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 […]

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 […]

SharePoint Server 2010 ships with a nifty Chart web part that displays visual data from a number of sources – SharePoint lists, BDC, Excel services, etc. It’s a handy control and one that was sorely missing from the 2007 version. It provides a number of chart options, including pies, lines, bars, cones, scatters, etc. in […]

Programmatically creating site columns and content types in SharePoint 2010 is a relatively straightforward process, especially with the new project item framework in Visual Studio 2010 and enhancements like CKS:DEV. Create an element file to define the columns, create another to define the content type and specify which columns to include, deploy it and whistle […]

With the inclusion of new tools and features in Visual Studio 2010 which directly support SharePoint development, programmers now have a much wider set of options for creating custom solutions. As with the introduction of any new approach, there are various factors which need to be considered in order to ensure that the final outcome […]

While working on an application which uses SharePoint 2010 claims, I came across a strange error trying to create a password change web part for users who had forgotten their password (and, consequently, can’t log in so they need to change their password without any kind of system identity). I assumed – wrongly – that […]

There are a number of different ways to create customized MOSS publishing sites – through the web UI, SharePoint designer, Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint, and so on.  But sometimes these aren’t enough – you just have to build it from scratch yourself.  This means diving into the world of custom site definitions, features, xml […]

This isn’t technically a SharePoint-related post as the issue is one of pure XML manipulation but I ran across it while building a custom solution in SharePoint and it took hours to figure it out so I thought it merited some attention. When working with XML, as is often the case in SharePoint (especially when […]