Continuous Deployment to Azure Web Sites via Visual Studio 2013 and VS Online

In principle, I appreciate the value of test-driven development (TDD) and continuous integration (CI) builds; I just didn’t think they would be entirely practical for my solo, side projects. Well, I don’t have any excuses anymore, I’ve been working on a quick project and in just a few hours, I had an AngularJS single page application (SPA) remotely building and deploying to an Azure web site. All for free. Every time I check-in a change, the source is copied to the cloud, my test runs and it triggers a CI build remotely and then is deployed automatically to the host server. Pretty slick.

One change was that testing web applications has come along from the dark days of having to wrangle with the HTTP context. Maybe the situation isn’t totally resolved, but it’s easier these days to write tests because the HTTP context isn’t so much of a stumbling block in newer frameworks.

I only ran into two issues setting everything up, and one was pretty much my fault. First, I created an ASP.NET MVC project using Visual Studio 2013 and added it to Visual Studio Online (which supports both Git and Team Foundation Services [TFS] online). As I wrote in a previous post, you can get free private Git repositories via Visual Studio Online.  I also created an Azure website and linked it to the project. I created a CI build profile and the build triggered correctly on check-in. No problems, no errors. However, the project was not being deployed. The issue was simple, I chose the wrong deployment template. I should have been using the AzureContinuousDeployment.11.xaml template.

The other issue was that the Visual Studio Online build machine wasn’t in sync with the NuGet updates, I had installed on my local box. To resolve these issues with package management, I Enabled NuGet Package Restore feature and then check-in the entire “packages” directory to resolve missing DLL errors.

To get this working for your project, you can start by reading the MSDN article about a continuous deployment setup.

BTW - If you don’t check in the package files, you’ll get error such as these (and more) because the remote build machine won’t be able to find the DLLs. To help with search, I'll paste in a bunch of the errors here.

Models\AccountModels.cs (11): The type or namespace name 'DbContext' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)App_Start\WebApiConfig.cs (5): The type or namespace name 'Newtonsoft' could not be found Controllers\AccountController.cs (7): The type or namespace name 'DotNetOpenAuth' could not be found Controllers\TodoController.cs (3): The type or namespace name 'Infrastructure' does not exist in the namespace 'System.Data.Entity' Controllers\TodoListController.cs (4): The type or namespace nam 'Infrastructure' does not exist in the namespace 'System.Data.Entity' Filters\InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute.cs (3): The type or namespace name 'Infrastructure' does not exist in the namespace 'System.Data.Entity' Areas\HelpPage\SampleGeneration\HelpPageSampleGenerator.cs (14): The type or namespace name 'Newtonsoft' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?) Models\TodoListDto.cs (6): The type or namespace name 'Newtonsof' could not be found Models\TodoList.cs (6): The type or namespace name 'Newtonsoft' could not be found Models\TodoItemContext.cs (16): The type or namespace name 'DbContext' could not be found Models\AccountModels.cs (18): The type or namespace name 'DbSet' could not be found Models\TodoItemContext.cs (23): The type or namespace name 'DbSet' could not be found C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "EntityFramework". Check to make sure the assembly exists on disk. If this reference is required by your code, you may get compilation errors.C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "DotNetOpenAuth.OAuth". Check to make sure the assembly exists on disk. If this reference is required by your code, you may get compilation errors.

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "DotNetOpenAuth.OAuth.Consumer".

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId". C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.RelyingParty". Check to make sure the assembly exists on disk. If this reference is required by your code, you may get compilation errors. C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "DotNetOpenAuth.Core".

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "EntityFramework.SqlServer". C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "Newtonsoft.Json". C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Could not resolve this reference. Could not locate the assembly "System.Web.Http.OData". C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Microsoft.Common.targets (1605): Found conflicts between different versions of the same dependent assembly.

Messing With a Thief When My Blog Content was Stolen

While I was working on my last book, How to Do Everything: SharePoint 2013, the main McGraw-Hill editor on the project sent me a nicely worded email that basically asked if I was plagiarizing content for the book.

