Category Archives: SharePoint

All SharePoint related posts

The Elusive Microsoft ULS Viewer


If you do any amount of work in SharePoint then you’ve probably needed to dive into the ULS logs at some point. Once there, you realized that working in those using a simple text editor results in nothing but frustration.  At which point, you probably went looking for a tool to make the ULS insanity go away … or at least to make it Click to read the full post

A List of All Changes in the October 2013 Cumulative Update


It is Cumulative Update time again and so Microsoft has once more attempted to make tracking down the specifics of what has been changed or updated to as difficult as possible. This post is just a single place that pulls together all of the changes in the October 2013 CU in one place instead of scattered across Click to read the full post

Calling a SharePoint Web Service Returns ‘Error 400 Bad Request’


The other day an Asp.Net developer approached me with a problem he was seeing interacting with SharePoint. He had code in place for months that called the OData SharePoint web service and it worked perfectly. However, the data he was pulling was just moved from one Web Application to another and now his service was returning “400 Bad Request” errors on the new URL. Pointing the identical code back to the old location (because you never delete the old data right away – right?) worked perfectly. Both the old and new web applications were in the same farm and both required Click to read the full post

SharePoint as a Whipping Boy


A ‘whipping boy’ is an 15th century term for a boy who was designated to take the punishment when a prince or other such noble misbehaved so that the boy would be punished instead of the prince.  I’m not entirely certain what lessons this taught the young prince but my guess is that it was either 1) other people would be suffer for his mistakes so he should be responsible, or 2) that he would never be punished for anything so he was free to do anything he wanted. It would probably depend on how moral or empathetic the prince was or even if he cared about the boy being punished.  You might be surprised at how a dark ages royal parenting strategy applies almost directly to SharePoint.

SharePoint continues to move itself closer and closer to being the center of the business world and with each new release extends its fingers even deeper into Click to read the full post

Use PowerShell to Remove an Orphaned Custom Site Template from SharePoint 2010


A situation cropped up today where a custom Site Template was created by saving a site as a template which was then used and subsequently deactivated and then deleted. Simple enough except that SharePoint insisted that the template was still there and presented it as a choice when creating new sites even though it didn’t exist and would fail if someone clicked on it.

I could have simply gone into Site Settings – Page Layouts and Site Templates and hidden it there but that raises other problems as well as adds ongoing maintenance as it means all new templates would have to be explicitly added in order to be visible. However, even if I did that Click to read the full post