Programming

When last we spoke, I discussed some of the pleasant discoveries that I had in my initial pair programming outings. In this post, I'd like to share some of the pain points I experienced, my thoughts on mitigating them, and some additional thoughts on when pair programming might be more or less appropriate.

Body: Analytics suck in SharePoint 2013. It’s been gutted. I know this happened because analytics moved into search, which was the right move, but don’t get me wrong… it’s bad the built in web analytics you’d get through the UI are more basic than you’d get in a simple Wordpress blog.  Pretty useless other than to say, it’s being used and by how many something it calls users (browsers, machines. IP addresses, it’s unknown).  In fact it’s a huge step backward, and that’s what you’re going to see as I lay out the details. Let’s just admit that usage is not done in SharePoint.  It’s been ripped out of the UI.  Look for usage reports in site settings…  good luck! First go to your site settings as Site Collection Admin and look in Site Collection Administration section for Popularity and Search Reports, then the next best bet is to look across your audit reports (it will only display what has been configured to capture), and your finally storage reports to put together the simple story of Unique Users (daily only even in the rolloup), hits (page views? who uses the term “hits?” that’s so 1995), and then your storage against your quota in classic storman.aspx which is back. If you’re not site collection admin, you can get the basic usage report in site settings under site administration titled “Popularity Trends” (What sounds like usability got all over that one??) It’s still just Hits and Unique Users, despite the line “This report shows historical usage information about the site, such as the number of views and unique users. Use this report to identify usage trends and to determine times of high and low activity.” No detail on hourly usage in the report, and since it uses “hits” which classically means all get/post and various verb HTTP responses I think what you’re actually seeing is page hits or page views.  This must have been an intern.  Historically means “Daily” and “Monthly.”  No way to break it down by hour.  Good luck identifying any usage trends other than day of the week since you can’t see any detail about who the users are, what the browser or agent string, or really anything about the user.  They don’t even define “hit” or “user.”  Every one of these reports is in Excel, but the data behind the scenes is not rich at all. Right out of Excel – All of the Reports are now based in Excel and download to the client.  No web based reporting. Sad they don’t open up directly in Office Web Apps.   In the Audit Reporting As a huge advocate of SharePoint, I am one of the first to stand up and say how great this next version is.  In fact I think people shouldn’t wait to upgrade because of the huge benefits in search and in mobile and cross browser support.  The latest version is a real game changer from a platform perspective, but still has a few gaping holes…  Compliance, Management, Storage, Reliable Backup/Restore and Recoverability, Replication, Workflow, Mobile, Social*, Web Analytics Reporting and More have created a rich ecosystem that the partners love to solve for SharePoint.  Would be interesting some time to really categorize these holes and list the partners all attempting to solve the same problem that Microsoft exposes.  Should you be ear marking money for additional software for a new deployment… YES! Rant: Also don’t believe anyone in MS Sales if they tell you that SharePoint is an easy or trivial deployment.  It clearly is on the high end of what most web architects will ever see in terms of complexity (not in the install (which is still tricky), but in getting it deployed correctly).  It really takes knowledge of best practices and serious coordination with the business to get the most out of your new or existing deployment. *Social was a big 2013 investment, but overshadowed by the acquisition, and is called out because you should get on board with Yammer or one of the other third parties that pull together the story. Figure: FrontPage 2000 Usage Reports (Available for SharePoint Team Services) Yesterday

AlwaysOn Availability Groups can provide a high-availability and disaster recovery solution for SQL Server Remote Blob Store (RBS) BLOB objects (blobs).  AlwaysOn Availability Groups protects any RBS metadata and schemas stored in an availability...(read more)

Love Ruby on Rails? Love teaching? Like blogging? Want to help contribute back to the Rails community? Look no farther friends, you can do so here!  Email me or comment on this post if you’re interested in contributing links, news, and information to the community.