I was shocked to say the least, but when I read through the rest of the email, my shock quickly turned to burning rage. The reason I was being asked this question was because some moron was copying other people’s blog posts to his blog and passing them off as his own. I had used some of my own content in the draft of the book and the editor wasn’t sure who wrote it.

I sent the scoundrel an email giving him 48 hours to remove the post before I took any action. Of course, he probably didn’t realize that I could actually do anything if he chose to ignore me. I also contacted some other people to let them know that their content was being stolen by the same guy.

The funny part was that the thief was so lazy that he didn’t even bother copying the images, he just copied the source and therefore I had control over the images on his blog. A friend of mine had encountered the same thing and decided to mess with the culprit, so I figured I’d do the same. The first day after the warning, I gave him a chance to take down the post with no really embarrassing images on his blog. Remember that these are screenshots of his blog. I could do whatever I wanted with the images since they were on my server.

 
day 1 – tame and to the point

On day 2, I asked my friend for permission to use the image he posted when his content was stolen.

 
day 2 – you should have listened on day 1

After that, I went for a random theme.

 
day 3 – now his blog was actually worth reading

 
day 4 and 5 – just some random stuff

Eventually, he took down the post, but he never apologized or replied to my message, but there’s a lesson for lazy thieves.

I Miss Compiled Server-side Code

Clearly, we should accept the things we cannot change, but sometimes it's fun to rant for the sake of ranting. This week I was working on a web application using AngularJS/AJAX and it reminded me that I really miss relying on server-side code. I know it's not in vogue, but I'll say it... I liked web development before JavaScript took over as such a heavy part of the code base. Writing this post, I do feel a bit like an old man talking about the "good 'ol days," but I also feel strongly that there must be developers out there suffering under the new fashion of client-side code. (And don't even get me started on running 'scripting' languages server-side. :)

I get the 'why'--I really do. I understand that the IT world is moving to the cloud and web applications heavily lean on script-based client-side frameworks to allow for a powerful user experience across platforms including mobile devices such as phones and tablets. (I also get that the V8 JavaScript VM used in Chrome doesn't include an interpreter--that's just splitting hairs.) Yes, I understand all that and it's great.

The problem is the dev experience. I've been using Sublime and I tried out the web tools in Visual Studio 2013 and they have made some progress to better support JavaScript and client-side frameworks, but the experience is just not as good as the good 'ol days of writing compiled server controls. Client-side code is more fragile because the compiler often won't help you find all sorts of errors. Writing "myvariable" instead of "myVariable" can break your whole application and you likely won't know it until you try to run that piece of code. When debugging issues, there are cases where it's necessary to pull out a tool such as Fiddler which allows you to manually inspect the communication between the client and server. I'm not knocking Fiddler, it's a fantastic asset, but seriously, manually reading JSON to figure out why it's malformed? (Not that I would ever do that.) We may as well be back in the 90s writing VBScript.

To be clear, I'm not some sort of code snob. Code is code and devs should be judged on code quality, not what the language they happen to be using. So I'm not saying that Java, C# or Go is in some way better than JavaScript; that's not my point at all. I'm simply saying that my experience writing code was more enjoyable when I could rely on some well refined tools to improve my productivity.

What's the solution to all this? We clearly need dev tools good enough that the difference between server-side and client-side code is irrelevant. In my mind, the various JavaScript frameworks have improved the situation, but there's lots of room for improvement. Client-side code (or server-side scripts such as Node.js) will be around for a long time and it should be treated as first class.

Changing Site Access Request Email in SharePoint 2013 (Office 365)

The option to set the email address for any SharePoint site access requests has moved around in the last few versions, so I thought I’d post this for those searching through old posts looking for one about SharePoint 2013.

This setting determines who will receive an email when a user requests access to a particular site—usually when the user tries to access the site and is denied. The tricky part is that the email address for this request is not related to the site owner permissions, it’s just a string.

