Radi's SharePoint Blog - English

Slides from the SUGBG/CORE IO presentation

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 12:11:00 +0300

Myself and Ognyan delivered a presentation on managing a development/QA environment for an entire team last night.

Here are the slides :)

Feel free to ask us any questions on the topic.

Enjoy!

Recompiling your own version of the SharePoint code to suit your needs

Sun, 23 Mar 2014 13:16:00 +0300

Ever been pissed off at the SharePoint code? Banging your head against the wall, trying to figure out why something is not working for you, you're looking at it with a reflection tool and just want to see what would happen if you change a single line of code?

You don't have the SharePoint source code, but you still want to fiddle with it and compile your own build? You might have never thought that is possible, but here in this post I will show you how!

This is by far extremely awesome and some seriously fun shit, so enjoy!

(Disclaimer: don't do this, seriously. Just learn from it. I am sure that reverse engineering is written to be forbidden somewhere. And don't do this anywhere near a production server.)

STEP 1) Get the Reflexil plugin, either in Reflector or Telerik JustDecompile. It is called "Assembly Editor" and is available as a JustDecompile Plugin. Ever since Red Gate basterdised Reflector I prefer Telerik JustDecompile, it is free and built in Sofia, where I live and where OneBit Software is located.

Once you get all the components in there, load your tool and the assembly that you want to fiddle with.

In my example I modify Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.Administration.dll, to make the CA UI show that I have a custom build, but you could easily do this with Microsoft.SharePoint.dll or any other assembly.

STEP 2) Browse through the assembly and find the code you want to modify. If you are tweaking a property, you need to specifically select the getter or setter. The UI will look like below, with many tabs in the Reflexil UI:

Right-click and either choose to edit the instruction, or "Replace all with code" for the fun stuff.

STEP 3) You will end up in an interface looking like the one below. On the left you will see generated code, on the right you will see instruction information. In my example, I replaced return default(string); with return "Radi's Custom SP Build!";

Make sure the Compiler version is the one relevant for the assembly, in my case v3.5, and hit Compile. You will get standard compiler errors if you have screwed something up. Otherwise if successful, the Instructions on the right will change as per your modification. That stuff is IL, you might already be familiar.

STEP 4) Go ahead and save your modified assembly. It will prompt you to save it with "Patched" in the filename:

STEP 5) After you save it, Reflexil/Telerik JustDecompiler will tell you some very important stuff about the Strong Name of the assembly. This step is key to get this to work and there's deep theory about assembly signing coming to play.

Assemblies are usually signed with a key so that they don't get tampered with in the way I'm doing it. Unless you have the key you can't modify it and resign it. This is something that Visual Studio does when it builds an assembly.

You can either remove the Strong Name, or register the assembly for verification skipping. This is something you could do with the sn.exe tool, or just through the interface below:

"Register it for verification sipping" requires that "sn.exe" is in the path variable so the tool can call it. It will basically execute:

sn -Vr yourAssembly.dll

I had to add "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v8.0A\bin\NETFX 4.0 Tools\x64" to my Environment PATH variable and restart JustDecompiler. You might want to do this before you edit assemblies so you don't have to do it again. This is what you will see if sn.exe is not found:

STEP 6) What you should see next is the patched assembly, but the most important part is the PublicKeyToken, it should not be null:

STEP 7) The last step, rename the "Patched" DLL to its original name, then do an IISRESET.

And here she is, the most beautiful SharePoint release ever:

Please comment if you like this post!

Slides and Video from my #SPC14 sessions, what a ripper I'm on Channel 9!

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 08:32:00 +0300

So, as you could imagine, #SPC14 was INSANE!!! So much content, amazing sessions, awesome announcements lots of great fun, lots of lost money at the casinos. I am still recovering, trying to get my calendar in order and attending to the endless list of tasks and people to follow-up. I have collected over 100 business cards, many of which are potential business opportunities, and have given out at least 400.

I got really good feedback from my sessions, I am happy, but there is always room for improvement. I was visibly (and audibly) tense in my #AccessServices session (the first one), but the amount of humor and jokes made up for it. A lot of people came up to me and told me they enjoyed it very much and that it was pure comedy. It was engaging, but definitely the amount of people in that session was mind gobbling. Definitely the first time for me speaking in front of 650 people (968 confirmed to attend, many more came, many got rejected because of no room). Overall it was a good session, but I also got some suggestions for improvements. The feedback is always the most important so I will definitely take action.

My talk on Work Management Service was significantly straight forward. It received a really high score, but overall it was not as entertaining as Access. the content was quite flat but unique. No other session at #SPC12 or #SPC14 demonstrates Task Synchronization and the Work Management Service. Many people, including in the feedback, told me they didn't even know it existed. It is very honorable to show something at #SPC14 that people don't know about.

