Archive for the ‘SharePoint Development’ Category

SharePoint Terminology – Farms, Web Front Ends, Web Application and Sites

Date:July 8th, 2010 Author:Ryan Tags: , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Development, SharePoint Ideas, Training Comments:0 ;

There is a great deal of confusion around some terms related to the different levels of SharePoint hierarchy. Some of this is buzword overload and some  has been brought about by inconsistent usage from Microsoft (and to be fair actually most of us in this industry).

So if you’ve ever wondered what things like Farm, WFE, NLB, Web Application, Site Collection and Top Level Site mean I am going to try and clarify the different terms without getting too technical as some of this stuff needs to be know by advanced, or power, users. I’ve missed out some of the more esoteric things like managed paths in the interests of readers sanity.

SharePoint Feature Receivers – the hidden details

Date:June 15th, 2010 Author:Ryan Tags: ,
Category: General, SharePoint Development Comments:0 ;

Warning -  this post is somewhat techie so if you’re not a developer you may want to go find something more interesting to do!

I’ve been doing some work with SharePoint Feature Receivers recently and found the official documentation to be somewhat … lacking.

SharePoint Feature Receivers allow you to run code when a Feature such as a web part or template is installed, activated, deactivated and removed. They are often used for installation/setup tasks that can’t be done using XML incantations in Manifest.xml, Elements.xml and Feature.xml.

I am not going to give a step-by-step guide to Feature Receivers (see the excellent How to add a Feature Receiver to a Feature from SharePoint dev wiki) but plan to detail information that I was struggling to find anywhere else.

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Don’t get Public Key Blobs and Tokens mixed up!

Date:October 26th, 2008 Author:Ryan Tags:
Category: SharePoint Development, SharePoint Ideas Comments:0 ;

Introduction

When developing web-parts for Microsoft SharePoint, a developer must confront the .NET runtimes Code Access Security and Strongly Named Assembly features.

There are several gotchas involved, one of which – mixing up public key tokens and blobs – is described here.

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