To find the setting, navigate to:

Site Settings (Gear icon on top-right) > Site permissions > Access Request Settings (in the ribbon)

First use the gear icon in the top-right corner to get to the Site Settings page. If you don’t see the Site Settings link, you probably don’t have sufficient rights to make this change.

Once there, click on Site permissions.

This will open the “Permissions: <site name>” page where you can access the Access Request Settings option from the ribbon at the top of the screen. The option you’re changing is “Send all access requests to the following e-mail address.”

Simply enter the email address you’d like to use for access requests and you’re done.

Convert Broken HTML to XHTML

I recently made the decision to refactor a 600 page software manual. That’s a daunting task, so why did I do it? The old format was barely working, inflexible, required a truly awful propriety tool, and cost the company considerable time and money when changes (such as translations) were required.
The underlying pages were in HTML, or at least the closest thing to HTML that still actually worked. In reality, the code was awful; there were broken tags and redundant tags all over the place. The editor in question (developed by a small company in Hawaii) is nothing more than a wrapper around Microsoft’s free HTML Help Workshop tool. I decided to clean up the HTML (read: convert it to XHTML), dump the editor and dynamically build the manual the same way I’ve done at companies in the past. This is an ongoing project, but here’s how I handled the task of cleaning up ~600 HTML files, so they were in valid XHTML.
Resources:
HTML - Special Entity Codes
HTML Tidy
Online RegExr Test Tool and Interactive Tutorial
Sublime Text Editor

- running a Regular Expression replace in the Sublime Text editor
Step 1: Clean up the HTML with HTML Tidy
HTML Tidy is convenient way to repair poor HTML. It doesn’t fix everything, but it does help and it makes the code look a lot better since it will fix much of indentation. So the first thing I did was run this HTML Tidy command on all the files.
I ran this in Git Bash after turning off word wrap in tidy settings file. Even with the word wrap option, HTML Tidy inserted more newlines than you’d expect, so it isn’t perfect, but it made a big difference.
$ find /C/Manual -type f -name "*.htm" -exec tidy -f errors.txt -m -utf8 -i {} \;
Note that you can remove the HTML Tidy watermark pretty easily using find/replace in Sublime. And that is a nice segue to the next step.
Step 2: Simple Find/Replace in Sublime
Using the “Find in Files…” feature, it’s easy to make simple text substitutions in Sublime. For example, to be XHTML compliant, I need to convert &nbsp; to &#160;, <BR> to <br/>, and many other examples.
I also needed to simply remove some tags. For example, tags added when someone pasted text from Microsoft Word into the editor (e.g., <o:p> and </o:p>).
Sublime will help you figure out the syntax to match just the current open file, all open files, or a whole directory structure. For example, in the “Where” box for Replace, you might enter c:\directory\test,*.htm to match all .htm files.
Step3: RegEx Find/Replace in Sublime
Simple find/replace actions got me part way there, but they wouldn’t solve all the issues I had to deal with in the broken HTML. The next step was to use Regular Expressions to enable some more sophisticated corrections.
One example, was attributes within HTML tags (such as size, height, etc.) that weren’t enclosed in quotation marks. Browsers will deal with that transgression, but it’s not valid XHTML. I had to find a quick way to add the quotes around these attributes in ~600 files. The answer was find/replace using regular expressions in Sublime.
Find: (size=)([0-9])
This creates two capturing groups with “size=” as the first and any number of 0-9 characters as the second.
Replace: $1"$2"
This replace command encloses the second capturing group in quotation marks. For example, size=100 becomes size=”100”.
Well that’s all for now. I hope you found this helpful. I encourage you to try the RegExr online tool; it’s helpful when refining regular expressions.

Scripting Regular Expressions Find/Replace in Sublime Text

Just like everyone in the software industry, I’ve used many, many different text editors over the years.  vi, Emacs, Notepad, Notepad++, TextPad, nano, gedit… to name a few. But, of course, there is a ridiculously long list of text editors and I haven’t tried that many of them. The one that I’ve been working in for most of this year is Sublime Text. Sublime’s tag line is “Sublime Text: The text editor you’ll fall in love with.” I may not be in love yet, but I’m definitely checking it out a lot.

