SharePoint 2013 | View post on anonymous blog asking for auth?

So, SharePoint 2013 has a lovely feature that is automatically enabled when a site or at-least parts of a site are set to allow anonymous access, this feature is "Limited-access user permission lockdown mode" it stops anonymous users from seeing SP system pages, it is a very useful security feature and in previous versions of SP, it is automatically disabled when the site is set to allow anonymous, 2013 being a more security conscious beast sets it by default.

Why is this an issue? a blog is just a normal site with pages in a library? not so!

A blog site consists of 

1. a homepage (viewable with anon, perfectly fine)
2. a Comments list (adding comments as anonymous is also fun and games!)
3. a Posts list (all blog articles are posts, and here is where the problem lies, clicking on a post on the homepage takes the user to the "view form" for that list item, hence a system page! so it is automatically locked down

So with this you really have two options:

1. Disable the “Limited-access user permission lockdown mode” Site Collection Feature (see the side effects below)
2. Create a custom view and list web part, all in a pages library

Both options are valid but choose carefully, they both entail extra work, disabling the lockdown feature does the following:

Allows list pages and system pages applicable to a read user to be viewable anonymously, so a user can navigate to those pages and see the lists, all left hand nav panels will show Site Contents and any other previously restricted links, so you end up needing to hide the links and need to be wary of anonymous visitors seeing your sites lists and libraries

SharePoint 2013 | Arabic display templates issues

I had another lovely issue recently, i created a set of display templates for different languages, all worked fine except Arabic, when the html file was uploaded the JS would get generated but as a "Design File", so the CSWPs wouldn't pick it up, tried changing the CT manually and it errored out saying the master page gallery didn't have the right fields.

The solution was to install SP1 and SP1 for the language packs, save yourself time, make sure you have a properly patched server!

Surface 3 Pro as a web development machine

A few weeks ago I obtained a surface 3 pro (128gb/4gb), since then I have been using it constantly as my main machine in an effort to see if and how it can be used as a development machine, before this I was using a Lenovo Z500 (8GB ram, i7 3rd gen, 1tb disk) so I naturally compare the performance and use of the surface to that.

The work I do in a day to day basis:

• PHP dev (LAMP server, VS 2013)
• Powershell (ISE/prompt x 2)
• ASP.net Dev (2-5 dev sites up at any time, all with VS 2013)
• SharePoint Dev (SPD 2010/2013, VS 2010/2012/2013)
• Graphic Design (Paint.Net, Photoshop)
• Presentations and demoing (Office Suite, Lync, Camtasia)

So I main needs for a laptop are:

• It needs to be Quick
• Can handle the masses of chrome and IE tabs I have open along with a few instances of VS and a few RDP sessions
• Portable (I generally carry it for atleast 2h/day)

The Good

• The battery can generally see me through an entire workday without needing to charge, very useful for travelling
• The plug has a USB charger built in
• The build of the Surface is spot on, its solid and all the parts work well together
• Size means its easy to use in smaller spaces
• Nice in-built sound, for those spotify/netflix moments
• Type keyboard feels good when typing, feeling like a miz beterrn a mac pro keyboard and the awesome old "tappy" keyboards
• Its very portable, being list and small, the kick stand being able to pivot to most positions makes it great to have on most types of desk
• The InstantGo functionality is nice, meaning you can just close the keyboard over the screen and the surface instantly goes into a sleep state, you can carry it around for hours and it wont loose almost any battery in that stage, great when you are about to make a demo or a presentation, one less thing the demo gods can smite you with! 

The Bad

• The touch screen functionality in windows 8.1 still doesn’t really cut it when you need to use a lot of selecting so a mouse is needed
• Use of display port means I have to carry a box of different cables around (VGA/HDMI/Ethernet) to connect to a wired network or to any external screen
• 4GB of ram means occasionally being selective on the apps I have open and almost no possibility for on-box VM's, but with teh readily available Azure VM's, there isnt really a need to have the local VM's, atleast in the way we used to need them so this isnt much of an issue
• Screensize can be a bit small, recommend docking it to a larger screen

Conclusion

I have found this to be a brilliant replacement for a the z500 laptop, it can rip through almost any work quickly, my biggest issue with it is the size of the screen, when developing on it, due to the nice resolution it means code can be hard to see, but of course if you have an office space, a doc and a 24inch monitor solves that very easily and cheaply.

