Since this particular change set and version 2.3 of CKSDEV, there is now an ASHX item template that you can use to create and deploy generic ASHX handlers to your SharePoint farms. Generic handlers are a lightweight and quick way to “roll your own” SharePoint web services layer, and I’ve used them quite a bit. Especially in AJAX anonymous access scenarios (where the Lists.asmx services will not work), generic handlers can be easily deployed to the LAYOUTS or ISAPI virtual directories and act as a nice shim/proxy to provide data to client-side callers.

To add a handler to your project, first install the CKSDEV tools. Then right-click a SharePoint project in the Solution Explorer and choose Add > New Item…

Once you’ve given it a name and clicked Ok, you’ll see two files, one with .ashx extension, and the other code-behind file with .ashx.cs extension.

You shouldn’t have to edit the .ashx file at all, unless you want to reference classes from other SharePoint assemblies in your code behind, like Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, or Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles, etc., in which case you need to add an @Assembly directive for each of those dlls. There is an @Assembly reference for Microsoft.SharePoint.dll already setup.

Once in the code behind, you will see the typical place to add your code in the ProcessRequest method. Some things you get with this approach:

• You don’t have to hard code the name of your assembly in the .ashx file (the SharePoint project replacement tokens are used)
• The ASHX file is deployed to the layouts directory automatically for you (if you change the Build Action to Content)
• You don’t have to edit your .csproj file and include the TokenReplacementFileExtensions entry for .ashx (the item template does this for you)

Special thanks to Wes Hackett for taking my contribution and making it work properly within the CKSDEV framework.

Overview

When selecting a theme from the Change the Look page in SharePoint 2013, in the lower left corner, you can see all the available font schemes with previews of the main fonts in the scheme. There is a primary font (shown larger) and a secondary font (shown a little smaller). If you create your own scheme and reference a web font, your font previews will look a little ugly (mine is the one in the middle with the empty boxes):

To see how these previews work, let’s look at a snippet of a standard font in a .spfont file. This would be a normal font like Arial, Helvetica, Sans Serif, Segoe UI, etc., that you would expect to already be installed on a client machine.

<s:fontSlot name="body">
    <s:latin typeface="Segoe UI" />
    <s:ea typeface="" />
    <s:cs typeface="Segoe UI" />
</s:fontSlot>

For these standard fonts, nothing else is required, and the font preview will render the actual text in that particular font. In the picture below, I’ve selected the text Segoe UI with my mouse (it’s real text), but Impact is a web font and so renders as an image instead.

When you reference a web font in a .spfont file, you specify the locations of several files (.eot, .svg, .woff, .ttf, etc.) as well as the locations of two preview images, largeimgsrc and smallimgsrc. For web fonts, these two images are used to render previews of those fonts.

<s:fontSlot name="body">
    <s:latin typeface="Bodoni Book" eotsrc="/_layouts/15/fonts/BodoniBook.eot" woffsrc="/_layouts/15/fonts/BodoniBook.woff" ttfsrc="/_layouts/15/fonts/BodoniBook.ttf" svgsrc="/_layouts/15/fonts/BodoniBook.svg" largeimgsrc="/_layouts/15/fonts/BodoniBookLarge.png" smallimgsrc="/_layouts/15/fonts/BodoniBookSmall.png" />
    <s:ea typeface="" />
    <s:cs typeface="Segoe UI" />
</s:fontSlot>

Dimensions

The preview images have the following standard pixel dimensions:

•  largeimgsrc: 109 x 16
• smallimgsrc: 75 x 10

For the out-of-box web fonts that ship with SharePoint 2013, you can see these preview images in the \15\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\Fonts directory.

To create the preview images, I use a program like Paint.Net. I first install the TTF TrueType version of my web font on my machine, then I create a new image with the proper dimensions in Paint.Net, and then I use the Text tool to add text, choose my font, and get the sizing right so it fills up the image nicely.

Once you’ve created your preview images, and deployed them either to the SharePoint hive or the content database (e,g, SiteAssets library), you can edit your .spfont file and point largeimgsrc and smallimgsrc to the site relative urls to those files.