In addition to having excellent functionality built-in, Sublime also supports a plug-in model. There is the GoSublime plug-in for golang code and there’s the RegReplace plug-in that allows one to write find/replace commands using regular expressions and save them in script as Command Palette commands.

To install RegReplace on Windows:

Step 1: Install Package Control for Sublime Text

As you can see in the installation instructions for Package Control  for Sublime Text, all you have to do is open a Sublime Text console (Ctrl+`) and paste in the install code.

Step 2: Install RegReplace for Sublime Text

Option 1: After installing package manager, download RegReplace, unzip it and paste the unzipped folder into your Packages folder (e.g., C:\…\Sublime Text 3\Packages). Next, go to Preferences > Package Control and choose “Package Control: Install Package.” Then choose the package you want to install from the list.

Option 2: This requires you have Git. Open a command prompt. CD to your Sublime Text 3 packages directory, then enter the following command:

git clone -b ST3 https://github.com/facelessuser/RegReplace.git RegReplace

Step 3: Add a Default.sublime-commands file -- with your command added

I had to manually create the folder: C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Sublime Text 3\Packages\RegReplace

Once you have the file, you can add your own custom commands. (Remember to add a comma to the command above.)

   // Test RegReplace
     {
         "caption": "Reg Replace: Test",
         "command": "reg_replace",
         "args": {"replacements": ["test_reg_replace"]}
     },

Step 4: Add your custom command to the Command Palette

To do this, choose Tools > Command Palette > Then type “setting” and you’ll see “Preferences: Reg Replace Settings – User.” Choose this option and paste the example one that comes with RegReplace into the new file that’s created.

This will create the file: /C/Users/username/AppData/Roaming/Sublime Text 3/Packages/RegReplace/reg_replace.sublime-settings

After the file is created, add a new command to reg_replace.sublime.settings. For example:

// Test the RegReplace Sublime Plugin
    "test_reg_replace": {
    "find" : "testxxxxx",
    "replace": "it works!"
   }

Step 5: Try it out!

Once you have everything set up, you can use the Command Palette to run your new custom find/replace regular expressions scripts.

Note: After installing RegReplace, I received the an error when trying to add my test code to reg_replace.sublime.settings. The error was something like “Cannot save. Can’t create .tmp file in RegReplace folder.” To work around the issue, I opened the security settings for the folder and added write permissions for all users. A bit overkill, but in my case, it’s a secure machine.

GoREST (golang web services) Simple Examples

In my last post, Installing GoREST on Ubuntu Linux, I mentioned that I should really post a simple example of using GoREST. Here’s some example code for a Get and Post request using GoREST web services in golang.

Note that I’m also using the go-sql-driver/mysql driver for MySQL in golang. To install the driver, simply run:

$ go get github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql

Also, this example isn’t actually using JSON. Check out the link at the end of this post for a JSON example.

package main
import (
      "code.google.com/p/gorest"
    _ "github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql"
      "database/sql"
      "net/http"
      "log"
      "time"
      "os"
      "strconv"
)

func main() {
    // GoREST usage: http://localhost:8181/tutorial/hello
    gorest.RegisterService(new(Tutorial)) //Register our service
    http.Handle("/",gorest.Handle())    
    http.ListenAndServe(":8181",nil)
}

//Service Definition
type Tutorial struct {
    gorest.RestService `root:"/tutorial/" consumes:"application/json" produces:"application/json"`
    hello  gorest.EndPoint `method:"GET" path:"/hello/" output:"string"`
    insert   gorest.EndPoint `method:"POST" path:"/insert/" postdata:"int"`
}

func(serv Tutorial) Hello() string{
    return "Hello World"
}

func(serv Tutorial) Insert(number int) {
    db, err := sql.Open("mysql", "root:password@/dbname?charset=utf8")
    db.Exec("INSERT INTO table (number) VALUES(strconv.Itoa(number) + ");")
    db.Close()
    serv.ResponseBuilder().SetResponseCode(200)
}

I’m using Postman REST Client for my post tests, you can download Postman for free from the Chrome web store. (Blog post on using Postman with JSON.)

