C# Debugging Tip of the day – Force the debugger to be launched at a specific point in your code

I'm still having some issue in SharePoint in my event receiver (or custom Timer Job) for the debugger to break on my breakpoints. Fortunately and regardless of the issue, you can force the debugger to be launched (and attached) using System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();

Pretty handy isn't it ?

SharePoint Tip of the Day – Easily allow your contributors to see what an end user will see

A common requirement in all SharePoint projects that I’ve be working on is to see what an end-user / visitor will see. The publishing console have the option “preview in another window” but you need to have the console activated / displayed and it’s not always obvious for someone who doesn’t know where to look for such an option. Fortunately, it’s really easy to add a simple link in your page layout (or master page in any “toolbox area”), just use the current page url and append
?PagePreview=true, a target=_blank will finish the job to keep the current page being edited opened !

And if you want to add this to a site action button, you can simply reuse this snippet that I just did

    <CustomAction
      Id=”SiteActionsToolbar”
      GroupId = “SiteActions”
      Location=”Microsoft.SharePoint.StandardMenu”
      Sequence=”2001″
      Title=”Preview page in a new window”
      ImageUrl=”~site/_Layouts/Images/menuslideshow.gif” 
      RequireSiteAdministrator=”False”>
        <UrlAction Url=”javascript:window.open((window.location + ‘?PagePreview=true’), ‘Preview’, ”);” />
    </CustomAction>

Hope it helped !

 

 

SharePoint Tip of the Day – Users with Full Control permission level are not able to view / manage custom group membership

Even if you give the highest permission level (full control) to specific groups or users, they won’t be able to manage custom group memberships until they are set as the owner of the group. By default it’s the system account that is set as the group owner, and the only one allowed to manage the group, changing that settings will allow your specific group to manage itself.

SharePoint Tip of the Day – Changing the execution timeout value

Edit (for all web servers in your farm) the web.config file in  C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft SharedWeb Server Extensions12TEMPLATELAYOUTS and update the configuration / system.web / httpRuntime executionTimeout to something bigger (value is an amount of seconds)

No more dreaded execution timeouts after 6 minutes for your very long running synchronous operations ! (Thanks Peter !)