A few months ago Microsoft released a new automated build system with visual studio online /tfs 2015.

This new mechanism is way more open than previous XAML builds, tasks based and easier to customize.

One of the available tasks allows you to run a powershell script.

Let’s  say that for one reason you want to increment automatically the version number of your SharePoint features when building.

If you have a quick look at the “.feature” file you’ll notice that the version attribute looks like a serialized object (instead of simply being the version number), this is way more complicated than simply parsing a XML file.

This year again I have the opportunity to speak at the SPS Ottawa. I’ll give a speech about the ALM capabilities for SharePoint/Office365 in Azure “Setting up your release pipeline for SharePoint in Azure”.

If you’re in the area Saturday November the 21st 2015 don’t hesitate to register to the event. Just as a reminder SPS are free events organized by the community with lot of great sessions. This is a good occasion to expand your network, learn a lot of things and to spend a good day.

I recently had a customer who wanted to disable SharePoint’s native SEO capabilities (Search Engine Optimization) including:

• Sitemap generation
• Canonical url generation
• Metadata generation on pages
• Explicit titles generation
• Etc

The main reason was he had very specific needs and wanted to implement his own custom SEO features.

The thing is that feature is hidden and enabled by default for any publishing site.

The simplest way to disable it then is using powershell, here is the command in case anyone else needs it.

This year again I have the opportunity to speak at the SPS New Hampshire. I’ll give a speech about the multilingualism capabilities of SharePoint “Translating SharePoint from beginning to ending”.

We’ll talk about how you can successfully implement an multilingual intranet, team sites or public sites using SharePoint.

If you’re in the area Saturday October the 24th 2015 don’t hesitate to register to the event. Just as a reminder SPS are free events organized by the community with lot of great sessions. This is a good occasion to expand your network, learn a lot of things and to spend a good day.

At some point you may want to add permissions to the “everyone” “groupe” of SharePoint.

Indeed this will allow you to set permissions to all users already having access to this site (because they are already members of other groups or already have permissions). This “group” is different of “NT AUTHORITY\authenticated users » which represents successfully identified users (bigger group).

The only thing is that “group” is in fact a user, so it’s helpless to iterate on every group of the site collection hoping to find it. It’s in fact a special user. To find it just use it’s login: “c:0(.s|true”

This year again I have the opportunity to speak at the SPS Toronto. I’ll give a speech about the graph “Making Graph data useful to your company”.

We’ll talk about the Graph, delve, yammer, machine learning and a lot of other interesting concepts and the conversation will be aimed towards developers.

If you’re in the area Saturday September the 19th 2015 don’t hesitate to register to the event. Just as a reminder SPS are free events organized by the community with lot of great sessions. This is a good occasion to expand your network, learn a lot of things and to spend a good day.

With office development tools for visual studio 2015 (and probably with august 2015 update for vs 2013 too, but I haven’t tried it), you may run into the following error:

unable to find version ‘3.1.2’ of package ‘appforsharepointonlinewebtoolkit’

And so while doing an “update-package” in nuget console or if you have a restore packages step in your build process. (mandatory if like me you don’t include the packages folder into source control).

Hi everybody!

Short post to let you know that Microsoft recently announced a new event: the AzureCon. First edition on Sept the 29th.

This free online event will focus on Microsoft’s cloud technologies (mostly Azure) and will be about news and things to come on the platform.

Great speakers, awesome content, this is the occasion for you to learn a lot about Azure technologies and their usage.

This conference should happen multiple times a year (approximately 4), main reason being: ”with releases and updates every 3 weeks for each service, we simply couldn’t wait for an annual event to announce everything like we do with Ignite and Build” (Microsoft Azure Product Manager)

It has been several months I’ve been “playing” with multiple semantic analysis services. I especially discovered www.alchemyapi.com in April. One interested thing about them being that IBM recently acquired them.

Semantic analysis

What is semantic analysis? It’s analyzing text data (or sometimes pictures too) and trying to understand the meaning of the content in order to extract metadata from it. It’s a little lit if I were to give you a document and ask you to read it and say “what concepts is it about? What entities (persons, cities, places, dates…)? etc.”. The ultimate goal being to extract everything automatically.

I’ve been greatly honored being selected to be speaker at collab 365.

This event directly comes from the sp24 with the spbiz which happened a few months from now. It’s a free online event which will take place on October the 8th during 24 hours all around the globe.

Adding to the fact I’ll be speaking at this event among other great speakers, I also have the great privilege to give 4 sessions (oh yeah!).