Installing GoREST on Ubuntu Linux

Previous posts on setting up a developer environment on an Ubuntu Linux virtual machine running on Windows Azure:
- Linux (Ubuntu) Virtual Machine on Windows Azure
- Remote Access to Ubuntu Linux VM on Windows Azure
- Installing LAMP on Ubuntu
- Installing Git on Ubuntu Linux

GoREST is a useful RESTful style web-services framework for the Go (golang) language. The commands to install GoREST are simple, but there’s more than one step involved. Although, having said that, this post will still be really light, so I’ll have to make sure I write another one soon with some GoREST examples. (Update: I wrote a post with some simple examples: GoREST (golang web services) Simple Examples)

First, you’ll need to install Mercurial so that you can run the “go get” command for GoREST:

$ sudo apt-get install mercurial

Next, run the command to install GoREST:

$ sudo go get code.google.com/p/gorest

The GoREST install is silent, so you won’t see any feedback.  My advice is to have a simple Hello World style example ready to go, so you can test your GoREST install.

Installing Go (golang) on Ubuntu Linux

Previous posts:
- Linux (Ubuntu) Virtual Machine on Windows Azure
- Remote Access to Ubuntu Linux VM on Windows Azure
- Installing LAMP on Ubuntu
- Installing Git on Ubuntu Linux

As part of my series on setting up a development environment on Ubuntu Linux running in Windows Azure, here are the steps to install and test the Go (golang) language.

First you have to SSH to your VM and install Go, which is super easy. Note that apt-get might not install the latest version of Go, see thread on Stack Overflow about installing latest version of Go.

$ ssh -p portnumber username@yourvmname.cloudapp.net
$ sudo apt-get install golang-go

You’ll be asking whether or not you’d like to participate in a program to track which packages are being installed.

To check that it’s installed, you can run: $ go version

You may want to do some additional customization. For more details, refer to this post: How to Install Google Go in Ubuntu by Joshua Price.

Installing Git on Ubuntu Linux

Previous posts:
- Linux (Ubuntu) Virtual Machine on Windows Azure
- Remote Access to Ubuntu Linux VM on Windows Azure
- Installing LAMP on Ubuntu

I’ve been writing some posts about setting up a development environment for Ubuntu running on Windows Azure. Here’s the short post on getting Git source control working.

Install Git

Installing LAMP is easy, there isn’t a word for how easy it is to install Git. It’s one command and you’re done. Done with the install that is… you’ll need to do a little config and then clone a repository or initialize one.

$ sudo apt-get install git



Once you’ve got your install done, you can quickly configure your user settings with these commands.
$ git config --global user.name NewUser
$ git config --global user.email

Check your Git install

Where is Git installed?

$ which git

What’s your config?

$ git config –list

Start Using Git by Cloning a Repository

Clone your repository to a directory (for example, from GitHub):

$ git clone git@github.com:whatever folderName

Note that you don’t have to pay for a private repository. See my post on a Free Private Git Repository Using TFS Online Git Integration. (Need help? See Cloning a Git Repository.)

Also, if you’re new to Git, keep in mind that you can get the Pro Git book for free.

Installing LAMP on Ubuntu Linux

Previous posts:
- Linux (Ubuntu) Virtual Machine on Windows Azure
- Remote Access to Ubuntu Linux VM on Windows Azure

Installing the rest of the L.A.M.P. stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) on a Windows Azure Ubuntu image is remarkably simple. You simply need to run two commands. First install tasksel and then run tasksel to install the lamp-server package. It’s so easy that I’m also including instructions for testing that each component is installed and running correctly.

cawood@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install tasksel

(At this point, you may be told that you can run sudo apt-get autoremove to get rid of walinuxagent-data-saver. This is optional.)

cawood@ubuntu:~$ sudo tasksel install lamp-server

After you’ve installed the LAMP stack, you can test that each component is working.

