Visual Web Parts for SharePoint in the Sandbox

Posted on September 22, 2011 by

Get ‘em while they’re hot! Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools plus a sandboxed compilation to ensure you’re not accidentally calling outside of the allowed set of types and members.

Posted in Deployment, Development, Sandbox, SharePoint, Visual Studio | Leave a comment

SPServices Helper Function: Resolve the Guid of a View

Posted on September 21, 2011 by

If you’re using the excellent SPServices library to wrap up access to the SharePoint web services from JavaScript, good stuff!
If, like me, you want to query a View on a given list you’ll need to pass the Guid of the view as the viewName parameter. Using the display name will give you the error: Parameter viewName is missing or invalid. 0×82000001

To resolve this you’ll need to call the GetViewCollection method for a given list and then parse the result to find your Guid. I’m a total newbie to jQuery and client side scripting so I found this a little tricky to get right, but I got there. So, here’s a helper for you use:

function ResolveListGuidFromName(webUrl, listName, viewName){
	var guid;
	var filter = "View[DisplayName='"+ viewName +"']";
	$().SPServices({
	    operation: "GetViewCollection",
	    async: false,
	    webURL: webUrl,
	    listName: "Votes",
	    completefunc:function (xData, Status) {
			guid = $(xData.responseXML).find(filter).attr("Name");
		}
	});
	return guid;
}

Not too bad for my first hack at this stuff.

Posted in Development, jQuery, SharePoint, SPServices | 5 Comments

TFS 2010: Add to security groups from outside of the current domain

Posted on September 14, 2011 by

If you’re a SharePoint developer like me, chances are that the dev server you’re working on is joined to a different domain from your corporate identity. Now this makes it tricky to add users to your TFS Security Groups from inside of Visual Studio as you can’t browse the AD users on your corporate domain

Thankfully there is a handy command line tool that you can use called TFSSecurity.exe, by default you can find it in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE

What you need to run is:

TFSSecurity.exe /collection:http://<serverUri>:<port>/<virtualDirectory>/<collectionName>/g+ “[<projectName>]\<group>” n:”<DOMAIN>\<user>”

Replace everything in angle brackets with the values that match your environment. As a rule of thumb for default install the virtual directory is tfs, the port is 8080 and the collection is default. So to add INTERGEN\Gavinb to project Awesome as a contributor the command looks like this:

TFSSecurity.exe /collection:http://tfsserver:8080/tfs/default /g+ “[Awesome]\Contributors” n:”INTERGEN\gavinb”

Posted in Security, TFS, Visual Studio | Leave a comment

Office 365 and Passwords

Posted on August 8, 2011 by

Today I learned that the new password policy for Office 365 specifies an upper limit on password length.

Yes, that’s right folks, some special person decided that passwords for Office 365, and therefore Exchange Online, should be 8-16 characters in length. As for why I have no idea.

Personally I think an upper limit on password length is retarded. I currently use a password scheme based on a short meaningful phrase which often results in passwords of over 16 characters.

According to my friend in our IT services team this limitation is not in place for those people who are using ADFS, so I guess the takeout here is ADFS is good, and as far as Office 365 goes, you can be “too secure”

Posted in Security, WTF | Leave a comment

SPEasy Setup Scripts: Gotcha!

Posted on July 19, 2011 by

A workmate of mine just recently used the SharePoint Easy Setup Script to setup a Windows 7 machine for SharePoint development. Upon trying to browse newly created Web Applications with host headers he was prompted to authenticate but these authentication attempts always resulted in a 401.1 error.

It turns out that the easy setup scripts don’t disable the loopback check. Luckily that has a well documented and easy fix which can also be done via PowerShell.

Posted in Development, SharePoint | Leave a comment

Serving HTML5 Video from SharePoint Document Libraries

Posted on July 19, 2011 by

So you want to serve up some video content and use the <video> tag? Cool!

You want to do it using video files you have in SharePoint? Cool, that shouldn’t be too hard.

Unfortunately out of the box SharePoint 2010 is going to serve that video file out of the document library with a MIME Type of application/octet-stream, which IE and Firefox are not going to recognise as playable video. Chrome seems to be inspecting the file and determining the file type itself so video plays in that browser without needing a correct MIME Type sent from the web server.

I’m not going to get deeply into the ins and outs of the codec nightmare (ugh). Expect to say, there are some good free tools for encoding your video as H.264. I like x264 for a command line tool or H.264 Encoderif you want a GUI. I’m not discussing WebM as I didn’t need to create videos using that encoding for the piece of work that generated this blog post.

If you’re after a hand on the front of generating your HTML, check out Video for Everybody. One of my big complaints is that there is nothing laid down in the spec to require a “full window” mode control, the individual browsers may provide this control, but at this stage IE, Firefox and Chrome don’t . If you’re looking to provide something on this front, then I’d suggest using VideoJS

So assuming that you have that all sorted there are a couple of steps to make SharePoint serve the content in a manner that a browser can use, so don’t just stand there, let’s get to it.

Step 1 – Configure IIS 7 to provide a MIME type for .mp4 files.

Yes, I’m only covering the .mp4/H.264 case, just repeat Step 1 tweaking for WebM/Ogv

1. From the Start menu, enter inetmgr in the search box and press Enter. An instance of the IIS Management Console will start.

2. Select the server node, in the Features View locate the MIME Types feature in the IIS Group and double click on it.

MIME Type in IIS7

3. In the Actions pane click Add…

4. Fill in the form providing .mp4 as the File name extension and video/mp4as the MIME Type and click OK

Add MIME Type

5. Close the IIS Management Console.

Step 2 – Configure the SharePoint Web Application to serve mp4 using the configured MIME Type.

1. From the Start Menu, select All Programs | Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products | SharePoint 2010 Central Administration. Under Application Management select Manage web applications.

2. Select the desired web application in the list.

3. Click on General Settingsin the ribbon.

4. Scroll down and find the Browser File Handling section, change the selection to Permissive, scroll to the bottom of the dialog and click OK.

Browser File Handling

5. Close the browser window.

6. You now need to reset IIS. Open and command prompt and enter run the iisresetcommand.

BOOM!

You’re now serving video files in a manner that all the major browsers should be able to play them when used as a <source> element in the <video> tag!

Posted in Configuration, Development, HTML5, SharePoint | 3 Comments

Hey where is my <video>?

Posted on July 11, 2011 by

So, I’m running Windows Server 2008 R2 aka Win7 Server. I installed IE 9 but none of the videos on the Video Format Support Page are playing?

WTF? That page is from Microsoft to show off the HTML5 support in IE9.

Turns out that I’m missing the codecs for H.264 and AAC which are bundled in the Desktop Experience feature, which, on Server 2008 R2 is missing these codecs.

Easy fix though, Microsoft have an update for the Desktop Experience on Server 2008 R2, download, install and you’re laughing at silly HTML5 videos Smile

Posted in HTML5, WTF | Leave a comment