Gav's Blog

Lake Louise Life

Gavin Barron — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 12:05:34 GMT

For those of you who were unaware I am now living in Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada :oD My current job is working in the Mountain Operations department for the Lake Louise Ski Area as a part of the Trail Crew team. One of the long time staff members Chris Mosely has set up his own blog on the inner w ... (More)

Introducing the Cross Site Collection Search Configurator

Gavin Barron — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 17:52:00 GMT

While I was working at Intergen I was alerted to a small issue with configuring search keywords, best bets and synonyms. This simply being that they are set on a per site collection basis and there is no OOTB solution to share them. This has previously meant either using manual steps to ensure tha ... (More)

Turn off custom error pages in SharePoint.

Gavin Barron — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:56:00 GMT

There are a number of good posts out there that will tell you how to get useful, for a developer, error messages out of SharePoint. Useful things to know while attempting SharePoint Development A solution to "An unexpected error has occurred" in WSS v3 A tip for your SharePoint develo ... (More)

SharePoint and Agile

Gavin Barron — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:54:00 GMT

Go together like a horse and carriage. Well, that's my take anyway. I've been involved on a few SharePoint projects now that have taken a tradition approach, i.e. waterfall style, to the development of the customers desired end product. While we did deliver a good solution to the customer I feel ... (More)

SharePoint Bookmarklets

Gavin Barron — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:14:00 GMT

A workmate just put me onto a great resource that Zac showed during the Tech-Ed session on Tools and techniques which he presented with Matt. These are a great set of bookmarks that work relative to your current page and let you quickly access various application pages, check out the SharePoint d ... (More)

Sorting with a Comparison Delegate

Gavin Barron — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:58:38 GMT

I've just seen the awesome power of delegates, I can't believe that I've never used them all that much before, mostly because I've been able to take advantage of using SQL or CAML to do my ordering, hey adding an ORDER BY or <OrderBy> clause is dead easy ;). Last night I was in the situation ... (More)

Difference Disks = Win

Gavin Barron — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:58:00 GMT

Huge thanks to Reza Alirezaei for his series of posts on creating your own time bombed VM. After reading that I thought to myself, 'hey, I could use that technique to keep a set of different VMs across multiple projects with the same base set up'. After a couple of hours of installing, configuri ... (More)

Pre-Populate a SharePoint List Instance

Gavin Barron — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 19:30:00 GMT

So, you want to provide a look-up in a SharePoint Site Definition and you'd quite like to provide your users with some options? (i.e. items in the source list) Firstly you're probably interested in this post from Josh Gaffy about adding a lookup column declaratively using CAML. Next you'll be wa ... (More)

Handy CAB tool

Gavin Barron — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:46:00 GMT

Alright, I've just had to edit an existing wsp :o| I won't go into the why and wherefores, suffice to say that I decided that the easiest way to achieve my end was to extract the contents, edit the necessary XML file and repack the cab. Now I didn't feel like writing a ddf and using MAKECAB.EXE fo ... (More)

National Tour Roundup

Gavin Barron — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:08:00 GMT

Firstly thanks to everyone who came along, it was great to meet so many people either using SharePoint out there in the "Real World"™ and others who were just keen to learn more. Further thanks to: Matt Smith for organising the tour. Alan Marshal, Tamlyn Kemp and Keith Patton for ... (More)