I solved a little problem last night when playing with named pipes. I created named pipe that writes all output to file. Named pipe is opened for all users in machine. In this posting I will show you simple class that works as pipe server.

For Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS) there are new API-s available you can use to extend WHS web and desktop interfaces. Actually there is no Windows Home Server SDK anymore – now we have common Windows Server Solutions (WSS) SDK that works also for Windows Small Business Server, Windows Storage Server and Windows MultiPoint Server. In this posting I will show you how to create development environment for Windows Home Server 2011.

In one of my current SharePoint 2010 Foundation projects I needed to hide ribbon from anonymous users. Visitors, contributors etc must see ribbon on all pages where it shown by default. In this posting I will show you how to hide ribbon usingSPSecurityTrimmedControl.

Sometimes we need custom menus in our SharePoint sites. In this posting I will show you how to add custom xml-based menu to your master page and make it work with SharePoint.

In one of my current projects I have some pivot reports that show count of issues in different states. Grouping depends on report. States are dynamic – admins can define new states and save them to states table. This means that I cannot hardcode names of states to queries. Instead I need dynamic pivots. In this posting I will show you how to write reporting procedures that offer dynamic pivoting capabilities.

I have events web site where I want to show events start and end time to visitors. I wrote simple extension method called DisplayTimeRange() to display event time range on user-friendly manner. My goal is to show times as 01.01.2012 10:00 – 14:00 and 01.01.2012 15:00 – 01.03.2012 18:00. It’s practically displaying time ranges is shortest possible way. In this posting I will show you how to do it using extension method.

You may get the following error when deploying your web application from Visual Studio to Windows Azure using WebDeploy: Remote agent could not be contacted. Make sure the remote agent service is installed and started on the target computer. An unsupported response was received. The response header 'MSDeploy.Response' was '' but 'v1' was expected. The request was aborted: The request was canceled. COM object that has been separated from its underlying RCW cannot be used.

You may get the following error when creating data scripts with MSSQL 2008: The selected database contains foreign keys that create a cycle. Publishing data only is not supported for databases with cyclical foreign key relationships. This problem is caused by self-referencing tables and it is given even if you don’t export data from one of such tables. Here is simple and very dirty solution.

SharePoint 2010 has powerful client object model that you can use to write external applications that use SharePoint data. In this posting I will show you how to get data from lists using client object model and how to optimize queries to save some bandwidth.

I found very good blog post by Andy Cross’ Blog where he describes how to deploy multiple web sites in a single Windows Azure web role. I like the idea but there are some things that should be understood and done differently if you plan to use same web role for totally different web applications that you want to run on your Windows Azure instance. In this posting I will show you how to deploy independent web applications to Windows Azure instance using single web role.