Aaron Robertson-Hodders SharePoint Blog

SharePoint Dispose Checker - Even more useful than expected

2009-01-29T21:53:00Z

By now you have probably heard that the SharePoint Dispose Checker has been released. It's an excellent tool for checking you are disposing of your SharePoint objects correctly! I downloaded it this morning as soon as I read about it just to see if I have really been as concientious as I thought I had. Turns out, according to the output from the tool that I have done a pretty good job of cleaning up after myself. In the 10,000 lines of code mostly devoted to interrogating the SharePoint structure...(read more)

Yet Another SharePoint Conference Post

2008-02-26T09:12:00Z

Yep, BandWagon.JumpOn();! I'm off to Seattle on Sunday for the SharePoint Conference . Hopefully I'll be able to get in the door at Kells and put some faces to names! I've never been there, but judging by the number of people interested , I hope they have a large place and a large supply of tasty bevies ! If you're going up from down-under and willing to discuss how great the Blues look this season over a cold one, lemme know! Posted on SharePoint Blogs Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati...(read more)

2008'ified

2008-02-26T08:27:00Z

Actually I've been 2008'ed for quite a while now, but only recently fully 2008'rtm'd! In a recent fit of over-exuberance (somewhat short of the Steve Ballmer opening keynote level mind you), I decided to embark on an upgrade journey. The plan was to upgrade the development environment for our Product's Server component (including SharePoint Solutions) to Visual Studio 2008, nuke my Vista Machine and re-birth it as a Windows Server 2008 development machine - no more VPC dev for...(read more)

Free SharePoint Business Data Catalog Column

2007-12-21T00:02:00Z

I have decided to release the custom BDC column that I created to the public domain. This custom column type provides a BDC Column type that can be created at the Site Column level and therefore used in Site Content Types. Out of the box this is not possible, and the ability to reuse BDC columns across sites and content has been identified as a common requirement. At this stage there are a number of things that are not yet implemented, including related fields, refreshing and nicer admin UI. However...(read more)

Best Practice : Using disposable object in SharePoint

2007-11-13T23:59:00Z

I found this article on MSDN via Andrew's post posing the question "So is it best practice to only use C# for SharePoint development?". A good question and one that will have plenty of comment from all I imagine. For what it's worth (although not the point of this post), I'm a fan of C# because I like using (SPSite currentSite=new SPSite( http://Server )) ... The interesting thing I took from the MSDN article was that objects that are accessed via SPSite objects, like RootWeb...(read more)

Best Practice : Using disposable objects in SharePoint

2007-11-13T23:59:00Z

Addendum to the SharePoint Deployment Daylight Savings patch issue

2007-11-08T23:11:00Z

There has been much written about the issue (in particular Joel's Q&A ) with Deploying Solutions on SharePoint 2007 after Daylight Savings started (and ended depending on where you are) this year and I have run into it several times. Most recently when I attempted to deploy and upgrade to a solution to a server I thought had the patch applied, but it had not. So I kicked off the upgrade, saw the job sitting in deploying (scheduled...) status, banged my head and installed the patch, rebooted...(read more)

And now, auto-create Manifest XML

2007-09-11T22:23:00Z

About a day after I posted about Rich Finn's auto-create DDF tool, he completed the story with the Manifest generation! That's pretty fast turnaround! Of course I still haven't managed to make time to try it out, but I will certainly try next week. Although, I wonder if I sent him my Dev VPC image if he would install it for me... Posted on SharePoint Blogs Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks...(read more)

Auto-create DDF for SharePoint Solutions

2007-08-30T02:23:00Z

A long time ago I said "One day I'd like to automate the generation of the DDF file, perhaps via a macro or XSLT". Well, I never did, but Rich Finn did . Good job Rich, can't wait for the Manifest creation bits! Now if I just had time to install this... Posted on SharePoint Blogs Del.icio.us | Digg It | Technorati | Blinklist | Furl | reddit | DotNetKicks...(read more)

A great resource for MOSS Search - SharePointSearch.com

2007-08-10T00:21:00Z

If you're looking for to get info about MOSS Search then SharePointSearch.com is a good place to start. The guys over there are doing a great job of information about aggregating news, information about related products and commentary from a range of excellent sources across the industry. There is a lot about MOSS, but also link and articles about Enterprise Search in general. If you have an interest in Search then you should check it out. Features include: Vendor and product pages and reviews...(read more)

Enterprise Search - SharePoint Search vs google

2007-07-31T23:04:00Z

There has been plenty written about the Google Enterprise Search products and their possible competition with Microsoft SharePoint Search technologies and I recently had the need to advise someone on which would suit them best. Obviously, given this is a SharePoint Blog and I'm pro SharePoint this post is not going to be particularly un-biased, but here goes... I think there are two questions that need answers up front: Do you already have licenses for MOSS? If the organisation in question already...(read more)

Partner Conference Day -1

2007-07-10T06:20:00Z

After a landing I'd rather forget, which might actually be a good one in Denver (lucky I recently learned that modern passenger jets are designed to land at up a to 45 degree angle to the runway!), we arrived in Denver last night (depending on where you are). Today was pre-partner-conference-event-day (I'm pretty sure there is a catchy acroynom, I'm just not sure what it is!). Today was a day of meetings and MS Partner 101 - I think that means I am officially assimilated! We had a good...(read more)

The Dark Side? MOSS on a MacBook Pro!

2007-07-05T01:11:00Z

I may as well admit it, I have been seduced by the power of the Dark Side (that should generate the 5,911 g**gle hit for that phrase and maybe knock g**gle off the top few spots in Live Search! ). After much research I decided on one of the new MacBook Pro's as my new laptop for work. I've never been a fan partly because of the proprietory (near predatory) nature of Apple, and partly because of the price. However, in my research I discovered that the new ones are fast (mine is Core 2 Duo...(read more)

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server's Most Innovative Search Solution

2007-06-29T00:56:00Z

In the middle of all the excitement of the APAC SharePoint Conference, Breakfast Briefings, Partner Conference Prep and product releases, it was announced in June that we at MacroView have won the Quickstart for Microsoft Search Innovative Solution Contest!! This contest was open at all Partners who signed up to the Quickstart for Search program and had Innovative Search solutions developed for the Portal Server or MOSS environments. Way back in February I posted about some work I had been doing...(read more)

The solution to saving properties in Custom Field Types!

2007-05-25T11:20:00Z

I have finally managed to put Anton's code to the test in my own custom field type with great results. The underlying issue is that the Update method does not seem to get called when adding a new field, and because there are a number of initializations of the field object the values in the custom propery editor controls get lost before you get to the OnAdded event where you could set them! So, Anton's plan (which I confirm works very well) is to store the values of the properties in a static...(read more)