When that is all done, your font previews will look a whole lot more polished now:

Prerequisites

In order to have your custom composed look show up on the Change the Look page, the following items need to be in place:

• Need to have a list item in the Composed Looks list (Site Settings > Web Designer Galleries > Composed Looks)
• The Composed Looks list item needs to have a Master Page Url set to a valid master page. This could be your own master page, or you can point to one of the out-of-box pages such as seattle.master.
• The masterpage used in the Master Page Url must have a .preview file with the same exact name as the masterpage (with the .preview extension instead of .master)
• The .master, .preview, .spfont, and .spcolor files must be completely valid and free of any errors. There is a nice note about this on the MSDN article about themes.
• The .spfont and .spcolor files must be in the /_catalogs/theme/15 folder, NOT in a subfolder of this folder
• Make sure the casing is the same for your files in the Composed Look list item, compared with your actual files that are deployed to the _catalogs/theme/15 folder.

What to check if things aren’t working

1. First off, check your .spcolor file. Edit your composed look item, point to an out-of-box master page, and blank out the Font Scheme and Background Image urls. If your composed look doesn’t appear, you either 1) have a bad .spcolor file (check the syntax, try an out-of-box one just to confirm), 2) You placed the .spcolor file in a subfolder of the _catalogs/theme/15 folder, or 3) You did not use the same case for the filename in your list item as opposed to the actual file in the gallery.
2. Next, check your master page. Point your composed looks list item to an out-of-box .spcolor file (like Palette001.spcolor), and blank out the Font Scheme and Background Image. If you don’t see your composed look on the Change the Looks page, then you 1) may not have a .preview file for your master page, 2) have an error with your master page, or 3) have the wrong url to your master page. To rule out the second problem, use PowerShell (or if you have Publishing features activated, the Master Page link in Site Settings) to set the MasterUrl of the site to your custom master page, and check for errors.
3. Check the .spfont file in a similar fashion to #1 and #2.

What is it?

A Visual Studio Extension that installs SharePoint project templates for creating custom SharePoint Service Applications of different flavors.

How to Get It

The installers are available from the Visual Studio Gallery, and directly from within Visual Studio via the Extension Manager.

There are two versions of the Extension:

• Visual Studio 2010 (Supports SharePoint 2010)
• Visual Studio 2012 (Supports SharePoint 2010 and 2013)

Additional documentation can be found on the CodePlex site for this project.

Why did I write it?

Writing custom service applications is probably one of the most complicated development tasks you can do as a SharePoint developer. Lots of moving parts, and unfortunately, not a whole lot of examples. There are also quite a few pitfalls you can run into – from inefficiently calling methods you don’t need to, to leaving a bunch of cruft behind in the configuration database, to worse.

Still, when done correctly, service applications can offer a lot of benefits, such as backup and restore, auto-provisioning of databases, and ability to scale across multiple servers.

Since I’ve been busy creating service applications over the last two years (like Blue Rooster’s Sepulveda social framework), I’ve learned a lot about good habits when developing these, and wanted to package that up as a starting point for others. Also, I’ve wasted a lot of time renaming classes and generating new Guids when copying an existing project to start a new service application .

What do you get with it?

After installing the extension in Visual Studio, you will see several templates under the SharePoint category:

1. SharePoint WCF Service Application
   A service application that communicates via WCF services between the Web Front Ends and the Application Servers.
2. SharePoint WCF Service Application w/ Custom Database
   Everything in #1, with support for provisioning a custom SQL Server database.
3. SharePoint WCF/REST Service Application
   Everything in #1, with REST services deployed to _vti_bin, supporting AJAX access to the service application.
4. SharePoint WCF/REST Service Application w/ Custom Database
   Everything in #2, with REST services deployed to _vti_bin, supporting AJAX access to the service application.

Here are my top 10:

Excuse #10 – The “I have a really good reason to be at home” Excuse

My wife is working from home, so I am working from home as well today.

Let your mind fill in the rest.

Excuse #9 – The “Wardrobe Malfunction” Excuse

The button on my pants popped off, so I had to sew another one on. Sorry about missing the 9:00 AM meeting.

Excuse #8 – A Variant of the “Bad Traffic” Excuse

I got stuck behind a cement truck, and then behind a school bus. Sorry for missing the 9:00 AM meeting.

Strangely, #8 and #9 were from the same person. Glad I don’t have his luck.

Excuse #7 – The “No Excuse Given” Excuse

In a reply to someone else’s “I’m Working From Home” email:

Ditto, I’m WFHing today as well.

