These days I’ve been working on an auto hosted app for SharePoint (office 365 actually).

I had to grant an anonymous access to one of the pages without requiring clients to give anonymous access to their SharePoint site. But I still needed to read a few properties from the App Web web site (the SPWeb provisioned by SharePoint when installing an app)

I had to play around a lot but I finally found the solution:

Service pack 2 for SharePoint 2010 and Service pack 1 for SharePoint 2013 recently came out.

A support of 2012R2 at last !

Both service packs bring support for Windows Server 2012R2. This is a recurrent problematic for IT services. How to reduce the number of different versions of an operating system in order to make maintenance cheaper and easier?

Warning: “in place” upgrade of operating system for SharePoint 2013 is not supported by Microsoft. You need to reinstall the farm and migrate the content. See section “overview of improvements” in this article https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2817429

SharePoint 2010 service pack 2 came out a few months ago from now. It brings lot of new things, I’ll blog about that in further posts.

One of these new things is the repackaging of language packs.

Indeed you may have missed it but it is not required anymore to do a progressive installation in order to support MUI in SharePoint 2010 when setting up a new farm.

Before, when one wanted to install language packs (let’s take for example French English and Spanish), one had to:

Microsoft recently publishing an update for Office development tools.

This update integrates SP1’s benefits. It also allows you to develop app for PowerPoint and Access, enhances/add creation/configuration wizards for projects elements and includes more data sources types.

You can find the detailed description of the update here https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dn610877.aspx

It’s very simple to update your installation, open Visual Studio, tools, Extensions and updates.

Have fun coding!

Introduction

I wanted to publish this article months ago, back to the time I found this solution. But I did not mostly because of a lack of free time. Sebastien LEVERT, a top SharePoint developer and a member of Montreal’s SharePoint community, recently published a post about the same subject. Read it (sorry it’s in French), I’ll write my post so it is complementary. https://www.pimpmysharepoint.com/2014/01/09/deployer-des-fichiers-de-ressources-simplement/

Reminders

To quickly summarize, when you develop SharePoint solutions and you want to support multiple languages (localize it) you need to use .net resources. These resx files are a mechanism coming from asp.net and work as a dictionary (key/value). You have to create one file by supported language. Instead of writing texts in the code (which is a bad practice anyway), you now reference these by defined keys.

Some great SharePoint MVP’s are organizing an amazing event on April the 16th/17th : the SP24.

The idea is:

• Amazing speakers

• Amazing conferences

• All around the world

• 2 tracks

• 48 sessions

• A few thousands attendees

• 24 hours straight

• You even get to choose the sessions!

• And it’s free

Translating SharePoint 2013 from beginning to ending

Really motivated by this great concept I decided to apply for a conference. Please help me to speak to this great event and vote now! (Details on the link bellow)

Explanations, tips, tricks and warnings

Explanations

This cache cluster is in facts made of appfabric hosts (caching services). One of the advantages is that hosts not members of the cluster but clients of it keep a local copy of objects. And this copy is automatically maintained up to date. The result is you do not need to implement a lazy loading pattern to avoid back and forth on the network.

Prelude

I started to write this set of articles as one at the beginning, but I quickly realized that I had a lot of things to explain. Moreover, I’m a real chatterbox which does not help in that case. I finally decided to write a trilogy. I will publish one article every two days beginning today. The code sample will be delivered with last article so I ensure that you read everything ;-). Have a nice reading and do not hesitate to comment.

Code apps they said, it will be easier they said…

Visual Studio 2013 comes with a new project model : SharePoint autohosted app ASP.NET MVC (Cool!)

I’m fond of SharePoint, I like MVC, why not mixing them?

Short reminder, SharePoint autohosted apps are only available for Office 365. Technically Office 365 will create an Azure website on demand when app is deployed. The potential cost overhead will be billed directly to the tenant owner.

When using the entity framework with a data context we often have this problematic:

What’s the best between performance and simplicity of usage or scalability?

(no? you do not ask yourself that kind of existential question?)

Here is a little explanation :

Static instance

In this first case you wrote a static reference to the context. Sometimes you also add some lazy loading and/or disposal management in global.asax (application end event)