If you’ve started using SharePoint 2013 you probably noticed that Microsoft changed the way they present the Modified value. In SharePoint 2010 the Modified field showed a Date/Time stamp, but in SharePoint 2013 the Date/Time is replaced with something like “3 minutes ago”. Personally I like this, but some users may not and the Date/Time stamp may be really important especially for Legal Departments or other Audited applications.

Fortunately there is a very simple fix, using the Client Side Rendering to override SharePoint’s default rendering of the Modified field.

I’ve been working on a site migration from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 and a lot of what we did in 2010 was to customize forms the user interacts with. One of the requirements we had was to ensure a Project Name and Project Alias field did not contain the same information. In SharePoint 2010 this had been done by adding some JavaScript to the page, grabbing each control by HTML Element ID, and then comparing their values. When we migrated these fields all got new HTML Element IDs so our validation logic was broken.

I was working on a project today where I need to dynamically create a MS Word Document, save it to a SharePoint library, and then present the document to the user for editing. My first attempt was to create an IFrame that would redirect to the document once it was created, but this would only open the document in ‘Read Only’ Mode.

I recently had more fun with setting Managed Metadata values in SharePoint 2010. This time as part of an event receiver during the Item Adding, Item Updating, and Item Updated events. (There are interesting event ordering challenges which lead to using all of these events, but that is not the focus of this blog.) The challenge I faced was copying values from a Document Set down to documents that were being created/uploaded to the list. Normally, using Shared Properties would negate this but because we wanted use to edit the Managed Metadata Values in the Document Information Panel we could not use shared values because the Document Set would immediately overwrite any changes made to the document. Instead we created an Event Receiver to manually handle the updates from the Document to the Document Set, and from the Document Set to the child documents.

I recently had an issue trying to set the Managed Metadata field value on a new list item I was creating in C# code. In the control where the user could select the managed metadata value I was using the OTB Taxonomy Control which was properly bound to my Managed Metadata Field.

I was recently working for a client who began having issues with the Windows 8.1 baseline and their search center. If you are familiar with Windows 8.1 then you are aware that it comes with IE 11 which has a new User Agent string that can cause some issues with SharePoint (ref: IE11 Broke SharePoint 2010). My task was to figure out why when a user entered a search term/key word and hit enter the page simply refreshed.

Recently I posted about how you can use Client Side Rendering (CSR)to display contacts on a map. After posting about how to display the entire list data, I decided I wanted to see how CSRcould be used to change the user experience while adding, updating, and viewinglist items, updating items, and viewing items. This post will provide a high level overview of how I was able to change the display during New, Display, and Edit of an individual item and then later I will actually put this together with the Contact Map idea.

Several years ago, back in the dark days of SharePoint (MOSS) 2007, Tom Resing and I worked together on a demo displaying contacts from a SharePoint contact list on a Bing/Google Map. He and I presented this at several SharePoint Saturday events (Boston, Virginia Beach, Richmond, Tampa) and found highly positive response. It has been a while since Tom and I worked together, and a lot has changed in SharePoint so I wanted to revisit our old demo and take a newly available approach.

I’ve been noticing recently my SharePoint site was behaving oddly, especially when I wanted to edit a web part. Yesterday the odd behavior hit a critical point as I was unable to connect web parts on a page. The problem was every time I clicked the drop down arrow on the web part heading the page would refresh and some of the menu content would appear in a side panel, where the web part properties are usually displayed.

I’ve been working on a project recently that has a large number of sub-agencies and the parent organization was attempting to push a standardization of Content Types. Since no one really wanted to duplicate work the organization decided they did not want to migrate content into SharePoint (from file shares) until all the content types and metadata had been identified and created. However, as with all large agencies some groups wanted to move forward with limited or partial capabilities because after all some limited capability is better than what they currently have. The concern that arose from this was: What if they created a Content Type in one of their Site Collections that had the same name as one that would be published later on?

I have done a lot of development with SharePoint workflows, especially those developed in Visual Studio. Unless I have been working with a standard list type, I generally create a Content Type that my workflow can be associated with and to ensure the columns and values needed in the workflow will be present. However, creating Content Types is always a painful process, because as you develop the content types and test them you need to delete the original content type, and any list depended up in before you deploy the updated version. This is even worse when you upgrade a solution that is in use in productionbecause you can’t easily delete the content type just to add additional fields.

Recently, I was working with a coworker who had created a javascript dashboard using jQuery and KnockoutJS in SharePoint. The dashboard had worked perfectly for him, but when I viewed the site none of the data would render. While we were testing the site we noticed that my browser was running inBrowser ModeIE10 with Document Standard IE 7 Standard,but his was running Browser Mode IE 10 with Document Mode: Standards. Having battled with SharePoint 2010using anHTML5 Masterpage I began looking for the Meta tag on the page which should define the appropriate browser mode and noticed he had removed it. I had him add the tag back to the masterpage (from my experience removing the browser mode tag in SP2010 causes all kinds of issues when editing pages, list items, etc) but still found the dashboard was not functioning properly.

Recently my company performed a migration for our old production environment to a new production environment so we had a more stable and robust platform to support the company, including providing leadership with better business intelligence about our operations. As part of the migration one of my goals was to launch My Sites for our internal users so they had somewhere to store information they were working on.

Last month I was working on a demo for a charitable organization that has lots of volunteers around the country. The charity didn’t want to have to create new active directory accounts for each of these volunteers so as part of the demo we integrated SharePoint 2010 site with Windows Azure App Fabric Access Control (ACS), this way we could use Google, Windows Live, and Yahoo! as authentication providers. (Yes I know we could hook directly to each of these providers, but using ACS allowed me to use all the providers with one SharePoint Trusted Provider instead of using three different trust providers). We demoed the site to the charity and they were very excited and happy with the solution.

I was attempting to create a custom FAST Search Center that would have a custom master page, and some web parts added to the search and result pages. My starting point was to grab the FAST Search Center site definition from the site templates in the SharePoint 14 Hive.

Recently I have been working on a SharePoint 2010 solution that leverages External Content Types for storing information associated with Microsoft Dynamics Great Planes Timesheets. Part of the information captures when an task is expected to be completed, which the UI allows the user to select a date from a calendar. Since the only significant information for this field was the date when I designed the database I chose to only capture the date value. Testing on my local Windows 7 VM worked perfectly and we rolled the solution out to the customer for testing.

Recently I was contacted by PACKT Publishing because they have recently published a book Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration and wanted me to review the book. I’m actually quite excited about this opportunity because it is my first invitation to review a book, and the book is talking about two of my favorite technologies!

Many SharePoint developers have come from a background with ASP.NET and so most are familiar with the Membership Provider concept. SharePoint uses ASP.NET at its core the membership providers you have build for custom web applications can be used in your SharePoint web application. The advantage of this is that you can abstract your web parts, application pages, etc in SharePoint so they use the Membership Provider to get user information rather than coding your own Active Directory calls into a library or the web part/application page itself.

During a recent project I was leveraging the SharePoint Lists Web Service to retrieve information from a list and push it to a Silverlight display. The list I was using was a heavily customized list with about 35 different views and at least as may fields. My Silverlight display would provide information like the “status” of the list item based on a number of other criteria. This status field was stored as a simple “Single line of text” field in the SharePoint list.