Solving Azure Web Application’s first load perfomance issues

Is your Azure Web Application suffering from absolutely horrible load times every time someone accesses it for the first time every 15 minutes or so? Mine was. It was pitiful.

I was developing a web-based service using EF6 and ASP.NET MVC 5, where all the assets were hosted in the Azure. Even though the app was reasonably lightweight and usually responded very fast, the first time someone accessed it in a while it took 20-60 seconds to load AND sometimes even timed out (especially with mobile clients). Load testing revealed only the what I already knew: initial load times were horrendous, but after that everything worked fine. I did eventually find the solution, though!

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Speaking at SPS Twin Cities!

Exciting announcement to make – I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities (SPS TC for short) on 14.4.2018! It’s one of the biggest SPS events worldwide, and I’m honored my session was accepted on the developer track. I’m really hyped to share some of the cool stuff I’ve been working on! Continue reading

Opening a web part page in maintenance mode

Can’t access a web part page because of a broken web part? Yeah, that’s a classic issue – and it’s nicely ported into Modern world, too! In these cases, web part page maintenance mode comes in handy!

There’s a query parameter available for accessing it. For whatever reasons, it’s different for Classic and Modern mode, though. Why make things easy if you can make them dificult, right? 🙂 Continue reading

Troubleshooting: Anonymous access on a public SharePoint site collection failing

Ah, everyone’s favorite, classic topic! Debugging SharePoint On-Premises configuration issues is the best thing since sliced bread, right? This post is about allowing/enabling Anonymous Access to a site collection – a simple configuration, that “simply works” like once every ten times you try it.

Symptoms

A lot of different ways to hit your head on this one. In any case, your on-premises SharePoint doesn’t allow anonymous access to a site where you are trying to allow it. Most typically, they’ll just encounter 401 error when accessing the site, or they might be missing some of the content or styles, resulting in partially broken site.

Causes

Usually incorrect configuration or non-published resources. Multiple reasons can cause this, though, I’ll describe some of them below with the solutions.

Solutions

A lot of things to check – let’s go through all of the most typical issues here! Continue reading

Hackathon win: Resolving Managed Metadata Madness

I won a hackathon! They had fun topics, it was a cool challenge, a well organized event, and had cool prizes. Since this is the first hackathon I ever took part in, I thought I’d post something about my experience and the solution(s) I figured out. Continue reading

How to show a Classic SharePoint page in dialog mode (without SharePoint’s full-blown chrome)

Classic SharePoint actually has a very handy piece of functionality, using which you can hide most of the SharePoint chrome (like header and navigation), and hence make the page a lot more sleek. This is especially useful for showing the contents in a dialog window – which SharePoint also supports natively through JavaScript! This post describes how.

How to show any (classic) SharePoint page in dialog mode?

Pretty easy – it’s handled via a url parameter! Continue reading

How to get rid of Foxit Drive in Foxit Reader

If you’re like me, you’re not using Adobe Reader, but rather switched to Foxit Reader years ago, and never looked back. Foxit has a great PDF printer, it’s a great reader, but not perfect. The default save location is “Foxit Drive”, and it pops up any time you try to save your document, and at least for me interrupts my workflow. This post describes how to get rid of it, and make Foxit Reader even better!

Description of the issue

Okay, so Foxit Reader is pretty great, but they’ve got their difficulties, too. Being freeware, they kind of need to get revenue from somewhere outside the reader itself – and nowadays, that would be their Premium software, but especially their Online offering, part of which the cloud storage for PDFs is. Continue reading

Solving error “AADSTS90013: Invalid input received from the user”

AADSTS90013: Invalid input received from the user. (header thumbnail)

I stumbled upon a customer, that complained about some pages in their intranet throwing weird errors with authentication. Those pages seemed to have one thing in common – there was a Yammer embed (or a SharePoint script webpart with Yammer embed script in it, to be precise) there. The error code they got was “AADSTS90013: Invalid input received from the user”.

AADSTS90013: Invalid input received from the user.

Okay – this is going to be extremely specific, and probably won’t solve the issue for all of you out there! But this is what worked for this customer: Continue reading

Don’t remove the root site of your classic SharePoint Site Collection!

A quick heads-up – if you remove the root site of your classic SharePoint Site Collection, that site’s going to be troublesome to deal with. Whereas you can always restore a normal site from the site collection recycle bin, the root site you can’t. You actually can’t access the recycle bin after removing the root site, nor can you make magic happen with PowerShell commandlets anymore.

Site Collection Recycle Bin – where you could access it, if you still had your site!

The Recycle Bin would be located at a url like this: https://<yoursite>/_layouts/15/AdminRecycleBin.aspx, but after the site is removed, it won’t be there.

If you actually just wanted to get rid of your site collection by removing the site (see below), you’re out of luck again. Even that didn’t happen, as you now still have the site collection, just without any sites in it. You can’t even reuse the url for anything, as it’s still reserved for your site collection! Continue reading

How to output console or PowerShell transcript to a file in Windows

Every now and then, you run into a situation, where you’ll need to somehow output the transcript of a console app run. I’m actually going to argue it happens a lot more often than one would think – in my case, any time a customer requires a webjob or a function, that one would normally deploy to Azure, being ran on the servers of the customer.

Problem

Something breaks or the app crashes, and the error is logged to event log… But just the error, not the whole transcript. You’d like to get it all, to figure out what’s actually going on, but event log is not the way to go.

What to do?

#SharePointProblems