Chances are you might have needed to convert a list of strings or numbers to a CSV file while you were programming something. An example is that in any java program you might have obtained a list of states of United States stored in your ArrayList object and then you wanted to have them in a CSV format so that you probably could load it to a database or use it for some other purposes. I wrote this tool to serve the same purpose. Here are the basic features this simple java example can do. Given a list of String objects stored in an ArrayList, this program can: Convert Strings or numbers stored in an ArrayList object to comma separated strings Print the comma separated values (CSV) to either console or file Optionally you can sort the the list before you do the conversion. package com.kushal.tools; import java.io.BufferedWriter; import java.io.FileWriter; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Collections; import java.util.Iterator; import java.util.List; /** * @author Kushal Paudyal * Last Modified on 2011-09-06 This utility converts a * list to comma separated values. Intended to be used with Strings and * can be modified with numbers. * * Have options to write the converted values to either console or file. */ public class ListToCSV { private static boolean writeCSVToConsole = true; private static boolean writeCSVToFile = true; private static String destinationCSVFile = "C:\\temp\\convertedCSV.csv"; private static boolean sortTheList = true; public static void main(String[] args) { ListToCSV util = new ListToCSV(); List sampleList = util.createSampleList(); util.convertAndPrint(sampleList, writeCSVToConsole, writeCSVToFile, sortTheList); } /** * @param sampleList - input list of string * @param writeToConsole - if this flag is true, writes to console * @param writeToFile - if this flag is true writes to file. * @param sortTheList - if the list is to be sorted before conversion */ private void convertAndPrint(List sampleList, boolean writeToConsole, boolean writeToFile, boolean sortTheList) { String commaSeparatedValues = ""; /** If the list is not null and the list size is not zero, do the processing**/ if (sampleList != null) { /** Sort the list if sortTheList was passed as true**/ if(sortTheList) { Collections.sort(sampleList); } /**Iterate through the list and append comma after each values**/ Iterator iter = sampleList.iterator(); while (iter.hasNext()) { commaSeparatedValues += iter.next() + ","; } /**Remove the last comma**/ if (commaSeparatedValues.endsWith(",")) { commaSeparatedValues = commaSeparatedValues.substring(0, commaSeparatedValues.lastIndexOf(",")); } } /** If writeToConsole flag was passed as true, output to console**/ if(writeToConsole) { System.out.println(commaSeparatedValues); } /** If writeToFile flag was passed as true, output to File**/ if(writeToFile) { try { FileWriter fstream = new FileWriter(destinationCSVFile, false); BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(fstream); out.write(commaSeparatedValues); out.close(); System.out.println("*** Also wrote this information to file: " + destinationCSVFile); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } } /** * Creates a sample list to be used by the convertAndPrint method * and returns it to the calling method. */ private List createSampleList() { List sampleList = new ArrayList(); sampleList.add("Nebraska"); sampleList.add("Iowa"); sampleList.add("Illinois"); sampleList.add("Idaho"); return sampleList; } } Originally posted 2011-09-16 18:54:06.

How many times have you rushed out of the house without some important file you needed for work—or wished you had access to your desktop computer’s music or movie library from your hotel room on the beach? Enter Splashtop 2, a popular app designed to provide remote access to your PC or Mac that just arrived in the Windows Phone 8 Store today. Splashtop 2 users can view and edit files, use apps, and stream audio and HD video to their phone directly from a remote computer. Setting it up is pretty straightforward. First download the Windows Phone app, which is free through August 31, then install Splashtop’s free Streamer software on your PC or Mac. The Splashtop remote access service runs $1.99 a month. For more info, head over to the Splashtop site.  

A simple java script to add custom CSS to your joomla site, without changing the template source, or dig to its settings.

As we announced earlier this month at the annual Adobe Max Conference, DMXzone has been working on extension that provides complete support for Twitter Bootstrap in Dreamweaver. With the DMXzone Bootstrap you'll have a crafty tool in your hands to edit your layouts fully visual in DW design view and experience the great bootstrap power with its responsive grid. This and many more comes on DMXzone next week so stay tuned.

Free-to-play MMO developer and publisher Wargaming (World of Tanks, World of Warplanes, and World of Warships) has announced that it will provide financial support for three open-source foundations. The company says that it is doing this because it uses a number of open-source technologies in its games and it wants to help support those technologies grow and prosper.read more

Hello guys, I'd like to auto populate my app recently converted to south, with permission group and user data. However, after generating a fixture and calling it from the datamigration I'm getting this error. I've put the steps I'm taking detailed here [link]