Now i have been using this for weeks i cant see the need to go back to a full laptop unless you need that extra grunt for VM's or a few instances of Photoshop and other apps open

Ofcourse it depends on what you are looking for and the type of intensive web dev you do, based on my needs it ticked every box, i would use this for everything apart from local VM's

.NET | Issue | CSV export giving corrupted chars for non english characters Â

Someone asked me today about an encoding problem they were having, its amazing, encoding issues have been around since the beginning of computers, the requirement to export international data to files or pages and having the reader interpret the characters correctly is pretty common, I would go so far as to say that about half of every big projects has some form of requirement around that.

So then we come to why the issue shows up? "Ive debugged and can see the data from the database is being shown correctly but when i export it to the response, the special characters come back as gobbledygook, even the pound symbol is coming back as '£'"

what do you do?

1. Check the data in the database is stored correctly and it is getting to the response without being corrupted
2. Check you are setting the ContentEncoding correctly, what do you need to use? UTF8 is always a good one to use if you are unsure
3. Make sure you are using the right BOM (Byte Order Mark)! (this is nearly always the issue with unexplained chars with the correct encoding, see below

if you want to know more about BOM, have a look at this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

Working with multiple Microsoft accounts (multiple 365 accounts)

it can be tiresome and confusing working with multiple microsoft accounts. there are countless scneario's where you will need to be logged in to more than one microsoft account at the same time, now the common way of doing this would be to use different browsers, IE and FIrefox or chrome for example, thats one way of doing it but that means you can only have a certain number of accounts, or using in private or incognito browsing but again, they all have limited usage and with the in private you will loose your credentials and history when you cose the window

Scenario's:
Using personal Live account and need to sign in with company account
Using company account and trying to sign in to company dev account
Using client account and trying to sign in with company account
the scenario's go on and on,

Enter Chrome Users....

Chrome has taken the title of best browser from firefox a few years back, it is quick, light and it works, for most web developers it is the browser of choice and thelist of reasons for that are as long as your arm.

chrome has another feature that most people arent aware of or using, this feature is perfect for using multiple accounts

Chrome Users

Setting up Users: he chrome site has all the information you need on setting up users here: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en-GB

On my environment i need to mange four separate Microsoft accounts, for this I have created four users, my first user being my main intranet account:

on that account I have saved passwords and settings for that user, if I click to the "Py" account, a new window opens with that user icon, with that i am able to use all my saved settings and passwords for my "Py" 365 account

You can see when you have multiple windows up, the icon user indicator allows you to easily see which window is which, this works for as many users as you want.

I highly recommend using it for any one who has to manage more than one Microsoft account, it is brilliant and such a simple way of managing multiple accounts!

SharePoint 2010/2013: Enable-SPFeature Error (Failed to create receiver object from assembly)

So I had another lovely error recently, I had a wasp which had some external assemblies, I accidentally forgot to add one to the package manifest and when it deployed I got:

Enable-SPFeature : Failed to create receiver object from assembly "ASSEMBLYNAME, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=eaf1b7820cf1
fb30", class "CLASSNAME" for feature "FEATURENAME" (ID: 08284496-c68e-4f6c-befe-5777d14ad74b).
: System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.

So I instantly realised I was being silly and added the reference to the package manifest, packaged it, cabbed it, The Dll was in there, Great! I deployed the wsp and tried The deployment script again, it failed on the same point, I checked the gas, it was there alright, everything was looking as it should, but I couldn't activate the feature.

What was wrong? I tried deploying once more, did an observer for good measure and still nothing.

I then thought I would reopen the PowerShell window and try once again on the off chance that something was borked, so I restarted it, ran the script and it worked!

For some reason, the PowerShell session had cached the old error response from the feature activation, I don't know why but that's what it seemed to do.

Rule of thumb for the future, open a new ps session if you get an unexplained issue with a ps script

SharePoint 2013/365: Get current page properties/metadata with REST

Scenario

Retrieve the current page layout name via the page metadata on Office 365, this approach must be maintainable, flexible and not have any extra costs

Investigation

There are a number of ways to get the current page metadata with full trust code, simply using the SPContext.Current.ListItem allows you to get the collection, of course that wont work going forward with O365.

The most flexible way of working with any form of SharePoint object in O365 is to use JavaScript, thankfully there are a number of ways that can be done:

• Use the JSOM - there are a number of blog posts currently on how to return the current items with JavaScript
• Use Search - mapping properties and matching the search result by url is also a possibility, this is fast and allows easy optimisation
• Use REST - there isn't much on this approach out there, it looks like a pretty obvious choice so i decided to try this approach.

