Development tips and tricks

Tips and tricks related to developing stuff. From quick tips to actual guides and solutions. 

Using “DetectedLanguage” to return only localized results from SharePoint Search index

How to SharePoint?

Localization and targeting of content in multilingual SharePoint installations is always an issue. SharePoint offers a multitude of ways profile content based on user language (or other properties), but none of the solutions are fool proof. This post describes how to fetch only localized results from SharePoint Search index, which solves at least some of the issues.

Description 

SharePoint Search index can be used in quite a few different ways. Probably the most typical way is by searching on SharePoint, or using webparts like Content Search or Content Results. However, one can also build custom functionality, custom client-side liftups, webjobs, single-page applications, mobile applications and a ton of other things that fetch data from SharePoint search index. However, on multilingual tenants, results are, by default, not localized at all. That means, that typically everyone will get the highest-ranking results back, despite them being in the wrong language. And that’s one of the many, many ways to annoy your users!

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Call to sites Graph API requires “owner” permissions for site collection regardless of app permissions

Okay – yet another weird issue, and a hacky workaround. I was developing an app that was calling a SharePoint site through Graph API, using jQuery $.ajax call (developed in TypeScript), and ran into surprising 401 errors. I did find a workaround, but am also working on an actual fix.

Description

To get SharePoint site ID, which is needed when accessing SharePoint lists, the calls seemed to fail for my test accounts. Everything was working fine for my developer account, which was a global admin, so the first thing I was suspecting was of course permissions…

The first offending test account was a Group member, and a restricted reader in the site collection I was trying to access via Graph. The account was also a contributor on the root site of the tenant. And all of my accounts were licensed with E3/E5.

I knew that this part of the code was supposed to get a site id for a certain SharePoint site collection with a call to Graph API, similar to this one:

https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/sites/<tenant>.sharepoint.com:/sites/<site>/

It worked for my developer account, but just wouldn’t work for the test accounts! This is the error I got: Continue reading

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The Shortest Debugging Article For SharePoint’s Taxonomy Fields Ever

SharePoint is not broken - it just does't work

Are you getting an error like “The SPListItem being updated was not retrieved with all taxonomy fields” when you try adding or modifying values in a TaxonomyField of a list item in SharePoint? Then read ahead, I’ve got a quick and dirty solution!

Reason

After quick googling and some frustration, I figured the probable reason for the issue. SharePoint went and broke the link between the internal Note-field and the actual TaxonomyField you’re supposed to be using. And this causes SharePoint to return slightly confusing errors.

Term Store Management Tool

Term Store Management Tool for managing (for example) the termsets associated with your Taxonomy Fields

In my case, my app actually just got a simple JSON response {“The SPListItem being updated was not retrieved with all taxonomy fields.”} I’d see this error any time I was trying to modify or create any values of a field of type TaxonomyField. I used OfficeDev.PnP’s TaxonomyExtensions to achieve this, but also tried the “normal” CSOM libraries – and the result was always the same. No amount of ctx.Load(item) -calls would help 😉

Like so many times with SharePoint, the solution’s simple, yet frustrating.  Continue reading

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A quick (and handy!) hack to force referenced assembly to getting copied to a project

Mock Function call to force loading an assembly - how elegant!

Visual Studio failing to copy a referenced assembly to a project in build might lead to surprising runtime errors. This post will explain one method of fixing these issues, using Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory as the example – as earlier versions of that assembly had this issue!

Problem

After build, you might get this kind of error:

In my case, I had referenced both of these DLLs in my “class library project”, which provided my console program a lot of functionality:

  • Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory.Platform
  • Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory

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SharePoint-Teams -integration using a tab

Microsoft Teams Logo

This post describes one possible scenario for SharePoint-Teams -integration, how to achieve that, and what kind of issues there might be.

Teams? What’s that?

At Blue Meteorite, we at the Valo team have been leveraging Teams since early 2017 as our main communications channel. For us, it complements Yammer, email and Skype for Business quite nicely, although to be fair, it’s not always 100% clear which channel would be optimal for a certain piece of communication… 🙂

The Redmond Magazine calls Teams Microsoft’s response to Slack, and for someone who has used both, the source of inspiration is rather obvious. Built for “high-velocity teams”, it’s yet another collaboration/communication tool, but in a way more flexible than either Skype for Business or Yammer. First and foremost I’d position it as a challenger to services like Slack – and hence at least partially a new addition to Microsoft’s ecosystem.

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Fixing the “Could not load file or assembly … or one of its dependencies” error

Visual Studio logo

This post describes how to fix the “Could not load file or assembly ‘<assemblyname>’ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.” error. 

Problem

Especially while installing a new dev machine, and building your project for the first time, you may end up getting the following exception:

No fear, though, as this is usually easily fixed. In quite a few cases, it’s simply a mismatch between architectures and easily changed.

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One web developer’s story about the downfall of web hosting (EIG review) – part 1

EIG is basically a host of scams now.

Okay, so this is going to be a bloggish rant about EIG – Endurance International – a web “hosting” company that’s ruining the web for everyone. If you hate salty rants, browse something else, please.

For a short version, check this out.

I’ve been an independent web developer since around 2004, and even though maintaining and hosting websites is currently more of a hobby than anything else, I still do have a few dozen customers with one or more websites or other systems hosted by me. For more than 10 years I’ve been hosting both my and my customers’ websites on a few different web hosting or cloud providers, and some services on servers I hosted myself. I joined Site5’s customerbase in 2013, after Clients From Hell endorsed them repeatedly (it was a paid promotion – but still, a good word from a trustworthy source). 

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Launching a new debugger instance from code in Visual Studio

Sequence contains more than one element

This post describes a quick solution to launching a new Visual Studio instance for debugging the code. Where I’ve found this exceptionally useful, has been in debugging code-first migration’s (one of the ways for database initialiation in .NET) Seed-method. It is by default undebuggable, as when you are running Update-Database you can’t really use a -debug switch or anything, and there’s really no way to launch the debugger. Hence the best you can do is using -verbose to get more information.

However, if you actually want to see what is happening in the code, here’s the solution.

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Fixing error “No Entity Framework provider found for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name ‘System.Data.SqlClient'”

No Entity Framework provider found for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient'

This post describes the fix to error “No Entity Framework provider found for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name ‘System.Data.SqlClient'”, which Visual Studio throws at your face when you try to run an application on any Windows-based system (or which you’ve dug out of event logs). Also, you’re probably using Entity Framework in your project.

Error

When debugging/running your code you get an error like this:

The running of the program is stopped there, and removing and readding the nuget packages and/or other references to dlls does not help. I, at least, tried also making all kinds of changes to my web.config and ran iisreset a couple of times, but nothing seemed to help. There’s a simple fix available, though!

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Using Dispatcher to update values in GUI elements from a background thread

System.InvalidOperationException'

Quick tip:
If you’re developing something like a WPF app and you’ll need to update values on the User Interface based on a long-running operation that runs in a background thread (like depicted here), you’ll probably need to use Dispatcher, or otherwise you’ll run into issues with the GUI elements being owned by another thread, and therefore forbidding access to them. This can result in an error like this:

Luckily, there’s a quick workaround available. Read on!

Cue the Dispatcher

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