About a week ago I started learning ASP.NET MVC framework. It is pretty cool entertainment for cold winter nights as I found out. Here you can find how I got started and what resources I used.

Seems like I am stuck in ADODB days a little bit and I still expect that query with no results returns at least some meta data. Or at least my code gets no bombed by null references.SPListItemCollection has GetDataTable() method that returns items collection as ADO.NETDataTable objects. Be careful when using this method – if your items collection is empty then this method returns null.

Cross-site lookup field is something we need almost every project that is not very small. There is no good OOTB solution but we can use field by Toby Bierman. This kind of field is easy to create because SPFieldLookup is cross-site by its nature. Basically you ave to perform the following steps.

When I started with this blog I needed some tool to copy code snippets from Visual Studio to Windows Live Writer so I get formatted code. There is cool online code highlighter called GeSHi, but I wanted my code to look like in Visual Studio editor. After some searching I found Visual Studio add-in CopySourceAsHTML.

Custom C# application and Exchange Server 2003 integration over WebDAV was one of the tasks I lately worked on. I made posting about how to log on to Outlook Web Access when FBA is used but I didn’t mentioned that I had to read data from Exchange public folders. There are some stuff that may drive you nuts but there are also some tricks to use to get everything work as expected.

One of the simplest refactoring methods is called Rename method. There are many reasons why one may want to change the name of some method. I think that main reason to rename a method is to give it a name that describes better what method is supposed to do.

I have some servers in my network. There is one public Apache server that proxies requests to these servers. These servers are not directly visible from internet. Some of these servers run IIS and ASP.NET web applications. When accessing these servers through internet then sometimes Apache reports a problem: 502 proxy error.

Another day, another kinky problem with SharePoint. This time I struggled with custom properties of my custom field. I tried out different code samples to make GetCustomProperty and SetCustomProperty to work but no luck at all – nothing worked for me. There was no errors when adding field to list or changing field properties but custom properties were never saved.

Creating global calendar that shows data from different calendars is something that SharePoint doesn’t have out-of-box. Using site data query and calendar view control we can easily create global calendar and make it show data from lists we want.

One way to write messy code is to use constant values in code without any explanations about their values or purpose. Sometimes it feels like too small problem to think about, specially when there are only couple of constants, but I am sure that hard coded constants may waste developers valuable time more than one may think at first place. To make this kind of code easier to read and understand we can use refactoring method called introduce constant.