Smart Hacks
How to: Get the name of a SharePoint feature from its GUID

There’s a really easy way to get the name of a feature that SharePoint requests from its provided GUID. For example, when SharePoint complains with something that looks like this: Error: The site template requires that the Feature {Long-GUID-of-Required-Feature-Here} be activated in the site collection. Correlation ID: {Long-GUID-of-Correlation-ID} Date and Time: “current date and time” [...]

Read More
Posted on 7th March 2012No Comments
How to: Create random Word documents of specified length

Have you ever found yourself in a position needing a document file to use in order to test an application? It’s one of those things that happen more often than not. What do you do then? I will normally start up Microsoft Word, type in some rubbish (or, even copy random stuff from whatever webpage [...]

Read More
Posted on 27th September 2011No Comments
How to: Troubleshoot “Server Error in ‘/’ Application.” error after SP2010 SP1 update

  In case you just installed SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1, or one of the new August/September 2011 updates is giving you a hard time, if you’re facing the following error: “Server Error in ‘/’ Application. Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of [...]

Read More
Posted on 14th September 201117 Comments
How to: Add a “Create New Document” link on a page outside a document library in SP2007

  If you want to display a link that allows you to create new items in a SharePoint 2007 document/form library, you can easily do that in a Content Query web part. Just do the following: 1. Navigate to the library where you want to be able to create new items. 2. Open up the [...]

Read More
Posted on 7th September 2011No Comments
How to: Debug SharePoint applications (attach to process).

First of all, you will need to turn off the custom errors. If you haven’t already done so, click here to find out how to turn off SharePoint Custom Errors After you’ve done that, you will be able to get more information about your application errors straight from the error page that will be served [...]

Read More
Posted on 15th August 2011No Comments
How to: turn off SharePoint Custom Errors

When you deploy to SharePoint, you are likely to hit a page that informs you or an error pertaining to your code but which provides very little information about it. If you’d like to get more information about the actual error, you will have to disable the Custom Errors in order to get the full [...]

Read More
Posted on 15th August 20111 Comment
How to: Fix the missing Start Menu icons

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where, although you can access your programs through the windows start menu, when they start, they do not display their associated icon in the task bar? Or, maybe, the program icons don’t display on the start menu itself? In Windows Vista and Windows 7, these icons are [...]

Read More
Posted on 30th July 20111 Comment
How to: How to change the GAC view

The Global Assembly Cache ( x:\windows\assembly ), more often visited when coding against SharePoint 2007 than SharePoint 2010, is a folder where you deploy your .dll files. However, sometimes you might feel that the default view is confusing. You see, the folder is not displayed just like any other folder in the windows file system. [...]

Read More
Posted on 29th July 2011No Comments
How to: Simultaneously run multiple Skype accounts on one PC

There are people, such as myself, who keep separate accounts in their instant messaging (IM) programs in order to be able to better control who can see them online at each time of the day. For example, one might have an account for use with random people on the internet and another one for business [...]

Read More
Posted on 27th May 20113 Comments
How to: Get a SharePoint 2010 Lists XML file

There will be times that you need to fetch the XML file that describes one of your lists in SharePoint 2010. One example that pops to mind is when working with the Lists.asmx web service. You will need to have a visual of the XML file in case you need to operate on the data [...]

Read More
Posted on 17th February 20115 Comments