CAML Designer: Have you tried it?

When you want to design/test your caml query, most of the time we use U2U CAML Query builder. Sometimes you get problem with connection but most of the time, it was working fine for most of the needs.
Recently, I tried CAML Designer which is really nice tool to try as alternative. WPF UI experience with many additional features may impress you to switch to this new tool.
Let us know your experience while evaluating CAML Designer.

If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.

Generate test data using GenerateData.com

Introduction:
There are times when you need test data in order to test how your application scales. GenerateData.com helps you generate test data in many popular formats like html, xml, csv. excel etc. Let's see how we can use it.
How to:

• Goto generatedata.com
• Enter column name in column title and select Datatype from drop down.
• For ID AutoIncrement Datatype is selected and in options (Start at ) 1 is entered because from which value user wants to start his id number.
• And in increment it is given 1 because user wants to increase its id by 1.
• Second field is inserted (Functional Group) whose DataType is custom list . The item of custom list is inserted in Enter values Seperated textbox and items should be separated by “|”.
• If user has more rows then shown than user can add more values by entering exact figure and click on Row(s) textbox.​
• After entering all data user has to select Result Type, For Result type option is given on top (HTML,Excel,XML,CSV,SQL), Select the desired Result Type. 
• And finally click on generate button and if user has selected Excel for result type and an excel will generate and then user can import excel to Database.

Conclusion:

It is really easy and straight forward to genreate test data for almost any kind.

If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.

PowerGUI script editor: powershell debugging and intellisense

​​​In this post I am going to show you how to use PowerGUI script editor for executing sharepont2010 powershell. There are two main advantages of using PowerGUI:

• Dubugging of powershell script
• Intellisense support

So, let's start setting up PowerGUI to use with sharepoint 2010:

• Download and install latest version of PowerGUI.
• Download PowerGUI PowerPack for sharepoint.
• Start PowerGUI script editor​ and go to File > Powershell Libraries
• Click on "Add Module" and add downloaded "PowerPack for sharepoint" library here
• That will add another entry "Microsoft.Sharepoint.PowerShell" into the listing. Check the library to make it enable
• Restart PowerGUI script editor and you are ready to get started.

If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.

Managed metadata column limitation

There is an interesting article on managed metadata column limitation from sharepointanalysthq wihch describes many interesting limitations. That list is really useful. There are some useful suggessions that I want to add to the list:

• Never export list/document library with managed metadata as template with data in order to copy it locally or othre places. Main reason behind the same is, managed metadata columns has term store, term set etc defined and they will not match in the destination managed metadata application and can cause problems
• Never stop/remove taxonomy updater services, specially because they are responsible to make sure your manage matadata columns are having consistent and up-to-date data all the time.
• One of the option for moving list/libraries with managed metadata column along with preserving all it's IDs is to use http://spdeploymentwizard.codeplex.com/ utility.

That's it for today, keep in touch for more managed metadata related interesting findings.

If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.

Performance analysis: Part 2

In previous post we used Stopwatch object in order to compare time taken by SPList.​ItemCount and SPList.Items.Count. Here are additional things to add in list.

• If you are using SPList.Items.Add, start using SPList.AddItem. Since reference to SPList.Items properly will load list data it will not perform good.
• If you are accessing list, try to use caml query to access it and always use RowLimit and view field properties to limit output to exactly what you want.
• use ContentIterators in place of foreach when you want to iterate list items.

If you have any questions you can reach out our SharePoint Consulting team here.