Testing the Apache Web Server Install

First you can simply test that the index file exists by running these commands:

$ cd /var/www
$ cat index.html

<html><body><h1>It works!</h1>
<p>This is the default web page for this server.</p>
<p>The web server software is running but no content has been added, yet.</p>
</body></html>

To start editing your index page, you can run:

$ sudo nano index.html

On Azure, you must create an endpoint for the Apache port. This opens the Azure firewall to allow communication across a port for Apache.

Go to the Virtual Machine > Endpoints > Add. These are the standard values: name: http, protocol: tcp, public port :80, private port: 80. Once you’ve created the endpoint, you can browse to your new Apache server.

Test your MySQL Install

To make sure your MySQL install is working, simply run mysql and then type show databases; and press Enter. Couldn’t be easier. The result should look the window below.

Test PHP on your Server

Finally, to test your PHP install, you’ll need to create a file and then launch it in your favourite browser. Maybe because I'm nostalgic about the days of Pine, I’m a fan of the  GNU nano editor, so I use this command:

$ sudo nano /var/www/info.php

Add this content to the file:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

After you’ve made your changes, Save and Exit by typing Ctrl+x, then y and Enter. Then you can open the info.php page using your machine IP or DNS name. For example, http://myvm.cloudapp.net/info.php.



There you go. The LAMP stack running on Windows Azure.

Remote Access to Ubuntu Linux VM on Windows Azure

Previous post: Linux (Ubuntu) Virtual Machine on Windows Azure

I was getting ready to write a post about connecting remotely to Ubuntu running on Windows Azure, when I found this post: Remote Desktop to Ubuntu in Windows Azure. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with Ubuntu 13.4 (Raring Ringtail); which just happens to be the image I choose to install in my virtual machine. Rather than wrestle with it any longer, I’ve decided to create a new VM using the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server (Precise Pangolin) image.

You may wonder why anyone would bother setting up remote access since you can SSH into the machine remotely and do everything through the command line. For me, the answer is quite simple, I want another way to connect in case something goes wrong. I’ve had VMs get into bad states (both one Amazon AWS EC2 and Windows Azure), so I’d like the option to connect as many ways as possible.

Note: I've used the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server image since newer versions of the Ubuntu Unity desktop don't have a 2D mode and therefore are difficult to use with remote client software. If someone has the solution to this issue, please leave a comment.

[Update: Of course, you fist have to set up SSH: How to Use SSH with Linux on Windows Azure. You should create an SSH key first and associate the certificate (*.pem file) with the VM when you create the VM.]

To get remote access to 12.04, here are the steps:

1. Connect using SSH. I like the Git Bash terminal that comes with the Git install. PuTTY is also a good SSH client.

2. Install a desktop. This command will take a while, so get yourself a cup of joe... and feel free to make it a grande.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

3. Install XRDP/ VNC Server.

sudo apt-get install xrdp

4. In the Azure Management Portal, create a VM endpoint for XRDP. 3389 is the default port.

5. Use the "Connect" button from the Azure portal to download an RDP shortcut for your VM.

6. Open the shortcut and login.

Here are a couple of other posts on this topic:
http://azurecoder.azurewebsites.net/tag/ssh-to-linux-virtual-machine/
http://www.liberiangeek.net/2012/05/connect-to-ubuntu-12-04-precise-pangolin-via-windows-remote-desktop/

Enable SharePoint Document Sets in Office 365

This still requires a number of steps, so here’s the rundown:

This first key point is that this feature is only available to Office 365 Enterprise plans. If you’re not sure which plan you’re on, check with an admin.

Note: You must be a Site Collection Administrator or a Site Owner to create or configure Document Set content types.

