SharePointers

Critical Path Training produces a number of excellent training courses, books, and free resources.   If you haven't checked out their  Inside SharePoint 2013  book, you definitely should.  It's a pretty comprehensive guide to what Developers need to know (initially) to do SP2013 Development. I typically build their VM when I first start using the next version of SharePoint and often make it my baseline for general development.   This year however I've decided to spice it up a bit and go for an install without the Configuration Wizard and a GUID-less database instance, per  Todd Klindt/Shane Young's book  because their guide is more close to an enterprise level configuration.  I also wanted install and configure it in Azure, so I can get to it wherever I am (and free up some  SSD  space on my PC). The Critical Path VM guide can be downloaded  here .  You'll need a (free) account to download the guide.  I suggest you read through the guide to get a good sen

Special thanks to Djamel Chagour and his response to my MSDN thread (which linked to this blog post ) to solve my issue of grabbing solutions from the Solution store so I could drop them on another server. His post is more complex and deals with generating the stsadm commands for a batch deployment. Mine is the dumbed down version that just pulls the files so I can readd them as I need them. Here's the code: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.IO; using Microsoft.SharePoint; using Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration; using System.Xml; using System.Web; namespace Mirant.SharePoint.Administration.WSPDownloader { class Program { static void Main( string [] args) { bool hasErrors = false ; if (args.Length != 1) { Console.WriteLine( "Usage: Company.SharePoint.Administration.WSPDownloader directory

Months (years?) behind the rest of the world, I've finally decided it's time to get my VMs up to Azure (no more SSD swapping between PC and laptop despite having a easily mountable caddy in my work laptop and this sweet caddy in my PC . As a loyal VirtualBox user I opted for VDI rather than VHD, but now I must convert.  So here's what I did: Uninstall VBox Guest Additions from the VM Shut the VM down (don't save the state). Remove the VDI from the Virtual Media Manager in Virtual box before running the command below Run the following command using Run As Administrator by right-clicking on the command prompt (from the VBox Install directory unless you've set the PATH variable):  VBoxManage clonehd e:\SP2013DEV.vdi  c:\SP2013DEVaz.vhd --format VHD In the above command the first file is the source VDI the second is the destination VHD. Wait for the magic to happen it should take a while since VMs with SP on them are pretty big.  Going from one drive to another