No reason given. What do you say to that? Pretty ballsy.

Excuse #6 – The “Instantly Recoverable Stomach Flu” Excuse

I have a really bad stomach flu.

Oh yes, the dreaded stomach bug. What always amazes me is how quickly people seem to recover from those. In this case, the employee recovered so quickly that he was able to take his daughter to the Justin Bieber concert that night and post videos and pictures of it on Facebook.

Excuse #6 – The “Overly Graphic” Excuse

I have food poisoning, and it’s coming out of both ends.

Ah yes, the overly graphic excuse to make it “that much more believable”.

Excuse #5 – The “Monday Morning Blame-Shift” Excuse

I took my car in to get the brakes fixed on Saturday, and they need it another day.

Don’t feel guilty, it’s not your fault at all.

Excuse #4 – The “Car/Weather Combo” Excuse

Both me and my roommate’s car doors are completely frozen shut.

Not just car trouble, but wham! also the cold weather. No way to get out of that mess.

Excuse #3 – The “Flu/Domain Password Combo” Excuse

I woke up with the flu, also my domain password expired so I won’t be online today.

Just to make sure that no one expects any work out of me today.

Excuse #2 – The “Health Department Mandated” Excuse

My three year old tested positive for pertussis (whooping cough). The health department has quarantined everyone for at least 5 days.

No arguing with this one.

Excuse #1 – The “Darwin Award” Excuse

And the best excuse so far, drum roll………………….

So. As I was parallel parking last night I backed into
a tree branch and shattered the rear windshield of my car. Anywho, I’ll be working from home today.

I know there are more and far better than these, please leave a comment if you have any good ones.

I found this post a bit too late:

http://www.rightpoint.com/community/blogs/viewpoint/archive/2012/11/29/issue-with-office-2013-and-sharepoint-2010-on-same-machine.aspx

The Installation

Playing Angry Birds Space on Windows 8 on the TouchSmart

I started off with an upgrade installation. In the past I’ve never upgraded a Windows operating system – I’ve never trusted the cleanliness or stability of an upgrade path and always opted for a clean install. However, I’ve done upgrades to Windows 8 on several machines so far, and the process has been quick, painless, and foolproof. Microsoft has really nailed the install and upgrade experience for Windows 8 IMO.

I stuck in my Windows 8 Professional DVD, it asked me for my product key, and 15 minutes and a couple of automatic reboots later I was staring at the introductory screens for the new OS. After choosing my colors, the first question it asked me was my email address, and that was the first gotcha. Clicking into the textbox did not bring up the on-screen keyboard. You can either use a real keyboard for this, or you can press-and-hold the accessibility icon in the lower right corner to bring up the on screen keyboard.

The first thing you’ll notice as you begin to use the operating system on this particular machine is that the touch experience sucks. It doesn’t understand the typical touch gestures, scrolling, panning, zooming, and seems to treat your touch input and a single mouse click. But don’t worry, this is a driver issue and I explain later how to solve this. I recommend a mouse and keyboard to get through the rest of the install screens.

Fixing touch

Once you finally get into the OS, and start playing around with it, you’ll notice that touch isn’t working quite right. If you go to the system settings (Win key + X > System), you’ll see that your system says that you have a “Single Touch” input. That isn’t correct, as the TouchSmart supports at least two touch points. This led me to believe that the drivers were not working quite right yet, so I went to the NextWindow site, and scrounged around for a Windows 8 touch driver. The page has a bunch of warnings on it, and doesn’t explicitly say that TouchSmart is supported, so I was concerned with installing it. With the touch the way it was, it was a non-starter for me anyway, so I figured WTF, I’ll install it, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll revert back to Windows 7 from a backup and be done with this experiment.

I installed the Windows 8 touch driver, and lo and behold touch was back to the experience it used to be. After a reboot, the System screen showed “Limited Touch Support with 2 Touch Points”.

Getting used to Windows 8 Touch

Now that touch was working properly, I wanted to see how my old first-gen touch machine would work with the Windows 8-isms like the Start screen and the Charms menu.

To get to the Charms menu, I fumbled around with tapping and press-and-hold-right-clicking on the right edge of the screen, with no success. To get to the Charms menu on this machine, you have to put your finger on the right-most edge, and swipe to the left.

