When Lenovo started shipping hybrid graphics in their W500-series workstations, it was a great improvement for road warriors who need both full-power graphics when connected to a power source and long battery life on the go. This is achieved by the presence of two video cards – an integrated Intel chip side-by-side with an nVidia […]

In the new SharePoint 2013 App model, there are essentially two ways to host apps – within SharePoint itself or from an external web site (also known as "provider hosted" or "autohosted"). One of the disadvantages of external apps is that they don’t look or feel like SharePoint. All the familiar navigation menus and shortcuts […]

Well, it’s that time of year again, and Microsoft has seen fit to keep me in the MVP program for another go around.  This will be my sixth year as an MVP.  When I first came into the program there were only a few dozen SharePoint MVP’s – now there are hundreds all over the […]

Most commercial blogging platforms use a fixed URL structure, known as a "permalink", to identify posts – something like "http://www.myblog.com/2012/09/13/This-Is-My-Post.html". This structure makes it easy to reference a particular post, supports trackbacks/pingbacks, and makes it simple for search crawlers to locate content. Unfortunately, the SharePoint 2010 Blog template has no concept of how an actual […]

Good friend and fellow MVP Rob Bogue, aka The SharePoint Shepherd, has just released an all-new Introduction to SharePoint Development (2010) DVD. It is a self-paced learning tool designed to bring new developers, regardless of background or level of experience, up to speed on the ins and outs of SharePoint programming. Each module is self-contained […]

While working on some modifications to the SharePoint 2010 blog site template I ran across an interesting problem. I was trying to duplicate the functionality of a particular web part; in this case, the Posts web part which outputs a formatted display of list items on the Category.aspx page of a blog site. The default […]

The SharePoint 2013 Application Model supports app development for both cloud and on-premise environments; however, there are distinct differences between the two implementations. In the cloud, apps rely upon an external authorization process to validate that an application hosted outside of SharePoint – in a vendor’s data center, for example – is allowed to communicate […]

SharePoint 2013 introduces a new mechanism for custom code deployment known as "Apps". Mostly targeted at online solutions, the purpose of the App model is to overcome the severe limitations of the 2010 isolated execution model (also known as the "Sandbox") and provide developers with a way to run rich web applications in SharePoint without […]

During the process of constructing a data access layer for a SharePoint project I kept running into SSL errors trying to construct my data model using the Entity Framework. I began the project with an Azure database which, surprisingly enough, worked like a champ – Visual Studio 2010 picked right up on my connection string […]

In just a few weeks, from April 23rd through the 25th, many of the best and brightest SharePoint people from around the world will be gathering in London, England for what is widely considered to be one of the best events in the world – the International SharePoint Conference. This time around, assuming no natural […]