and connect to your host:

$cred = Get-Credential
Enter-PSSession -Computername dev -Credential $cred

If you want to know more about powershell remoting, I recommend “A layman’s guide…”. See even a detailed example on poshcode.

To use only SPUser objects isn’t always sufficient. To get other properties we have to retrieve user profiles. Giles Hamson gives an example how to get and how to update user profile properties with powershell. Here is an example how to get all work phones:

$url = "http://intranet/"
$site = Get-SPSite $url
$context = Get-SPServiceContext $site
$profileManager = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager($context)
$profiles = $profileManager.GetEnumerator()

while ($profiles.MoveNext()) {
  $userProfile = $profiles.Current
  $name = $userProfile.DisplayName
  $phone = $userProfile\["WorkPhone"\]
  $line = '{0};{1}' -f $name, $phone
  write $line
}

If you are not sure what properties are called, see the whole list by typing:

If you have used Issue tracking list template in SharePoint you must have marked that the comments are added and marked with author name and datetime. It is handy to have these micro “discussion boards” on items. The comment-formed communication can help to fine-tune task definitions. By the way, have you seen Trello? So the question is how we can create this column in other lists? Here is a little tutorial how to create “append-only comments”, as they are called:

In javascript, if we copy objects or their properties, the reference still remains and by changing the new object the old one is changed, too. To clone or do a clean copy of an object I found a very useful solution by Jan Turoň on StackOverflow:

Object.prototype.clone = function() {
  if(this.cloneNode) return this.cloneNode(true);
  var copy = this instanceof Array ? \[\] : {};
  for(var attr in this) {
    if(typeof this\[attr\] == "function" || this\[attr\]==null || !this\[attr\].clone)
      copy\[attr\] = this\[attr\];
    else if(this\[attr\]==this) copy\[attr\] = copy;
    else copy\[attr\] = this\[attr\].clone();
  }
  return copy;
}

Date.prototype.clone = function() {
  var copy = new Date();
  copy.setTime(this.getTime());
  return copy;
}

Number.prototype.clone = 
Boolean.prototype.clone =
String.prototype.clone = function() {
  return this;
}

Next: clone your objects if you pass them from a popup.

If you want to reset all interval jobs when a browser tab is inactive, the best way would be to use clearInterval on window blur. But unfortunately Chrome fires window focus and window blur two times. Here is an embryo to a solution:

var M = window.M || {};
M.counter = 0;
M.focused = true;
M.tick = function() {
  if (M.focused) {
		console.log("tic tac " + ++M.counter);
	}
};
M.start = function(e) {
	console.log("starting...");
	M.focused = true;
};
M.stop = function(e) {
  console.log("stopping...");
  M.focused = false;
};
$(window).on({
	focus: M.start,
	blur: M.stop
});

M.ticker = window.setInterval(M.tick, 1000);