
Click here to find out exactly what we did to ensure success on this project!
Click here to find out exactly what we did to ensure success on this project!
SPLimitedWebPartManager
can be a cause of memory leaks. Why? Turns out that SPLimitedWebPartManager
instances instantiate their own SPWeb
object, but don’t properly dispose of them: a bug in the SharePoint 2010 SDK. It seems that one of the only ways to discover this ghost memory leak is in production. Or a little utility, built by Microsoft, called SPDisposeCheck.
You can run SPDisposeCheck in the command line, but I thought it would be nice to integrate it into a project. These are the steps to integrate SPDisposeCheck into a build: Read More…
Take your company website, for example. It looks great on your desktop computer, right? But when you view it on your phone, it doesn’t look nearly as nice if it wasn’t developed using responsive design techniques. Images will be too big, the navigation may be impossible to tap and the download time may kill you.
Designers/developers must write the code in a way that looks great no matter what device it is viewed on. Basically, we have to use something called media queries. Media queries are pieces of code that allow us to put details around objects. So we can say if a web page is being viewed on a device with a 460 pixel width, display it like this. But if the web page is being displayed on a device with a 800 pixel width, then display it like that.
It actually goes well beyond just the width. We can decide what to display based on the following factors:
We can tell your website if it should use high-res images for Retina Display or no images for a phone display. We have a ton of options. Responsive Design is in its infancy and we are discovering new ways every day to make this logical way of thinking possible. The sad fact is we haven’t quite developed the best way to do this yet. Right now we have to write tons of lines of code to account for all the different resolutions, as well as older versions of browsers that do not support the latest and greatest best practices. But each time we launch a new digital page, we get closer. We make it better. Read More…
Trying to describe what you can accomplish with Microsoft System Center 2012 is akin to defining what a carpenter can build when he opens his toolbox. The possibilities are virtually limitless. When all of the System Center 2012 management components are deployed, administrators and decision makers have access to a truly integrated lifecycle management platform. The seven core applications can each be deployed independently to provide specific capabilities to an organization, but are also tightly integrated with each other to form a comprehensive set of tools.
System Center 2012 is offered in two editions, Standard and Datacenter, with virtualization rights being the only difference. The simplified licensing structure is identical to that of Windows Server 2012. Further simplifying the licensing, SQL Server Standard is included and no longer needs to be licensed separately. The applications that make up the System Center 2012 suite, however, cannot be licensed individually, so it makes sense to have an idea of what each application can do, and how it fits into your environment. Read More…
Amazon Web Services (AWS) CTO Werner Vogels offers this great piece of cloud advice: “Treat everything as a programmable resource, including data centers, networks, compute, storage and load balancers.” In other words, automate every aspect of your (cloud-based) infrastructure. There are significant benefits in following Werner Vogels’ advice:
Given AIS’ years of experience with SharePoint, we are always looking for ways to make the underlying infrastructure more cost effective, scalable and robust. Fortunately, the aforementioned benefits of automation apply equally to a SharePoint 2013 farm hosted in the cloud — whether it is the ability to dynamically provision a SharePoint 2013 farm on the fly, or the ability to scale up and down based on load, or the ability to make the SharePoint 2013 farm more fault resilient.
But it all begins with developing robust automation scripts to provision and manage a SharePoint 2013 farm. This brings us back to the purpose of this blog post by Abhijit Kumar. Abhijit discusses an automated approach for provisioning a SharePoint 2013 farm using Amazon Web Services. It is noteworthy that the automation approach we describe below is based solely on PowerShell. This might come as a surprise given that AWS offers services like CloudFormation, which enables creation of AWS resources, combined with open source tools such as Opcode Chef and AWS Puppet, which enable the installation and configuration of applications. We chose to rely solely on PowerShell for the following reasons:
Abhijth’s post below walks you through the script to deploy SharePoint 2013 Farm on AWS in an automated manner. I am confident that you will it useful. Please give the scripts a try and let us know.
Head over to our website for a more detailed look at what we’re doing…
Approach:
The specific approach we used for this project was to “follow” or “shadow” the workers as they performed their activities and collect observations about:
We worked with both staff personnel and supervisor personnel, and we looked at both scenarios where customers would come into a field office and scenarios where the field staff would meet customers at a field location directly. We then followed the observation sessions with one-on-one interviews to review the observations and ask more specific questions.
Based on our experiences, we identified what we would consider to be some key recommendations for business analysts, product managers, or others seeking to elicit requirements for mobile worker applications. Read More…
Navigating this post-PC world can a frightening experience when your corporate lifeblood relies on the dominance of PCs. Compounding this is the fragmentation of the emerging market across native mobile platforms, three primary desktop browsers (exponentially more when including mobile), and varying device form factors and operating system flavors. Read More…
Members of this group believe JS is the rightful king of the web (and possibly server). They believe JS is easy and fun to develop with and mature enough to handle anything you throw at it. They praise the language for its impressive developer community and rich ecosystem of libraries.
Members of this group believe JS is a twisted and deceitful language. They are obstinate that JS is a broken language flawed from its conception and mired by designers and the 90s. They see the language and its associated tooling as too “immature” for any real work. Of course, all JS libraries are just the hyena minions sent upon the web (and now server) to ravage and uglify the beautiful landscape that computer scientists have diligently built over the past six decades.
I believe both groups have valid points. JS can be a bit idiosyncratic at times. I have been burned a few times by many of the questionable “features” of the language. For example, double-equals is not equivalent to ==
present in many C-style languages:
if ("" == 0) //this statement is true... console.log("Seriously?!")
If you are like me, you probably learned C or some language based/inspired by it. The reason behind the behavior above is that ==
actually is an equality operand that performs type-coercion first. But there are also some very neat things going on in JS, and perhaps the best attribute is function-passing. There is great power in the ability to pass functions as arguments — just ask any Scala programmer! While functions are fundamental to JS, they are a topic that confuses a lot of developers, so let’s get started. Read More…