Since SharePoint 2010 you have the ability to improve the search experience in adding custom search refiners. Even better you can develop new ones if you want. As a reminder search refiners (or facets) are located on the left of the search result page and allow you to filter search results to have a faster access to relevant items. (file type, author, modification date…)

Here is some documentation if you’d like to know more about it.

Montreal will have a SharePoint Saturday this year too!

Just as a reminder SharePoint Saturdays are:

• Free events
• Happening all around the world
• Dedicated to SharePoint/Office 365
• On Saturdays
• With great sessions and awesome speakers

Practical information

This year’s edition will be on May the 23rd at “college maisonneuse”. You just have to register here https://www.spsevents.org/city/montreal/montreal2015

Last year the SPS MTL brought together 200 persons. This year will try to have even more people with 4 tracks (20 sessions total).

Another episode of my series about automated build of SharePoint full trust solutions with tfs 2013 and visual studio 2013.

/automated-build-for-sharepoint-2014-10-29-02-22-54

If you followed my posts you must have noticed you dll’s were built but you didn’t have any wsp.

This is because by default msbuild doesn’t package your solutions. That’s pity isn’t it?

Here is some documentation telling us to add IsPackaging=true to the build definition as a parameter.

Quick update on my serie about automated build for sharepoint full trust solutions.

If you take a look at the second error I’m describing hereyou will notice that you have to replace two lines in order to make it work.

With update 4 it looks like Microsoft is preparing full 64 bits support for visual studio. New fix lines are now

<Import Condition="'$(Language)' == 'C#'" Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft\Windows Workflow Foundation\v3.5\Workflow.Targets" />

<Import Condition="'$(Language)' == 'VB'" Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft\Windows Workflow Foundation\v3.5\Workflow.VisualBasic.targets" />

Notice the appearing of 32 in the parameter name (the previous parameter doesn’t seem available anymore).

If you work in SharePoint development you probably already have noticed that the tools are getting a new update.

With previous versions Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Search and Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Search.Applications dll’s were not included (it most likely has been forgotten)

You then had two solutions:

• Ensure that all developers had SharePoint binaries installed on their machines
• Embed a copy of the dll taken from a SharePoint machine

Both solutions were not very practical.

These dlls are now included for version 15 and 16 located here C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\

As some of you know, this is my first year as an MVP. Next week will be the MVP summit and I’m very exited about it.

For those whom don’t know it, Microsoft is actually bringing 1800+ persons from all around the world to their headquarters so they can share information with them and gather feedback.

We have a huge week coming up, well I can’t really say anything more about it, pretty much everything is under NDA.

Introduction

It has been a few articles I’ve been mentioning the fact that we (Negotium, the company I work for) have migrated to visual studio online (TFS Online). This service offers most of the features offered by the on premises version of Team Foundation Server 2013 and even some exclusive features.

If you have only a vague idea of what can do TFS2013/VSO and you want to learn more I very highly recommend Professional Application Lifecycle Management from Wrox.

Hello everyone

Microsoft is launching a SharePoint MVP Expert Chats again!  Have questions about SharePoint 2010 or 2013?  Or SharePoint Online? Office 365?  Please join us October 29th at 1pm EST or 10am PDT where you can have your questions answered live!  We will be using the Reddit Ask Me Anything format.  This is new to us but many of Microsoft teams are using this medium now.  Please create a Reddit account beforehand so you can be ready to ask questions.  More information on the chat and room location will be available on Oct 29th in the SharePoint forum.  Hope you can join us!

I’m proud to announce I’ll be speaking at the SharePoint Saturday Ottawa 2014. The event will be held close to Ottawa on November the 18th and you can get all the details here https://www.spsevents.org/city/ottawa/ottawa2014

I will be presenting this session with Fabrice Vaxelaire (AKA Great Venerable) and we’ll be talking about building your business portal in Office 365: Nowadays we have business tools and portals everywhere in the company, what are the benefits of having everything at one place? How can we bring core business applications to Office 365? Etc…

At work I am trying to implement automated build for SharePoint (full trust) projects on visual studio online. (Expect to have several articles about this as and when I meet and solve errors)

When doing SharePoint development we have to sign assemblies with a certificate. When the project is initialized there are two options:

• Certificate is protected by a password: (pfx extension) that was with first versions of SharePoint tooling, or if you have created the structure of (visual studio) solution yourself with several assemblies.
• Certificate is not protected: (snk extension) default option of the tooling for a few years

In my case the certificate was protected by a password which causes the following problem: that you have to type this password when you want to build the source on a new machine for the first time. This is really not convenient when doing automated build (no human to type a password when building). This gives us this error message.