Living and breathing the world of Microsoft: October 2012

Monday, October 29, 2012

Unattended installation of Windows 8/Windows Server 2012

In case you are interested in performing an unattended installation of Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012, here is a very good article describing the entire process including screenshots:

http://derek858.blogspot.com/2012/07/windows-server-2012-unattended.html

You can download the Windows ADK from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30652

It is a setup file which will download the remaining files over the Internet. You can also have it download the files for a later offline installation.

Once the Windows ADK is installed, you will use the Windows System Image Manager to create the answer file as you did with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

Unfortunately, the Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 answer files are significantly different from the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 answer files, so there will be a learning curve and some trial and error with the answer file settings once again...

Here is the online Technical Reference for the Windows ADK: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825039.aspx

This is the specific reference guide for Windows System Image Manager in regards to creating and opening an Answer File: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825114.aspx

You can find a copy of the CHM file on your file system when you install the Windows ADK here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.0\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Docs\Unattend.chm

You can find more information about the Windows ADK Documentation here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/hh825613.aspx

NOTE: I learned an interesting fact/quirk about the Autounattend.xml file. Even if the default setting is Enabled in the Answer file, unless you change the setting to Disabled and then Enabled so that Windows System Image Manager displays it in bold, the validation error messages will not disappear!

Installing AvePoint DocAve 6

If you have installed AvePoint DocAve 6 from the installation documentation, you may have noticed that the documentation lacks screenshots for many of the installation steps, thus making it difficult to read and follow.

Fortunately, I have captured the overall installation and configuration process that I can share with you below:

The installation consists of a DocAve 6 Manager Installation followed by a DocAve 6 Agent Installation.

In order to log into the system, you will launch a Web Browser that uses a Silverlight plug-in:

The default login name and password is admin/admin.

SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 Released on MSDN!

SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 RTM were released on MSDN!

You can download the RTM releases here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Adding jQuery Mobile support to a Sitefinity Content Page

If you are using a version or edition of Sitefinity that does not include the Mobile Device Support, odds are that you will need to leverage jQuery Mobile in your Sitefinity website in order to provide mobile device support.

Fortunately, this is a bit tricky but not that difficult overall:

Open up your Sitefinity content page for editing
Go into Title & Properties and add the following meta tag to the Advanced Options-->HTML Included in the <head> tag section: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
Save your Changes
Go back into Page Edit mode so that you can drag widgets into the Sitefinity Page
You will need to add a CSS Widget and 2 JavaScript Widgets
For the CSS Widget, link to the location of the jQuery Mobile .min.css file
For the 1st JavaScript widget, link to the location of the jQuery .min.js file
For the 2nd JavaScript widget, link to the location of the jQuery.mobile.min.js file
Publish your resultant page
View your published page and check to see if the rendering of the content in a mobile device has been improved

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Building and customizing styles for Sitefinity RadControls

If you are currently using Sitefinity CMS, you may already know that Sitefinity uses the Telerik RadControls for much of the ASP.Net content.

Therefore, if you want to customize the styles used in Sitefinity CMS, as in ASP.NET, you will need to skin the controls.

Fortunately, Telerik has made this process relatively easy through use of the Telerik Visual Style Builder: http://stylebuilder.telerik.com/

You can customize an existing skin and then export it for use within your Sitefinity CMS Website!

Once you have the resultant styles, you can do the following:

Upload the resultant styles into the App_Themes directory
For the specific RadControl that is being targeted (such as RadMenu), open the Design Settings in Sitefinity
Specify the name of the generated Skin in the Design Settings for the control
Save your changes
Verify that your Skin changes have been applied to the control

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Beware of Rebuild operations in Visual Studio with SitefinityWebApp

I was recently modifying a Sitefinity Web Application project, and as I so often do, I performed a "Rebuild" operation in Visual Studio.

Of course, as soon as I did this, I began getting assembly loading errors. I could not figure out the root cause of the problem since my Sitefinity Web Application projects seemed to be running just fine!

Well, after some further research, I discovered that many of the assemblies/DLLs in the bin directory of the Sitefinity Web Application project are not referenced!

Therefore, performing a "Rebuild" effectively cleans out the bin directory of any unreferenced assemblies. By natural consequence then, I would received assembly loading and assembly reference errors for any assemblies that no longer exist in the bin directory.

The solution??--just perform a "Build" and avoid the more common and conventional "Rebuild" operation in Visual Studio. You could, of course, create Visual Studio references for all of the necessary assemblies and make "Copy Local" is true, but that might be more trouble than it is worth.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Default number of sections in InfoPath Repeating Control

As many InfoPath developers know, using an InfoPath Repeating Section control allows end-users to add additional sections as needed.

However, how do you add a default number of sections in an InfoPath Form.

Well, the answer is surprisingly easy:

Open up your InfoPath Form
Click on the Data tab
Click on the button for Default Values
Expand the field containing your Repeating Section
Right click on one of your existing sections
You will now see a menu option to add additional repeating sections above or below the current section
You can simply repeat steps 5 & 6 depending on how many "default" number of sections you want in your InfoPath Form.