- Creating a new document set

1. Enable Document Sets for a site collection

2. Create a new Document Set content type

Note: you don’t need to worry about the “Configure or customize a Document Set content type” unless you actually want to customize something.

3. Create a new instance of a Document Set

After you create and configure a Document Set content type, you must add it to the library where you want users to create their Document Sets.

To do this, go to Library Settings > Content Types (section) > Add from existing site content types

- adding the new content type to the site

Great Article: STOP GLOSSING OVER THE GOOD STUFF

- image from www.scrawnytobrawny.com

I don’t normally do this, but this is a great article…

STOP GLOSSING OVER THE GOOD STUFF (HOW TO BE POSITIVE AND HAPPY)

by Jason Lengstorf

“During the course of conversation, I made a couple negative comments about my life; essentially, I started complaining about my situation.

Phil looked me in the eye and asked, point blank, “Are you actually complaining right now?”

It caught me off guard to be questioned like that, because I was used to commiserating with other entrepreneurs about how “hard” our lives were and all the things we wished we could change.

…I was being a colossal tool.”

Free Private Git Repository Using TFS Online Git Integration

If you’re looking for a way to have a free private (and hosted) Git repository, Team Foundation Services Online is a great way to go. Last time I checked, GitHub was charging for private repositories.

You can use Visual Studio if you want, but you can treat your Git repository just like any other, so you don’t have to use VS.

Read the detailed instructions for creating a new Git project in TFS online and Getting Started with Git in Visual Studio and Team Foundation Service for more info.

BTW – TFS online also has some really cool project management features (e.g., Kanban board), so it’s not just source control.

SharePoint 2013: Quick Launch Heading Without a URL

There are occasions when you’d want to create a heading in the SharePoint Quick Launch navigation without your heading being navigable. In the past, I believe it was possible to create a heading without specifying a URL, but in SharePoint 2013, the URL field is mandatory—at least from the Site Settings interface. (See below for update.)

Option 1: enter “#” as the URL from Site Settings > Look and Feel > Quick Launch

Option 2: Use the “EDIT LINKS” option under the Quick Launch and leave the URL field empty. Although, the URL field is mandatory from Site Settings, you can leave it blank from this interface.

Both of these options create a link to the site’s home page, but they allow you to create a heading without using an absolute URL to some random page.

Update: Option 3:

There is actually a way to do it the old fashioned way; it’s just not that intuitive if you happen to try the UI for editing the Quick Launch above. Go to Site Settings > Navigation and then scroll down to the Structural Navigation: Editing and Sorting section.

Linux (Ubuntu) Virtual Machine on Windows Azure

Creating (it’s hard to write “installing”) a Linux virtual machine on Windows Azure is remarkably simple. It’s just a matter of choosing the O/S and configuration you want from a gallery of options.

The whole process takes a few minutes and under the BizSpark start-up program, it’s possible to get access to Windows Azure for free.

- choosing to create an Ubuntu virtual machine in Windows Azure

After creating the VM, you can connect easily from Windows by downloading PuTTy SSH.

- connecting to Linux on Azure using PuTTy

Full instructions for creating a Linux Virtual Machine on Windows Azure can be found on the Windows Azure website.

SPAM Green is people! It’s people!

I’ve heard that some people refer to the excessive mail that comes in from legitimate sources (e.g., your airline plan, Groupon and hotel plans) as “Bacon.” In other words, it’s not SPAM, it’s bacon. I don’t think that’s a good term because why would you associate something negative with bacon?

Anyway, the issue that I have been complaining about for a long time is not the volume of email from accounts that are genuine, but SPAM that comes as a result of human error. Someone mistyped in the address somewhere along the way and now you get their mail. I’ve decided to call this type of email “SPAM Green.” Why? Because it’s people! SPAM Green is people!

If that doesn’t make any sense to you, you really need to watch Soylent Green.

