When Software Attacks!

Declaratively create Composed Looks in SharePoint 2013 with elements.xml

This is really a follow-up to my earlier post about tips with SharePoint publishing customisations. Composed looks have been a part of a couple of projects recently. In the first, a solution for on-premise, we used code in a feature receiver to add a number of items to the Composed Looks list. In the second, for Office 365, a bit of research offered an alternative approach with no code.

What are Composed Looks

A composed look is a collection of master page, colour scheme file, font scheme file and background image. There is a site list called Composed Looks that holds them, and they are shown in the Change the Look page as the thumbnail options you can choose to apply branding in one hit.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, February 28, 2014

Speaking at NEBytes on February 19th

I’m pleased to have been asked to speak at NEBytes again – a great user group that meets in Newcastle. I’ll be speaking about customising SharePoint 2013 using master pages, themes and search templates, along the same lines as my recent blog post.

It will be an unusual one for me, as I will spend most of the session inside Visual Studio showing how to create and deploy the customisations that can deliver really powerful solutions without needing to resort to writing code (other than for deployment).

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, February 8, 2014

Using the Dell Venue 8 Pro Stylus

You will recall from my earlier post how much I like my Dell Venue 8 Pro and how disappointed I was that the stylus was on back-order until March.

Imagine my surprise, then, when a package arrived at the beginning of this week with a shiny new stylus in it!

As you can see from the picture, it works just great with OneNote (and it’s desktop big brother).

The only niggle I feel obliged to point out right at the start is that the stylus requires a battery, which is an extremely obscure AAAA type. I can pick them up on Amazon, certainly, but I’ve never seen them anywhere else! I shall be ordering a pack ASAP as I have no idea yet how long I can expect the battery to last.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Six tips when deploying SharePoint 2013 masterpages, page layouts and display templates

I’ve been hat-swapping again since just before christmas (which explains the lack of Azure IaaS posts I’m afraid). I’ve been working on a large SharePoint 2013 project, most lately on customising a number of elements around publishing. Getting those custom elements into SharePoint from my solution raised a number of little snags, most of which were solved by the great internet hive mind. It took me a long time to find some of those fixes, however, so I thought I’d collect them here and reference the original posts where appropriate.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, February 3, 2014

BlogEngine.Net automatically tweeting on new posts

I sadly miss Twitter Notify, the plugin for Windows Live Writer that would tweet when I published a new post. Fortunately, there are a couple of plugins for BlogEngine.Net that purport to do the same thing. I’ve just deployed SocialPublish to our server. Configuration is a bit fiddly, and I’m not sure yet how well it will work with our multi-tennant structure. This is my first post after activation so I’m keen to see if it tweets when I publish!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, January 27, 2014