Posts

Emacs keybinding in Visual Studio 2010

I've been using Visual Studio 2010 from early last year. Unfortunately I used to emacs many years ago. In Visual Studio 2008 and earlier versions there's a key mapping settings for emacs. However MS seized support since 2010 beta version. I always pressed wrong key and gain much anger at Visual Studio as all my other IDEs are using emacs key bindings, including emacs and Eclipse. Later last year, all my projects were ported to Visual Studio 2010 from 2008. Since then I was trying to convince myself the shortcut keys used in many MS editors – word, notepad, SQL management studio etc. But – compromise is not the only solution! I found this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2010/09/01/emacs-emulation-extension-now-available.aspx I was wondering why I didn’t find it earlier as it released last year! Maybe my frustration with the beta version didn’t evoke my hope. This one is among the best tastes in Visual Studio 2010. Shame for MS. I wish someone would also make sa

SharePoint 2010 upgrade from 2007 (content database, UI etc)

Upgrade is always painful. SharePoint is no exception. Microsoft has suggested two ways of upgrade: inplace and database upgrade. All articles suggest database upgrade, which is also my choice. I don't trust third party migration tools. They will mess up the whole thing as I tried the most famous one, and missed a lot of things. However I don't trust Microsoft either, maybe SharePoint itself too. Firstly I exported content database to new farm. The PowerShell window in SharePoint 2010 menu must be opened as Administrator. Run Test-SPContentDatabase in the new farm then it reported some error. Check the log it says some features are missing. Those features have already deleted but some elements still reference to them. After some search I found a tool that claims to remove even the toughest features. It's called WssRemoveFeatureFromSite written by an MS guy. Still one feature can't be deleted. My colleage suggested me to create a dummy feature using the same GUID. It&#

Deploy WSP with SharePoint 2010 PowerShell

The stsadm command was replaced by PowerShell cmdlets in 2010. To deploy on a Produciton, QA or DEV server you may probably need PowerShell scripts (with .ps1 suffix). However if you prefer GUI, you'll thank to Visual Studio 2010 as development and deployment is as simple as a few clicks.

Shortcut URLs in MOSS 2007

Link to Heather Solomon's MOSS URL matrix I am a newbie in SharePoint. As what I've discovered so fat the product may be good for intranet use for medium and large organizations with out of box features, to facilitate cooperation between employees. The internet site developers, however, will immediately facing branding issue which requires master pages, page layouts, CSS, images, almost all Web Parts to be rewritten to fit "in-house" styles. C# programming is essential. Not to mention the development have to be carried on windows server family. The speed of virtual machine, compilation, deployment of features, testing loop will drive you mad. It's not impossible to re-branding, just even a medium organization won't have so much resources to feed the black hole. When I'm working on SharePoint, I couldn't stop thinking about alternative approaches... yes, Drupal, django, pure ASP.NET, even the good old LAMP. What if I could work on things like the op

Force to delete SharePoint items

“This item cannot be deleted because it is still referenced by other pages” When you see this message when you are trying to delete MasterPage or Page Layout, use SharePoint Designer to create a new folder and move the locked item to it and then delete the folder in whole. It's the simplest work around to "unlock" the bizarre dead lock.

Use reverse ssh tunnel to access remote machines behind NAT

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If you have ever connected to your cooperate network using VPN you may understand the complexity of the tools and configurations IT engineers must deal with. In Windows world, it's true. To do anything that looks complicated there's always some software available, to make simple tasks over complicated. Say if you want to access your home Linux machine from your office. Both are behind firewall and use NAT. You don't have permission to change firewall settings. We see this a very common scenario in today's world. We don't need VPN or any software to connect to home machine (A). What we need is a machine (B) at middle and through B we can connect to A with ssh connection from the machine (C) you are working on. This is the easiest solution I found so far. No need for VPN, expensive software, configuration, ... all you need is ssh. ssh has a very useful parameter -R. This tells ssh server at remote (B) will forward the given port number to itself (A). For more deta

My Ubuntu 9.04 desktop

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It looks nice now. Linux is quite robust. I didn't re-install for more than a year now. It's unbelievable when I was running Windows. Even with the promising Windows 7 I don't believe a heavy user like me don't need to re-install for over a year. The music player is Audacious, nice to render non-unicode characters. Also when use Dust theme and 50% gray background, turn on minimal visual effects it rocks.