Here are my slides and video:

Access is back! High-value, 'no code', functional & flexible business apps with the new Access services

Slides:

Video:

My Rating so far:

Evaluation Count 108
Question: Average Score:
The speaker’s presentation style helped me better understand the material. (5 excellent - 1 poor) 4.46
The speaker was knowledgeable about the subject matter. (5 = high to 1 = low) 4.72
The presentation was effective. (5 = high to 1 = low) 4.33
The demo(s) were effective. (5 excellent - 1 poor) 4.28
Overall satisfaction with this session. (5 = high to 1 = low) 4.39
Overall: 4.436

SharePoint 2013 Work Management Service Deep Dive

slides:

Video:

My rating so far:

Evaluation Count 27
Question: Average Score:
The speaker was knowledgeable about the session’s topic. (5 excellent - 1 poor) 4.87
The speaker’s presentation style helped me better understand the material. (5 excellent - 1 poor) 4.39
The presentation was effective source of learning. (5 excellent - 1 poor) 4.61
The demo(s) were effective. (5 excellent - 1 poor) 4.35
Overall satisfaction with this session. (5 excellent - 1 poor) 4.42
Overall: 4.528

(People are evaluating continuously, so numbers may change)

Overall, it was a great pleasure and a great experience. I sincerely hope I have shown someone something new.

Please feel free to contact me and ask me about these things, I would be glad to help. Oh, yes, and if I haven't offended anyone with my jokes, please feel free to come to my next session!

I’m speaking at SPC14 and ESPC14!

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 08:49:00 +0300

It has been a quiet period on blogging, but I have been very active in presentations and conferences. Well… not as active as Joel, Michael and Paul, but still active J

Catch me next at:

The SharePoint Conference 2014 in Las Vega, yeah baby!!!!

Session 1: Access is back! High-value, 'no code', functional & flexible business apps with the new Access services

Microsoft Access 2013 and Access Services 2013 have made a huge step forward... one of the greatest advancements on top of the new SharePoint platform. Anyone can build powerful business solutions in minutes. The new Access 2013 allows you to follow agile development from your business units and remain confident the data is secured, backed up, and managed appropriately. We will look at how you can leverage the SharePoint Apps model and use SQL Azure as a backend database. We, too, will talk about how your legacy Access applications could be brought forward and migrated.

This will be a technical session focused on functionality, capability, process and architecture. There will be 'no code' and we will discuss the rationale of why this should be in your development arsenal.

Date: Tuesday, March 4

Time: 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM

Room: Murano 3201-3303

Session Type: Best Practices

Session Code: SPC301

Audience: IT Professional

Level: 300

Product: Access, Office 365, SharePoint 2013

Tag: 2013, Access, Access Services, Apps, Cloud, On-Premises, Solutions, Tools

Role: Administrator, Application Manager, Database Administrator, IT Architect, Software Architect, Systems Administrator

This session currently has 474 attendees confirmed… WOW, just wow!!!

Session 2: SharePoint 2013 Work Management Service deep dive

Where do you keep track of all your tasks? Outlook? SharePoint? Maybe Project Server? Storing them across multiple applications is a pure Information Worker challenge. SharePoint 2013 has the new Work Management Service Application to solve these issues. It aggregates tasks across SharePoint, Exchange, Project Server and there's even a story for TFS. There's not that much documentation out there on how to configure it, how to maintain and work with it. In this session I will walk through the architecture and setup, and go over how it operates and what you need to know to keep it alive. I will demonstrate the features and discuss all of the technical aspects.

Date: Wednesday, March 5

Time: 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM

Room: Murano 3201-3303

Session Type: Deep Dive

Session Code: SPC342

Audience: IT Professional

Level: 300

Product: Exchange, Project, SharePoint 2013

Tag: 2013, Architecture, Deployment, On-Premises

And…

The European SharePoint Conference 2014 in Barcelona, 5-8^th May:

SharePoint 2013 App Authentication

SharePoint 2013 introduces a new App model that is drastically changing the way developers think about and deliver new functionality. This talk is a deep dive on SharePoint 15 App authentication and how it works, how tokens get exchanged and how the communication is secured. We will look at the framework API and architecture, all the various bells and whistles of OAuth and Server-2-Server authentication. This talk is developer oriented and we will spend a lot of time covering the specifics on OAuth authentication & tokens, communication back to SharePoint, the different deployment models, various limitations and how to overcome them and apply them to the real world.

Link: SharePoint 2013 App Authentication

Soon I will also be posting the upcoming local user group sessions. Stay tuned :)

#spc14, #espc14

Blog brought back up from the ashes….

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 07:50:00 +0300

Hi readers!

You might have noticed my blog down for a few months. Quite sad, I was constantly getting spam comments and eventually the whole SharePoint.BG platform crashed, bringing down a few blogs.

It took a while for me to find out, then eventually book time to revive it with the help of my colleagues.

We ended up migrating from BlogEngine 1.8 to 2.8, which is really much better. It still has bugs, but it is an OK platform. The challenging parts we're migrating some lost posts, making sure URL's are the same, making images work properly.The key feature we use is multiple bloggers, which is the idea of SharePoint.BG, a blog platform for interested people.

So… we’re back in business J oh yes, screw you annoying spammers!