As mentioned before, we’ve started to use SmartAssembly to obfuscate some of our products. We also use Team Foundation Server (TFS) as source control and build server. Using obfuscation with code analysis caused some issues, which were compounded by our check-in policies. Continue reading
We’ve started to use SmartAssembly to obfuscate the code for some of the SharePoint products that we’ve been working on, and I’d had a few problems with it. Continue reading
Less of a technical post, but something I harp on about daily in the office – Requirements. Continue reading
Something that I have to do time and again is get some element of SharePoint’s heirarchy, such as a site collection, site, list or item. This is pretty typical – that’s why we all use USING to ensure proper disposal of SPSites and SPWebs, right? But what happens if the thing you’re after isn’t there? What exception get’s thrown?
Well, this should be pretty clear:
try
{
//FileNotFoundException if doesn't exist
using (SPSite site = new SPSite(siteGuid))
{
//FileNotFoundException if doesn't exist
using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb(webGuid))
{
//SPException if doesn't exist
SPList list = web.Lists[listGuid];
//ArgumentException if doesn't exist
SPListItem item = list.GetItemByUniqueId(itemGuid);
}
}
}
catch (System.IO.FileNotFoundException fileEx2)
{
// Site or Site Collection Not Found
}
catch (SPException spEx2)
{
// List not found
}
catch (ArgumentException argEx2)
{
// Item not found
}
Hopefully that might prove useful to someone – and a good reminder for me.
I’m a big fan of not raising exceptions if possible – rather than throwing and catching ‘expected exceptions’. To me, that phrase is an oxymoron – exceptions should be, um, exceptional, and it can make the wood hard to see for the trees when looking for proper exceptions.
Anyway, that aside – you can make Visual Studio break on any exception, not just the unhandled ones. Use Ctrl-Alt-E to edit – there is supposed to be some way to get to it though the menu, but I’ve not found it. Discovered in a blog post here.
I’ve been doing some testing of email enabled lists, and I needed to send quite a lot of emails, so I wrote a little console app to do it. Here’s the core of the code I used, in case I need it again, or it’s useful to someone. It uses System.Net.Mail:
SmtpClient smtp = new SmtpClient(@"vm-moss2007.virtual.local");
for (int i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
{
MailMessage message = new MailMessage("administrator@virtual.local", <a href="mailto:testlist@sharepoint.virtual.local">testlist@sharepoint.virtual.local</a>);
message.Subject = string.Format("Message {0}", i);
message.Body = string.Format("This is message '{0}'", i);
Console.WriteLine("Sending {0}", i);
smtp.Send(message);
}
While working on pre-filling ListItem fields on an item, I became a bit puzzled. The SPItemEventProperties.AfterProperties collection is a dictionary which can contain the named value for one of the fields of the item. In other words, if we wanted to set a value “Tax Area” to “Europe” we’d do:
properties.AfterProperties["Tax Area"] = "Europe";
In our case, however, we didn’t know what these properties were before hand. Rather, we were ‘inheriting’ values from a parent folder. Thus, we were going to use the parent folder’s SPField object for each field to define the value. I started out using:
properties.AfterProperties[parentField.Title] = parentItem[parentField.id];
But is Title the right property to use? Well, having looked through a number of blog posts, this seems to be the subject of some confusion.
At first Title is okay to use. However, you can change the display name of the field. For example, we could change our field’s Title to ‘Tax Region’ – but we still need to use ‘Tax Area’ in our AfterProperties collection.
So, InternalName is the right property of the SPField to use – but there is a hiccup. The InternalName is encoded – Tax_x0020_Area – so you have to unescape it like I’ve talked about before.
The summary is, then, use the unescaped InternalName in your AfterProperties collection.
I like mail enabled lists – they’re not perfect, but they are nice, and most folks can handle working email.
Sometimes, though, you want to programmatically create and enable these lists. That’s cool – but how do you figure out the email address of the list afterward?
You can get the first part of the address from the SPList object’s EmailAlias property. But that’s only the bit before the ‘@’ sign – what about the end of the address? Well, you get that from the farm:
emailAlias = list.EmailAlias + "@" + SPFarm.Local.Services.GetValue<SPIncomingEmailService>("").ServerDisplayAddress;
This gets the rest of the address (in my case ‘sharepoint.virtual.local’). Job done.
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while – how to programmatically disable page layouts for a site in SharePoint, similar to how you’d do so with the ‘Page Layouts and Site Templates’ page in the site settings. You can also specify what page layouts are allowed, if you are defining your own Site Definition. But someday, maybe you’ll have to do it through code.
I’m pretty sure that I read something that set me going on this, but I’ve lost the link 
Continue reading
Another thing I’d not done through the SharePoint Object Model was create or reply to a Discussion. This sounded a bit more complicated, but I found a helpful post of ‘Common Discussion Operations‘… Continue reading