Solution

The architectural approach is as such:
On Page Load

1. Using the current context object data form a rest query
2. Query the ListItem REST endpoint
3. Get the page fields out of the returned data

Here is the finished codeblock:

Powershell | Get SharePoint 2010 Custom Error and Access Denied pages

A simple script, run this on any SharePoint server in a farm and it will return all set error and access denied pages for all web applications:

Scenario: Audit of farm setup

Script:
<#
.Synopsis
   Gets all set error and access denied pages for all webapps in the current farm
.EXAMPLE
   get-sperrorpages
#>

function get-sperrorpages()
{
    $snapin = Get-PSSnapin | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq 'Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell'}
    if ($snapin -eq $null)
    {      
        Write-Host "Loading SharePoint Powershell Snapin"
        Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell"
    }

    Start-SPAssignment -global
get-spwebapplication | ForEach-Object {
Write-Host "Web Application: $_" -foregroundcolor Green
Write-Host " - Error Page Set:" $_.GetMappedPage([Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication+SPCustomPage]::Error)
Write-Host " - Access Denied Page Set:" $_.GetMappedPage([Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication+SPCustomPage]::AccessDenied)
Write-Host ""
}

    Stop-SPAssignment –global
}

Output:
PS C:\dev\scripts\audit> .\get-errorpages.ps1
Web Application: SPWebApplication Name=intranet.devnet.local
 - Error Page:
 - Access Denied Page:

Web Application: SPWebApplication Name=extranet.devnet.local
 - Error Page: /_layouts/Devnet.Local/Error.aspx
 - Access Denied Page: /_layouts/Devnet.Local/AccessDenied.aspx

Web Application: SPWebApplication Name=internet.devnet.local
 - Error Page: /_layouts/Devnet.Local/Error.aspx
 - Access Denied Page: /_layouts/Devnet.Local/AccessDenied.aspx

Web Application: SPWebApplication Name=edit.internet.devnet.local
 - Error Page: /_layouts/Devnet.Local/Error.aspx
 - Access Denied Page: /_layouts/Devnet.Local/AccessDenied.aspx

As you can see from that execution my farm has four web applications, three are publicly accessible so i have set custom error and access denied pages, the fourth is internal only so there is no need for any custom branded pages

Powershell | Get all active RDP sessions for a username

For any IT admin/dev, the ecosystem involves connecting and managing multiple remote desktop sessions to different servers and computers, this can get very cumbersome to maintain and make sure you are disconnecting, many of you probably use mRemote or Remoter Desktop Connection manager to help you manage all of your different connections (if you don't, you really should, its a godsend to be able to categorise and organise all of your connections).

The problem comes in when you have an unexpected crash or an issue and either your computer crashes or the RDP app crashes, you can loose track of which connection you have open, that can lead to leaving sessions open taking up valuable resources or hogging sessions other people need.

That problem can be solved with this powershell script:

<#
.Synopsis
   Gets all server entries from an RDPC connection file and shecks for any open sessons
.EXAMPLE
   get-rdpsessions "C:\resources\rdpSettings.rdg" 'benjamin.dev'
#>
function get-rdpsessions()
{
    Param(
        # link to the RDPC connections file
        $rdcManagerFile,
        # default username to use incase the conneciton entry doesnt have a username set, this should be without the domain
        $defaultUsername)
    
    Select-Xml -XPath '//server' -Path "C:\resources\rdpSettings.rdg" | %{
        $server = $_.node.name
        $userName = $defaultUsername
        if ($_.Node.logonCredentials.HasChildNodes)
        {
            $userName =  $_.Node.logonCredentials.userName
        }
    
        $queryResults = (qwinsta /server:$server | foreach { (($_.trim() -replace “\s+”,”,”))} | ConvertFrom-Csv)
        $queryResults |  %{
            if ($_.SESSIONNAME -eq $userName)
            { 
                write-host 'User:' $_.SESSIONNAME 'is active on' $server -ForegroundColor green
            }
        }
    }
}

get-rdpsessions "C:\resources\rdpSettings.rdg" 'benjamin.dev'

This will output something like the following:

PS C:\Users\benjamin.dev> C:\Users\benjamin.dev\SkyDrive\Code\PS\get-rdpsessions.ps1
User: benjamin.dev is active on devnet-ad.devnet.local
User: benjamin.dev is active on devnet-sql.devnet.local
User: benjamin.dev is active on devnet-sp14.devnet.local
User: benjamin.dev is active on devnet-sp15.devnet.local

This script can be easily modified to integrate with whatever system you use, for example, if you run a development house or consultancy, this could be modified to run through all servers for all users at 4:50 in the afternoon every day and email anyone who has an active session to remind them they need to log off