To get to the Start Menu button, I found that I could not tap the bottom-left corner like I could with the mouse. There is something wrong with the calibration of the cameras in the bezel and the driver software, and it just will not respond. To get the Start menu using touch only, I have to swipe to get the Charms menu, and tap Start from there. The lower-left corner just doesn’t work.

When in the Metro UI, if you want to snap or dock metro apps, swipe from the very top of the app down and to the right (making a big “L” gesture). If you have multiple Metro-style apps open, you can scroll through them by swiping from the left edge over to the right. This is awesome, as the Metro apps always stay open, and so I can swipe from Calendar, to Weather, to Traffic in the morning and get access to everything I need to start the day.

Optimizing Touch

To make the Desktop Touch experience better, I increased the size of UI elements. You can do this from Control Panel (Windows Key + X > Control Panel) > Appearance and Personalization > Display > Make text and other Items larger or smaller. I chose Medium, this gave me nice big X buttons to close windows.

For the Metro Experience, I chose to display everything bigger. Get the Charms Menu > Settings > Change PC Settings > Ease of Access > Make everything bigger. This gave me just the right size icons and menus for this larger screen.

I have to say that after using the Metro UI on this large touch screen, the experience is really excellent. Scrolling, swiping, browsing and installing apps, the whole touch enabled Start menu – everything is very fluid and polished. If anyone tried out HP’s failed attempts at this with their TouchCenter WPF experience on the TouchSmart computers, you can see that the potential of that paradigm has finally come to full fruition with the full backing of Microsoft behind it. HP was sadly all alone on that concept, and a bit ahead of their times.

Getting Windows Media Center Back

Since the TouchSmart has a TV tuner, and we used MediaCenter all the time for watching OTA local digital TV stations (PBS Kids while the kids are eating their breakfast at the kitchen counter), we had to have access to Windows Media Center.

Luckily this is free, and easily acquired via a product key from Microsoft. Note – you have to wait at least 24 hours to get your key via email. To add WMC back, open the Charms menu, tap Search, and search for Add Features to Windows. Run through the wizard and enter your product key. After a loooong time, the system will reboot, and you’ll have the same old Windows Media Center available with access to your TV tuner. You’ll have to setup TV and your media libraries again though. And note – this is the same old WMC. There is nothing yet improved with this version.

Logging on Without a Password

Since this is a shared kiosk, always on, we never use a password. The old trick of Windows Key + R (Run menu) and typing netplwiz still works.

Remote Control

The TouchSmart comes with an infrared Media Center eHome remote control. Initially after upgrade, the remote did not function at all. Turns out this is an easy fix. There is a windows service called Human Interface Device Access that was set to disabled. To enable this, perform the following:

• Windows Key + X > Computer Management
• Expand Services and Applications > Services
• Right-click Human Interface Device Access service and choose Properties
• Set the status to Automatic, click Apply, click Start, click OK.

Enabling the remote control.

Side Notes

I uninstalled all the HP TouchSmart crap software, as it isn’t compatible with Windows 8, and you don’t need it anyway. The only thing I left was the Ambient Light application, this still works fine, and lets you change the color of the light at the bottom of the unit.

The only thing I can’t get working is the Home button on the bottom right corner of the unit. I’d love to have this launch the Start screen. Maybe some day I’ll have free time to see if I can’t interface with the driver for it and control what it does.

[update]Also, the side volume buttons on the unit do not seem to work.[/update]

So, now I was back to the old trick of right-clicking devenv.exe and trying to force it to always run as administrator. However, in Windows 8, there is no “Compatibility” tab, and no option on the Properties dialog to Run as Administrator for all users.

Troubleshoot Compatibility Menu

The trick then is to right-click devenv.exe and choose Troubleshoot Compatibility.

Troubleshoot compatibility screen 1

Choose the second option to Troubleshoot Program.

Troubleshoot Compatibility Screen 2

Check the box for The program requires additional permissions.

Troubleshoot Compatibility Screen 3

Click the button to Test the program. It should open VS as administrator. Once open, click Next.

Troubleshoot Compatibility Screen 4

Click Yes, save these settings.

Troubleshoot Compatibility Screen 5

The program will report an error, but from my experience, this doesn’t mean anything, and Visual Studio will continue to run as administrator from that point forward, no matter what shortcut or link you choose to start it from.