Small Talk - Blog by Houratious Albert

In this post, I talk about my experience and learnings from volunteering at the MyRoad program run by Beacon foundation . The program aims at providing career guidance opportunities for high school students in remote schools all around Australia with a focus on female students in particular. The aim of the program as I understand it is to provide exposure to the world of regular jobs; what can be expected in a working environment and to encourage students to continue further education. I was introduced to the program via my current employer, Readify. There are a few highlights that I found from my participation. 1. Structured mentor preparation The mentor training materials itself makes this volunteering program worth attending. The materials provided include very good guidance on working with young children, being mindful of cultural differences, etc. 2. Structured delivery for consistency The mentors are given a script that they can follow. This is carefully crafted t

1. Make sure you are using cat6 cables everywhere. Cat5e has a speed of 100 mbps max and cat6 supports upto 1 gbps. 2. Have enough data points throughout the house ... especially where you plan to keep .... modem/router, TV,  Playstation / Xbox,  home surveillance, study desk, landline. 3. Get Internet connected at lockup stage so you have it at handover. 4. Using the Internet,  test all ports at handover. I missed this. I think one of my ports doesn't work. 5. Have a NBN box in the garage with 2 extra power plugs. 6. Have all the data points in the house connected back to the garage/ ur preferred place like a hub. 7. Have two data points at the place where you are planning the router/modem tracing back to the garage or your hub. This is so that you can switch it around.

Octopus Deploy Tip - Feature Branch Channel Create a feature branch channel as the default channel and configure the lifecycle to only deploy to dev. This is to help feature branches from being deployed to production.

To view request headers of incoming requests from IIS, you can use failed request tracing in IIS to include status code 200. This would log successful requests too and you can view all request headers in the "request details" > "general request headers" section. 

Windows 10 anniversary update wiped out my PC's Hyper-v role Wiped out Net Nat and other network settings. Make note of all your settings and roles before you install the update.

If 1) Umbraco admin tree is not showing up and 2) is determined not to be a problem with the trees.config file and 3) Clicking on any of the navigation elements gives you          Request error: The URL returned a 404 (not found):          views/propertyeditors/undefined/undefined.html Check permissions on the website folder for iis users. Easy way is to give machinename\users full security access on the folder.

Quick Tip - Enable failed request tracing in IIS for status 200 to log Request Data and search for GENERAL_REQUEST_ENTITY in the resulting trace file.

Use the export option in GIMP to convert PDF to high quality images.

Problem : A stored proc returns data with more than 20 columns. There are no updates to data. I need to show the data a few columns first and more details later. Use views instead of stored procs.

To change or update URLS after resotring a content DB of hostnamed site collections, use stsadm -o renamesite -oldurl http://abc.com -newurl http://abc-uat.com You only need to rename the root hostnamed site collection. It will reflect on the other HNSC starting with the same URL. If you try using Set-SPSiteURL on an HNSC with  same starting url, you will get the error : Could not perform this operation on the site collection http://abc.com. To add a URL for this site collection add a URL to the root host-named site collection at http://abc.com. At line:1 char:1

To search for "Everything" as the default option, change search navigation settings under site settings > search settings, and add the following links Everything /results.aspx People /search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx Conversations /search/Pages/conversationresults.aspx This Site /search/Pages/results.aspx?u={contexturl}

Catch block does not work correctly for exceptions from get-spweb and get-spsite without the -ErrorAction Stop parameter.  This code will not print "in catch block"  try{Get-SPWeb 'wrong url'} catch { Write-Host "in catch block" }  correct usage : try{Get-SPWeb 'wrong url' -ErrorAction Stop } catch { Write-Host "in catch block" }

Here is a snippet to save your day. There are many snippets out there showing you how to do cross domain calls, but none of them complete. Here is a sample to access host web components from a SharePoint hosted app or add in. Keywords: SharePoint, access host web, sharepoint online, JSOM, CSOM, SharePoint hosted app, Office 365. 'use strict'; //URLs var hostweburl; var appweburl; var context; var appContextSite; var factory; var context = SP.ClientContext.get_current(); var appContextSite; var rootweb ; var roleDefinitions ; (function () { $(document).ready(function () { hostweburl = decodeURIComponent(getQueryStringParameter("SPHostUrl")); appweburl = decodeURIComponent(getQueryStringParameter("SPAppWebUrl")); var scriptbase = hostweburl + "/_layouts/15/"; $.getScript(scriptbase + "SP.Runtime.js", function () { $('#message').append(" Getting Scripts.. ");

