My custom Visual Studio keyboard shortcuts

I do all of the builds in my position as Development Coordinator but with the Visual Studio project context menus out of control and nearly unusable with clutter from various plugins (including ReSharper, PowerCommands, and Productivity Power Tools), I've finally cracked.

Since we don't (yet) have a build server, a normal manual build workflow goes something like "do stuff, do more stuff, BUILD, do stuff, OPEN DEPLOYMENT FOLDER IN EXPLORER, copy files to drop folder, etc. Before installing ReSharper, the VS team finally had all context menu items displaying on a single screen, with no scrolling required; ReSharper has ruined all of that again and I now find myself forever scrolling the context menu from the top (Rebuild) to the bottom (Open Folder in Windows Explorer).

Because I'm forever installing Visual Studio in different environments/upgrading/etc, I'm loathe to define custom keyboard mappings (likely a hangover from my days of using the product before Import and Export Settings… was introduced). Nonetheless, these are the shortcuts I've finally created:

Project.OpenFolderinWindowsExplorer – Alt+ O

Build.RebuildSolution – Alt+ R (Why rebuild instead of build? Personal preference)

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Relative URLs, the Rich Text Editor, and Reusable Content

We recently started leveraging the Reusable Content list to supply user-editable content to one of our interactive online forms and outbound emails. This allows the content owner to tweak the content as required as this content isn't locked away in custom code or resource files—no build and deploy required and the content management system is even used as such (whatdya know?!).

The Reusable Content list is provisioned by SharePoint when the Publishing feature is enabled; it allows users to define content snippets that can be maintained in a single location and updated automatically wherever they're used. You can optionally treat a reusable content snippet as a template—an editable copy is inserted into the page instead of a read-only, auto-updating view.

Reusable Content list items are pretty straightforward and, most importantly, contain a single HTML (rich text) field. SharePoint naturally displays its rich text editor around this field in edit mode so the edit user experience is similar to editing page content.

Unfortunately HTML fields in SharePoint are smarter than they should be and (in MOSS 2007), the product will mangle some content. I recently discovered it refuses to play with background-image style—they're silently removed whether they're inline or in an embedded stylesheet. (And yes, I know, inline styles are evil but this snippet was actually being plugged into an email so everything had to be self-contained).

Despite the tricks SharePoint plays on you with "managed" URLs, it seems the rich text field also stores URLs pointing to content within the current site as relative URLs. Absolute URLs are converted automagically but you'll never really see this until you pull the content out via the API.

We hunted for a way within SharePoint to convert all relative URLs in this content to absolute URLS but without much luck. I think there may be a Javascript function in one of the client scripts to do so for a chunk of content but there's nothing obvious in the server-side API.

To address this, we replace all relative URLs using the regex below (note the URL group) (is using regex to parse HTML bad? You be the judge). You may want to use SPUtility.GetFullUrl() to convert individual URLs.

@"(?:<\s*(?:a|img)\s+[^>]*(?:href|src)\s*=\s*[\""'])(?!http)(?<url>[^\""'>]+)[\""'>]"

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DateTime format safe for file system

Couldn't find anything similar when I searched so thought I'd throw this out there for use in file names in a Windows file system:

DateTime.Now.ToString ("yyyyMMddHHmmss")

Will output "201001312359"

Add a ".txt" or ".dat" if you're hard-core and you're all set.

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How to determine if a SPPublishingPage is published

You can programmatically determine if the SPPublishingPage you're dealing with is in a published state by retrieving the SPFileLevel of the page's corresponding SPFile:

if (page.ListItem.File.Level == SPFileLevel.Published) …

You can also access this through the PublishingPage.ListItem.Level property.

The same SPFileLevel enumeration will also indicate if the page is in draft mode (checked in but not published) or checked out but in my experience this property will return SPFileLevel.Published or SPFileLevel.Draft more often than not.

To determine whether the page is checked out, use the SPFile.CheckOutStatus property in WSS 3.0 or the  SPFile.CheckOutType property in SP2010. Any value other than None means the page is checked out.

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SPSite.AllWebs vs SPWeb.Webs

There's a subtle distinction between SPSite.AllWebs and SPWeb.Webs to be aware of—and yes, despite this being the SharePoint API we're talking about, it's more than just a naming oddity!

SPSite.AllWebs returns the immediate child webs of the site collection and all of their child webs (in other words, all webs recursively within the site collection); SPWeb.Webs has a much narrower scope and only returns the first level child webs immediately below the SPWeb object.

So what does this mean and how does it benefit you? If you're writing code that recursively walks the site hierarchy using SPWeb.Webs, you may be able to avoid the overhead by simply using SPSite.AllWebs. Recursion is fun and all but it adds complexity where it may not be warranted.

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Free Antivirus for Windows Server 2008

I've been a long time home user of Avast! antivirus. It's a great product that doesn't bog down my machine. Unfortunately the free home edition won't install on Windows Server 2008 R2 and I run a single-boot W2k8 environment because of my Hyper-V love affair.

