In August 2021, I had the privilege of travelling to Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, NM to attend Wood Badge 133. The Wood Badge experience was nothing short of exemplary. I’ve been a scout leader for 5 years and leader and manager of software teams for over 13 years, and I’ve never been to anything quite as comprehensive and well-thought as this leadership training. What was the price for this 5 day training? It’s a steal at under $700!
in Sharepoint on Sharepoint, Rest, Authentication, Java, Kerberos
Each enterprise has many languages they use to solve their technology problems. C# and Java are the predominate languages used in most enterprises. However, I have noticed a distinct difference between these two types of developers. Enterprises that use Microsoft Active Directory have very little problem with authentication for applications developed using C# (or Visual Basic). NTLM and Kerberos are natively supported for authentication by all .Net applications. Authentication looks like the following (C#):
in Sharepoint on Sharepoint, Rest, User information list, Uil
I have experienced many legacy solutions which closely depend on the SharePoint Server Side Object Model (SSOM). This was the only option for being able to manage your SharePoint 2007 and 2010 farms. You may have read on some of my past blog posts, code written against the SharePoint SSOM is extremely difficult to unit test without Microsoft Fakes or writing a facade. As a result, I have deepened my familiarity with the SharePoint 2013 REST APIs. They are much more strategic, especially when planning for the possibility of moving to SharePoint Online / Office 365.
in Software development on Software Posts, Development, Programming, Best practices
After reviewing some recent software work and discussing those reviews with my team, it was clear that what I considered common practices, they didn’t.
One of my most recent interactions with several of my colleagues has been over best practices within software development. More specifically, the idea of static classes, static methods, and helper classes. It was a healthy debate with different view points. Some believe that static methods are perfectly fine for development. Others feel that helper classes provide unity to certain practices such as database access. Generally, however, I believe static and helper classes are an anti-pattern and lead to less maintainable code. This post is an expression of why I believe this to be the case. None of the code samples are actual snippets on real projects. They are paraphrased instances of practices I’ve seen on a myriad of past projects.
in Systems administration on Sharepoint, Enterprise, Social, Brevity, Communication, Email, Technology
Enterprise social technology is all the buzz these days. Here’s some ideas on how to make it successful.
Let’s talk about something I really don’t like: e-mail. Let me clarify this by saying I loathe e-mails on team projects. Why? Persistence. Conversations via e-mail have this perception they will be “found” at a later time, but the proposed value is rarely so useful. Furthermore, new team members or collaborators rarely ever get that context, because it’s buried in another person’s e-mail. This is my approach to how teams should communicate to ensure longevity of this critically important information. I’m a huge fan of the e-mail brevity challenge. The idea is simple: keep your e-mails short. 140 characters short. What this limits you to do is huge. Do you think you can have technical design discussions with 140 characters? What about researching technical support problems? How about product feature ideas? Clarifying how your team came to the conclusion to disable a feature due to security constraints? You might be able to do this in a bunch of 140 character e-mails, but that’s hardly a good use of time.
in Systems administration / Software development on Sharepoint, 2013, Powershell, Mysites, Social, Timer job
This post discusses how to re-create the timer jobs used for My Site creation in SharePoint 2013.
The way My Sites are created in SharePoint 2013 is vastly different from SharePoint 2010, but for good reason. I won’t go into the details of how it’s changed, as Wictor Wilen has done an excellent job of this already in his blog post SharePoint 2013: Personal Site Instantiation Queues and Bad Throughput. I encountered problems with a new development workstation not setting up My Sites for users appropriately - blocking us from testing our solution, which was dependent upon a user having a My Site. In looking online (and in Wictor’s blog post), everything was pointing to checking the following three timer jobs:
in Software development on Sharepoint, 2013, Sp2013, Social, Socialdatastoreexception, Javascript, Client object model, Tenant
Ran into a bit of a problem figuring out an exception I received while writing a SharePoint 2013 apps.
As I was writing an app using the new SharePoint 2013 app model the other day, I ran into an issue when I was trying to follow a site automatically through JavaScript:
in Systems administration on Sharepoint, Claims, Identity, Migration
I’m in the process of migrating my customer from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013. In their SharePoint 2010 environment, they were still using classic-mode authentication, but are switching to claims-based authentication in SharePoint 2013.
I have just completed building my first SharePoint 2013 application. I came across the error message Sorry, only tenant administrators can add or give access to this app. when trying to deploy the application to my site. This happened regardless if I was deploying using a SharePoint development site or after installing the solution in the app catalog.
Keep going!Keep going ×2!Give me more!Thank you, thank youFar too kind!Never gonna give me up?Never gonna let me down?Turn around and desert me!You're an addict!Son of a clapper!No wayGo back to work!This is getting out of handUnbelievablePREPOSTEROUSI N S A N I T YFEED ME A STRAY CAT
