Improved: Developer Dashboard in SP2013

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The developer dashboard was a great new feature when SP2010 was released, and now with SP2013 it has been further improved, with the key changes being:

  • The Dashboard now appears in a separate window – it isn’t rendered out at the bottom of the page you are diagnosing any more.
  • Cumulative page requests are shown, instead of just the last request.  This certainly helps in SP2013 given the use of Minimal Download Strategy (MDS).
  • The execution Plan of SharePoint stored procedures can now be viewed.
  • The dashbaord is implemented as separate WCF service named diagnosticsdata.svc
  • ULS Logs can be viewed through the browser (rather than opening the logs in ULSViewer or Wordpad) – but this should still be done from the server for security reasons
  • The Dashboard can now be extended with Javascript 🙂

 

SharePoint 2013: Using the search REST service from an app for SharePoint

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A new code sample has been released on MSDN that demonstrates how to return search results in an app for SharePoint.

“The SearchApp sample accepts a query using the keyword query language (KQL) syntax as an input. It subsequently makes a call to the search engine using the search Representational State Transfer (REST) service. The results are then displayed in a table, which is built dynamically using JQuery and JavaScript.”

The screen shot below shows search results displayed on the home page of the sample:

Figure 1. Home.aspx page in the app, displaying the search results

SharePoint 2013 Search Sample

Go get it here and even more SharePoint 2013 sample code here.

Can’t Delete List Field?

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Recently I had to help someone that wasn’t able to delete a field off a list!

Seemed a bit strange I thought.. just go and delete it 🙂

Well in this case there was a catch – it was sealed. One of their developers had deployed a custom feature containing list fields and had set this particular one to sealed.

This was reasonably easy to figure out by opening up SharePoint Manager 2010 (SPM2010).

By using SPM2010 you can easily navigate the site structure – down to the individual list and then see each of its fields.

If you then click on a field you can view all of its properties – and in SPM2010 you will see a ‘CanBeDeleted’ property.

If you just scroll down to the ‘Sealed’ property and set it to False, then save your changes – you will now be able to delete it.

Cannot create InfoPath.ExternalApplication object. Error code = 0×80080005

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Issue: Error message when you install an InfoPath 2007 Client Form Template (i.e. a non browser-enabled form) on a Windows Vista or higher computer: “Cannot create InfoPath.ExternalApplication object. Error code = 0×80080005”

Resolution: To work around this issue simply:

  1. Oen Windows Task Manager
  2. Stop any InfoPath or Microsoft Outlook process
  3. Restart the installation of the Form Template

How To: Detect if McAfee Virus Scanner Exclusions are being applied?

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Question: How can I detect if McAfee Virus Scanner Exclusions are being applied?

Answer:

  1. Download ProcMon
  2. Extract the downloaded files to a clean directory using WinZip or other file extraction utility.
  3. Launch ProcMon.exe.
  4. Select Options then Enable Advanced Output.
  5. Create the relevant filter for McShield. For example, to filter for all READ actions by McShield, set Process Name IS McShield.exe and Operation CONTAINS IRP_MJ_READ

 

SP2010 – Developer Dashboard – What a Life Saver!

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The Developer Dashboard is one of my favourite troubleshooting tools for SP2010.

The great aspect about the Dev Dashboard is that it allows you to see how long each of your web parts are taking to load on a page, in addition to individual SQL queries and stored proc executions.

Now you can easily figure out which web parts are causing problems so that you can fix them, or hand them off to your developers to fix.

The other useful feature is that you can toggle the dashboard, so that it doesn’t load on each and every page, just the ones you want it to  – by clicking a button.

To enable the dashboard in toggle mode, simply run this command:

stsadm -o setproperty -pn developer-dashboard -pv OnDemand