Don't get me wrong, I normally despise AV and security in any form… the guys I work with are probably fed up with me always shouting "security != productivity" when the bloody proxy policy has once again broken something or prevented me doing my job. But, every now and then, I feel incline to download evil things and God forbid those things include a virus of some kind—a quick scan would then come in handy…

ClamWin to the rescue! Don't know about the name but it doesn't include a real-time scanner which meets my requirements. So far so good… evil things downloaded and appear to be virus free!

Empty ImageUrl results in empty src and duplicate request

Not exactly a new issue but an empty ASP.NET ImageUrl tripped us up today. In this case there were no visible symptoms but two requests were coming through when Fiddlering the page view: the first initiated by the user and the second initiated by the page itself towards the end of the trace. In development with a debugger attached, this was manifest with Page_Load, CreateChildControls, etc being called twice for no obvious reason.

Because I initially thought I introduced the problem with the control I was working on, I first attempted to convince ASP.NET CreateChildControls was complete; I did so by clearing the Controls collection before unleashing my own code and setting the ChildControlsCreated property true once done. Neither of these tricks had any affect and the Fiddler trace had me convinced something beyond the ASP.NET pipeline and IIS had to be at fault.

That turned out to be the case but ASP.NET was still to blame ;-)

Specifically, we were adding a server-side ASP.NET image control but not initialising its ImageUrl property; the image src was later being set by jQuery at runtime on the client side. As mentioned, there were no visible symptoms of the double request: the image src was set as expected by jQuery and everything appeared okay on the surface. The IE dev toolbar also showed image src as being correctly set and there were no 404s in the mix.

It wasn't until we looked at the raw HTML that our ever-faithful admin extraordinaire noticed the empty src="" attribute. Removing the attribute removed the problem so I can only conclude IE is helpful enough to attempt to interpret a request for an empty image as a request for the parent directory of the current page while parsing the HTML before any Javascript runs. Thanks again, IE!

Notably this problem wasn't reproducible in Firefox or Chrome.

To fix the problem, we first set a default value for the ImageUrl property but that left me feeling dirty since it was still resulting in an unnecessary request. When I realised the server-side Image tag wasn't actually being used for anything server-side anyway, I replaced it with a boring old HTML img tag with no src. Microsoft has other, equally lame workarounds for this if you're interested; note they also don't plan to fix this bug.

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Must-know SharePoint debugging tips

This post is a follow-on to my Must-Know Visual Studio debugging tips article; I'm separating out my SharePoint debugging tips focused on list, feature, and solution deployment that don't relate to Visual Studio.

Here you go:

• Try activating your feature without the –force attribute; you'll likely need to deactivate the feature first
• Try uninstalling and reinstalling the feature
• If something stuck and rebooting seems to clear some kind of cache deep inside SharePoint, stop IIS and restart the various SharePoint Windows services

@echo off
@echo Stopping services...
iisreset /stop /noforce
net stop "Windows SharePoint Services Timer"
net stop "Windows SharePoint Services Administration"
net stop "Office SharePoint Server Search"
net stop "Windows SharePoint Services Search"
net stop "Windows SharePoint Services Tracing"
@echo Starting services...
net start "Windows SharePoint Services Tracing"
net start "Windows SharePoint Services Search"
net start "Office SharePoint Server Search"
net start "Windows SharePoint Services Administration"
net start "Windows SharePoint Services Timer"
iisreset /start
@pause

• Create a new list from your list definition (or at least, a new list item)
• Rebuild your solution and redeploy

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The Mysterious SourceID Attribute

I see a lot field definitions around that unnecessarily include a SourceID attribute:

<Field
SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3"
…

More often than not, the value of this attribute is set as above. Microsoft's own documentation samples tend to include this attribute.

So what does it do? Not a lot as far as I can tell; I don't include it with my own field definitions because inspecting the field after deployment with SharePoint Manager proves SharePoint sets it automatically with the GUID of the list that created the field. The Field Element documentation also indicates it is optional.

If you're intent on using it, the documentation describes this attribute as "containing the namespace that defines the field, such as http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3" so rather than use the default namespace it may be advisable to use your own (I haven't tried this myself).

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SharePoint and Chrome - Better Together

I've been using Google's Chrome browser since its first release in 2008; I've loved nearly every second of the experience. Who would've thought there was room left to innovate in the browser space? Chrome's omnibar and rapid-fire JavaScript rendering, among other tweaks, are simply light years ahead of the competition.

While I normally rely on IE for my MOSS/SharePoint editing interactions, as of late I'm making the switch to Chrome in that space as well. What I've found to date has blown my mind.

Yes the MOSS 2007 UI degrades somewhat but it's still very useable. More importantly, Chrome drastically reduces the time it takes to accomplish basic tasks like modifying page content or viewing list data. I'm not saying these are normally slow in SharePoint but they can be in the www.westernaustralia.com environment (it's an ageing site with a lot of content and a lot of customisations); some pages in particular nearly grind to a halt in IE8 with the corresponding process consuming upwards of 1GB of memory the more I interact with the page.

Chrome "fixes" many of these slowdowns I'd previously attributed to the SharePoint environment and gives me all the Chrome goodness I've come to love over the last two years. It almost makes the SharePoint editing experience pleasurable!

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