Thanks to this blog, I learnt the best way to print out powershell exception details. $_.Exception|format-list -force

Error : Microsoft.Azure.ActiveDirectory.GraphClient.AuthorizationException Insufficient privileges to complete the operation Solution: Under Configure under Permissions to other applications Add application - Windows Azure Active Directory Give the following permissions Read directory data Sign in and read user profile Stack Trace :  Microsoft.Azure.ActiveDirectory.GraphClient.AuthorizationException was unhandled by user code   HResult=-2146233088   Message=Insufficient privileges to complete the operation.   Source=Microsoft.Azure.ActiveDirectory.GraphClient   Code=Authorization_RequestDenied   ErrorMessage=Insufficient privileges to complete the operation.   ResponseUri=https://graph.windows.net/ /users/ ?api-version=2013-11-08   StackTrace:        at Microsoft.Azure.ActiveDirectory.GraphClient.ConnectionWrapper.InvokeNetworkOperation[T](Func`1 action)        at Microsoft.Azure.ActiveDirectory.GraphClient.ConnectionWrapper.DownloadData(String address,

Error Message: Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has "Full Read" permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled. Solution 1: Add backconnection host names in the registry under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0 Add a Multi-String Value with name "BackConnectionHostNames". Add the host names for the sites that are on the local server. Solution 2: Disable loop-back check on the server  ( or add host name to Under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa" Create a new 32bit DWORD value "DisableLoopbackCheck" with value as 1 Solution 3: Give your content access account "Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers" permission on the user profile service application.

Error: SharePoint 2013 web application authentication fails, prompts for credentials 3 times and displays blank page. Kernel Mode Authentication is not supported in SharePoint Products. I would suggest turning this off. If you want this enabled, there is a workaround s - https://technet.microsoft.com/library/dd573004(office.13).aspx  Change the ApplicationHost.config file to have the bit <windowsauthentication enabled="true" useapppoolcredentials="true">< /windowsauthentication>

A windows update broke search in SharePoint. We could not resolve the error in the server. We have to recreate search service in a new server. You are luck if your search topology has redundancy. Errors in ULS: AssemblyReflector : Failed to load dependency assembly in load context and in load from context. Assembly: BihConsumerInterop System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Unable to find the specified file. Errors in Process Monitor HKU\S-1-5-21-494056553-2953882651-1462924595-7389\Software\Microsoft\.NETFramework NAME NOT FOUND HKU\S-1-5-21-494056553-2953882651-1462924595-7718_Classes\CLSID\{BDEADF26-C265-11D0-BCED-00A0C90AB50F}\InprocServer32 NAME NOT FOUND HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\JitLockWrite NAME NOT FOUND

Error while accessing MySite after changing MySite URL. Solution : Verify permissions on mysite service application for the account used to change the URL. Re enable the service connection to the webapplication. ULS Error: Exception occurred loading user profile (/default.aspx): Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileApplicationNotAvailableException: UserProfileApplicationNotAvailableException_Logging :: UserProfileApplicationProxy.GetRawPartitionID has null proxy    at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.GetRawPartitionID(SPServiceContext serviceContext)    at Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.ProfilePropertyLoader.get_CurrentPartitionId()    at Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.ProfilePropertyLoader.OnInit(EventArgs e).

In SharePoint 2013, workflow runs with the users permissions unless it has an app step with elevated permissions. If your list has unique permissions, ensure that your workflow history list and task list have write permissions for the user. Another item to check for are steps in the workflow where the user do not have permissions to do. One instance is if the user has no delete access on the list but there is a step in the workflow to delete an item in the list.  This was not an issue in SharePoint 2010 as the workflow was running as system account. Also, do not make your workflow to depend on or read the last modified date on the item. Because the workflow will change it.