Tips for supporting clients with BlackBerry phones

Have you ever been called by a client who tells you, “I can’t get emails on my phone. Help me!” You would love to help, but struggle with guiding them through the menus on their BlackBerry because you don’t have the same model available. There is a very easy solution to this…download the simulator! Research [...]

Integrated Authentication – Prompted for Credentials Anyway?

Many people have difficulty setting up the connection to SharePoint 2010 such that users are not prompted to enter their username and password. SharePoint does support integrated authentication, but there are a few settings that can interfere. On the SharePoint side: Try different configuration options in SharePoint. This is done through the SharePoint Central Administration [...]

SharePoint Event Handling – Property Promotion in Office

One of the big selling points for SharePoint 2007 is the ability to have MS Word automatically detect the fields that are set up in Sharepoint and make those values available within the document. This feature is called property promotion when SharePoint pulls the values from the Word doc and fills in the list fields [...]

SharePoint Events – Setting a Column Value in the ItemUpdating Event

I was recently tasked to automatically set a document ID value in a SharePoint 2007 document library. (In SharePoint 2010, an excellent document ID feature is included out of the box)  I figured it would be easy since SharePoint supports calculated columns.  However, I needed to be able to insert the document ID value into a Word document as a field.  Sharepoint does not include [...]

SharePoint Event Handling – When do events fire?

There are a lot of different events that are exposed for us to hook our code into. Unfortunately, WHEN those events get triggered is poorly documented and inconsistent across the SharePoint framework. I wrote this article to list out the different event hooks available and to document my test results when I built some automation [...]

Building SharePoint Web Parts – Basic Handling of Exceptions

I’ve gone through the process of creating custom web parts a few dozen times now, and I thought I’d share an exception handling pattern that I’ve found very useful. I keep re-using this pattern for two reasons: It is REALLY simple. It works. If a web part doesn’t handle an exception, SharePoint will catch the exception and [...]

WinDBG – Inspecting Memory in Managed Code

Although WinDBG has been around for a long time, it is still one of the great memory analysis tools for use with your managed code applications.  I recently went through the exercise of installing, configuring, and using WinDBG on my Windows 7 dev box and I thought I would post about just how useful and simple to [...]