Toluu

Mark Arend

SHAREPOINT
TIPS & TECHNIQUES

nb… provided as-is

Debugging web parts and other SharePoint custom codeSeptember 9 2008

Here are some tips for debugging your SharePoint web parts and other custom code.

1. How do you debug assemblies that are in the GAC?

2. Is there an easy way of attaching the debugger to the right process?

Debugging assemblies that live in the GAC

When debugging an assembly that lives in the GAC, you have to copy the symbol file (.pdb) from your project to the GAC.  The problem is, when you open a Windows file explorer to the GAC directory, C:\Windows\assembly, it doesn't behave like a folder that you can drag-and-drop into.  You must copy using another method.

To view the GAC as typical folder structure using file explorer, enter %systemroot%\assembly\gac_msil in the Run... dialog box under the start menu.  This folder opens the part of the GAC that contains managed code assemblies (from this location in file explorer, you can click the folder-up button to see other parts of the GAC).

From %systemroot%\assembly\gac_msil, locate the folder having the name of your assembly, and open that.  Open the folder in there having the correct version number.  Finally you’ll see the dll.  To debug, drag the .pdb file from your bin\debug directory into that folder.  You can also use an xcopy command to do this, now that you see the full path to the dll location.  This path will change if you modify your assembly's version number.  Note that whenever you upgrade your solution, the .pdb file is remov

List of MOSS Timer JobsSeptember 6 2008

MOSS has many default timer jobs; information about them can be useful to understand the workings of your MOSS farm, and potentially to troubleshoot problems or plan for related types of customizations.

The attached document provides a list of all MOSS timer jobs provided out-of-box, with some additional notes about them.

Consolidated list of MOSS itemsSeptember 6 2008

Sometimes you just need a list of things provided by MOSS, in order to plan what kind of things you will make available to users within your architecture.

The attached document lists all out-of-box Lists, Web Parts, Site Templates and Site Actions provided out-of-box by MOSS, along with their descriptions and availability.

MOSS Usage Reports explainedSeptember 6 2008

The site usage reports that MOSS provides are fairly simple, but can be useful if you haven't got any other tools for tracking site usage.  One problem with them, however, is that the information they present is not really explained anywhere. Columns are often named "Value" and sometimes it's not clear exactly what the value represents.  Another example is what does "Requests" actually measure?  The answer is that Requests always measures Page Views, not all HTTP requests for individual items like images, style sheets, etc.

The attached document gives clear, detailed explanations of all out-of-box report elements.

Colleagues, Social Distance & Relevance in People Search; Social Networking toolsMay 1 2008

MOSS provides some very powerful features to enable the new buzzword "social networking."  Discussions about these can be found pretty easily, and I give an overview of some tools near the end of this posting.  But specifics about how some of the details work has been devilishly hard to find... until now.  Through discussions with various people in-the-know, I've been able to assemble answers to common questions around People Search and MySite web parts.

Social Distance

By default, the results on the People Search page are ordered by Social Distance.  What the heck is that?  It's an ordering of results based on colleague relationships.  Here's how it's computed:

• Search results are always returned to the search results page sorted by relevance.
• When viewing results by social distance, additional processing on the search results page is used to group the results:
  • The first 3 pages of search results are grouped by colleague-ness: first your colleagues appear, then colleagues of your colleagues, then everyone else.
  • Within each group, the ordering is still by relevance.
  • When paging through results, another 3 pages of results will be grouped once you reach page 4, then page 7, etc.

By default, 10 results appear per page, so this groups people in batches of 30.  If you customized the People Search results page to show 25 results per page, this would group people in batches of 7