Archive for February 2012

 
 

Debugging the MVC Application

So your MVC apps do really start the same way and our new best friend, Stephen, describes how to set the startup page here.

And then there’s the tutorial from Microsoft’s ASP.NET site here.

SharePoint as a Service Provider

Our objective is to get SharePoint content on an iPad. Our costraints are that we have to use an ASP.NET MVC3 website that runs on the same web servers but outside of SharePoint. This site will use the SharePoint site’s web services to gather content metadata and links to published SharePoint content.

Our tools are:

  • SharePoint 2007
  • Visual Studio 2010
  • MVC3
  • HTML5 

We’ve got a functional SharePoint publishing portal website that’s internet facing to that’s our “requirements” but we need to optimize for the iPad and we’ll use a Safari browser as a proxy for that.

And just like your TV chefs, someone’s already built the whole solution. We copy that to our project’s folder to open it in Visual Studio so we can see it run and, as ususal, barf:

The project type is not supported by this installation.

So, what we have here is something missing. We check with our new best friends at StackOverflow.com where, here, our new best friend MindStalker tells us we need to open our .csproj file in notepad and identify the project type guids.

Sure enough, in the .csproj file, we see:

<ProjectTypeGuids>
{E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401};
{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};
{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}
</ProjectTypeGuids>

We google the GUIDs and we see they all realte to MVC. Now, anyone that’s been following along know we know squat about MVC but Microsoft provides a bit of info here including an option to download the MVC3 Installer.

Let’s give that a go… Click, Accept, Install…

This is a pretty clunky install. It gave me one green bar real quick but then took several minutes to start the second. It stopped about half-way for a minute or two than again at about 70%. The pinwheel would spin very slowly. But then it completes and wants to reboot. What’s arobot to do?

After the reboot, we can open the project no problem. To get our project to open in Safari, we need to work a little trickery.

Again, our friends at StackOverflow.com help out here. First we have to find a browsable file such as a .aspx or .html file. Since there’s none of these in my project, I tried an .xml file. Right click on it and select  Open With and Visual Studio will open a dialog box that will allow you to select a browser from your installed options which, since I just installed Safari, include Safari. Then, best of all, it gives us an option to set our selection as our default.

So now we can build our solution and debug right in Safari. What could be easier?

-robot

New Things at SharePoint from Scratch

I hate when bloggers talk about “haven’t been blogging” and “I’ve got to put more time in this” and on and on…

So briefly, I blog so I can remember how to do stuff. Everything I’ve blogged is there so I can go back and use it the next time I need to do something slimilar. If anyone else finds any of it interesting, great.

Since I last blogged, I left the sorriest company I’ve ever worked for and found a new opportunity that has been truly captivatating. The reason for the lack of blog posts is that I’ve been so busy doing stuff I know how to do but none of it was new so I didn’t need to create any blog entries to track any notes; nothing new to help us get going the way we like it, from scratch.

Things change.

I’ve got something new to work on and some blog posts will be coming, probably today.

But, in addition, we’ve heard the first alarms about SharePoint 2013 and Office 15.  With that in mind, your favorite robot has captured the 15Hive.com domain name and pointed it here. we’ve also got the @15Hive Twitter name and we’ve followed some of the SharePoint community’s brightest Twitterers. Finally, and this is cool, we’ve set up an aggregator at paper.li so if you’re stoked about SharePoint 2013 and you want to be spoonfed, subscribe here.

So, enough navel gazing, let’s build something from scratch.

-robot