I have a relatively short email address (6 characters), so this happens to me all the time—I mean every week I get mail that’s for someone else. Much of the time, there’s an unsubscribe option, so I just do that, but sometimes there is no way to unsubscribe so I have to just mark it as junk. The funniest ones are the messages that include login details for their account. Of course, I don’t use that information for evil, but one time I got messages from some shady “have an affair” site, so I did use the info to go in and delete the account.

World Water Day 2013: What is your water footprint?

Check out Stu Hamilton’s blog post on the Aquatic Informatics website about World Water Day 2013.

“To mark World Water Day at Aquatic Informatics we watched the movie ‘Last Call at the Oasis’. In discussion about the issues raised by this movie one of our senior developers expressed surprise at the magnitude of the water footprint for everyday products.

For example, the water footprint for a t-shirt was given as 700 gallons!

I don’t know whether the notion of accounting for your water footprint will catch on or not. A few years ago the idea of calculating your carbon footprint got quite a bit of press and even though carbon calculators have never caught on the notion that your carbon footprint matters seemed to stick. Equating energy use with a carbon footprint is intuitive – if I turn on a light my footprint grows whereas if I walk to work my footprint shrinks.”

Running Mono 3.0.5 Beta on Windows

Mono is a really cool concept. It’s a C# compiler/framework that works cross-platform. C# is fantastic, so I really like the idea of being able to develop C# (potentially with Visual Studio) and target any device. Until Mono came along, C# was only used on Windows because it uses the Microsoft .NET framework. (Mono also boasts the MonoGame platform and the MonoDevelop IDE for Linux coding.)

Here is the introduction from the Mono Wikipedia page:

“Mono is a free and open source project led by Xamarin (formerly by Novell and originally by Ximian) to create an Ecma standard compliant .NET Framework-compatible set of tools including, among others, a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime.

The stated purpose of Mono is not only to be able to run Microsoft .NET applications cross-platform, but also to bring better development tools to Linux developers.^[3] Mono can be run on many software systems including Android (and most other Linux distributions), BSD, iOS, OS X,Windows, Solaris, and some for game consoles such as PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360.”

So I downloaded Mono to try it out on Windows (I’ll try Ubuntu next) and I ran into an issue right away. Just trying to validate the install using the “Hello World” example on the Mono Basics page didn’t work. It’s really not that complicated, here’s the example program:

using System;
 
public class HelloWorld
{
    static public void Main ()
    {
        Console.WriteLine ("Hello Mono World");
    }
 
}

However, I couldn’t get it to work using the gmcs compiler that’s used in the example. The result was this all too common error:

C:\Mono\Mono-3.0.5>gmcs
'gmcs' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

This error will occur on Windows when the program actually doesn’t exist, or it can’t be discovered from the location that the console is running. There are two way to fix this issue for any Windows program:

1. Use the full path to the program and use quotes if the path has spaces in it

2. Add the path for the program to the Windows Environment Variable called “Path.”

So I tried to find the executable for gmcs, but I could not even find gmcs.bat or gmcs.exe. In this case, it wasn’t an issue with Windows or Mono, it was simply out of date documentation on the Mono site.

I received this helpful advice from the Mono user community forum, “Have you tried "mcs -sdk:2"? Mono 2.11 merged all the compilers into the one unified compiler, and now gmcs is a shell script that simply calls mcs (at least on Linux).” Ah, that’s good to know!

Here is the working version of the “basics” test code:

C:\Windows\System32>mcs --about
The Mono C# compiler is Copyright 2001-2011, Novell, Inc.
The compiler source code is released under the terms of the
MIT X11 or GNU GPL licenses
For more information on Mono, visit the project Web site
   http://www.mono-project.com
The compiler was written by Miguel de Icaza, Ravi Pratap, Martin Baulig, Marek Safar, Raja R Harinath, Atushi Enomoto

C:\Windows\System32>cd C:\Mono\Mono-3.0.5

C:\Mono\Mono-3.0.5>mcs helloworld.cs

C:\Mono\Mono-3.0.5>mono helloworld.exe
Hello Mono World

Success!