Latest C# topics

Curate the News Social Following Sites on behalf of a user The impetus for this post was the desire to follow a site for a batch of users. Why? Well, the news that shows up on the SharePoint home page stems from news posted to sites you follow. So as an organization, especially a large one, if you want to somewhat curate what news gets pushed to your users you need to make sure they’re following the sites that have the news you want them to see. [Continue Reading]

Introduction Azure Active Directory (AAD) Unified Groups, or better known as Office365 Groups, the security principal that underlies modern SharePoint team sites, Teams, Outlook Groups, Planner, etc. is a very powerful management construct that is the glue that holds the Office 365 security pyramid together. Basically, a Unified Group has both an Owners group and a Members group and by adding users (either users in your tenant or external users – with a Microsoft based work and school account or a personal account) you can create a construct that allows you to work across many of the vast product offerings in Office 365. For a more easily consumable infographic covering the power of Unified Groups go check out fellow MVP, Matt Wade’s An everyday guild to Office 365 Groups [Continue Reading]

I’m currently dealing with a requirement where I need to the set an application page’s title from the code behind. By default the form has a ContentPlaceHolder control with a ContentPlaceHolderID=“PlaceHolderPageTitle” which in the master page is the text that will fall in the header’s title tag. Unfortunately, asp:Content controls are not added to the hierarchy at runtime so I can’t access it directly. There are good ways to modify this title on the client side with Javascript but client side code doesn’t really suit my needs as the title will come from some custom manipulation that’s better done on the server. It did cross my mind that I could do this manipulation and then post it back in script to have it update but it seemed kind of like taking the long way around. Anyway, long story short I found a way to access that title in the Page_Load event but if anyone out there has any better ideas I’d love to hear them. [Continue Reading]

I’m working on a requirement to copy files from one document library to another document library in a sub-site. I figured this wouldn’t be horribly difficult to do but turns out it’s not as simple as you might think and for some reason, although I found many questions about how to do it, I found very few answers. From the things I’ve read out there it’s apparently relatively easy if you’re moving documents within the same site… apparently the Move method works and I read where someone suggesting using SPExport and SPImport. I also found a post by Ivan Sanders that said that you can use Site Actions > Manage Content and Structure > Choose the Library > Choose the docs >Use the Actions drop Down Click onMove > Choose the new Location to accomplish the move on this thread (this post is no longer available). Unfortunately, none of these solutions fully met my needs. [Continue Reading]

When working with BCS data and creating an external data column in a list or library it is often desirable to show some or all of the secondary fields. In the SharePoint UI, this is a simple task, completed by checking off the fields to capture for viewing, searching, filtering, and sorting later. However, when you’re building your list or library using a custom list definition schema.xml file this is not as simple. After struggling a bit trying to code the XML myself, it dawned on me that I could mock up the field using the UI and then extract the properly formatted field tags by getting the schemaxml property of the list. [Continue Reading]