Thursday, May 17, 2012

Copying users from one SharePoint group to another



Although SharePoint doesn’t provide any out of the box approach to move users from one SharePoint group to another, this can be achieved by writing code to iterate through all users in a source group and add them to destination group.

Below mentioned is a workaround to copy users across groups without any code.
(One pre-requisite to use this approach is the users email addresses have to be associated with their LAN ID’s in the active directory)

1.       Click on People and Groups.
2.       Go to the group from which you want to copy users.
3.       From the group page, select the required users (or all users) and then from Actions Menu, choose "Email Users" as shown below.

4.       Once you selected "E-Mail Users" then your default email program (Ex: Outlook) will be open with all email addresses.
5.       Select all email addresses and copy them.
6.       Navigate to SharePoint site and then go to SharePoint group to which you want to add users.
7.       From the toolbar, select "New" and then "Add Users". 
8.       From the add users page, paste all email addresses and then click "Check names" icon for validation.
9.       Click OK button to save the changes.

Thus all the users are copied across to the destination group.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

ASP.NET MVC Razor and jQuery


These are my thoughts, learnings and insights from the ASP.NET MVC Razor and jQuery session at the GIDS .NET 2012 in Bangalore.

Speaker - Ido Flatow (Senior Architect – Sela Group)
ASP.NET MVC is a new framework for building web applications using the power of ASP.NET.
MVC is all about
·         Clear separation: Model, View, Controller
·         Making testing easier and comprehensive
·         Giving full control over HTML and JavaScript
·         Using friendly URLs
Page life cycle of MVC
What is Razor?
Many ASP.NET Web pages have C# or VB code blocks in the same place as HTML markup. In some occasions this combination is uncomfortable for writing and delimiting code. To deal with that problem, Razor was designed as an easy to learn, compact and expressive view engine that enables a fluid coding workflow.
Razor is not a new programming language itself, but uses C# or Visual Basic syntax for having code inside a page without ASP.NET delimiter: <%= %>. Razor file extension is ‘cshtml’ for C# language, and ‘vbhtml’ for Visual Basic.
Examples:
@’ is the magic character that precedes code instructions.
A single code line inside the markup:
Current time is: @Datetime.Now
What is jQuery? It’s Fantastic!
ü Fast and concise JavaScript library
ü Simplifies your code
o    DOM traversing
o    Event handling
o    Animation
o    Ajax interaction
ü Included in ASP.NET 4 project templates
ü Cross browser (IE/FF/Safari/Opera/Chrome)
ü Extensible through plugins
ü Write less, do more!
ü It just works!
Interesting fact – around 42% in the world use jQuery compared to its competitors
There is lot more to know and appreciate of these tools and technologies which I’ll try to cover in my upcoming blogs. Here I wrap up the topic with a comparison of ASP.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

My Experience at Great Indian Developer Summit - 2012

This year the Great Indian Developer Summit was held at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Tata auditorium, my experiences...

GIDS 2012 – a great platform to get first insights of the upcoming trends and technologies!

This was my first experience at GIDS and I can say it was a rich learning experience, we were the delegates and the IISc campus with its lush green cover welcomed us.

I was accompanied by one of my teammates, we registered at the counter and received our welcome kits and went around all the exhibits and stalls put up by IT companies like Microsoft, Google, Goldman sachs, Nokia, Blackberry to name a few.

There were lot of sessions and presentations planned for the day, held in the main hall of the Tata auditorium and 4 other smaller halls. All the topics scheduled to be covered were of vast interest for me – the most exciting one being the Windows 8 and the metro style UI.

The key note of the day was on the Metro style UI, presented by a Microsoft India professional. This was amazing and set the tone for the entire day long events.

Highlight of the day for me was – I was interviewed by the Microsoft Team and the video will be posted on the Microsoft website. (I’m yet to get hold of the videoJ). I was asked about my experience of working on the Microsoft products and technologies.

We went around all the stalls and participated in few competitions and won some goodies too. After having attended many sessions, we were hungry and it was the lunch time, we feasted on the good foodJ.

Post lunch we attended other sessions and to sign off the day, all the delegates were given certificate of participation, shirts and watches as goodies, which was a pleasant surprise.

The sessions attended by me:

ü Evolution of C# - a departure from its roots

ü How frameworks can kill your projects and patterns to prevent getting killed.

ü Windows 8 platform for the metro style apps

ü Enhance developer productivity with Visual studio 2011 and .NET 4.5

ü Tips and best practices for windows phone development

ü ASP.NET MVC Razor and jQuery – the new face of ASP.NET

My next blog is on the topic – ASP.NET MVC Razor and jQuery

Monday, April 2, 2012

SharePoint Development with Visual Studio 11 – What’s new?

Visual Studio 2010 made significant investments in the SharePoint development tools. In the earlier version of SharePoint development, developers had to rely on STSDEV, a community tool, or Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS) to build different applications and solutions and deploy them to SharePoint.
Visual Studio 2010 was a major step forward in providing rich tools for SharePoint development, noteworthy are the Solution package creation and Visual Web parts. These were the 2 vastly used topics in the SharePoint development and VS 2010 tools for SharePoint made developers life easy.
There was also support for Business data connectivity, Client object model and LINQ for SharePoint.
However VS 2010 left the developers in need to put in more efforts in developing Silverlight web parts and sandbox solutions. There were no tools available for these.
Visual Studio 2011 will surely make the developers life lot easier, VS 2011 adds more designers and templates to the SharePoint development tools kitty.
The major inclusions to the tool kit are highlighted below:
  • List and content type designers
Designers now allow the developer to set up and lay out the contents of the new list or content type. The designers enable you to display, sort, and group the available site columns.
  • Site Column template
Creating site columns and list fields will be lot easier with the templates
  • Silverlight project template
The project template enables you to create a new Silverlight application and it also provides a web part project associated with the Silverlight application.
  • Improved Sandbox solution support
Visual web parts now support sandboxed SharePoint projects
  • JavaScript IntelliSence and debugging
VS 2011 will provide IntelliSense when coding JavaScript’s in SharePoint projects and what will make developers happy is the JavaScript codes can be easily debugged
All SharePoint developers - lets look forward to visual studio 2011 and I’m very curious on the support Visual studio is going to provide for Windows 8 + SharePoint 2012