Rob Nowiks Blog

Windows 8: “Run as Different User”

Rob Nowik — 5/14/2013 10:38:07 PM

Just a quicknote – to enabled “run as a different user” from the Win 8 start screen, do the following:

Launch Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)
Select User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Start menu and Taskbar
Select the "Run as Different user" node and enable this.

Quicknote: Reduce size of Hyberfile.sys

Rob Nowik — 10/30/2012 11:54:36 PM

I recently began running out of space on my C: Drive (120GB SSD). It turned out that 13GB of this was used by HyberFile.sys (which is used for hybernation).

To reduce this, I opened an administrator command prompt and ran

PowerCfg.exe /HIBERNATE /SIZE 50 (where this size is a percentage of the machines memory).

See http://www.ehow.com/how_8617946_reduce-size-hiberfilsys.html for further details.

PowerShell Variable Scope

Rob Nowik — 10/9/2012 10:52:10 PM

Just thought I’d blog about PowerShell variable scope. It seems that not many people are aware of this (I wasn’t aware until recently). There are scopes for private, local (this is the default behaviour), script and global (the PowerShell console).

$private:myVar = "Some value"
$local:myVar = "Some value"
$script:myVar = "Some value"
$global:myVar = "Some value"

This article contains a nice section with slightly more detail. http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/ebookv2/archive/2012/02/02/chapter-3-variables.aspx#scope-of-variables

XNA Experiments: Coverflow

Rob Nowik — 3/4/2012 4:36:52 PM

Experiments with XNA. Just finished trying to build coverflow, with animation, inertia etc…

Quicknote: Equivalent to SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges in standard asp.net (4.0)

Rob Nowik — 2/8/2012 9:57:09 PM

I have an asp.net web app that must execute code under the context of the current user (via identity impersonate, as it needs to call out to various resources). There are some blocks of code, such as writing exceptions to the event log that must run as the app pool account.

In SharePoint, (which has asp.net set up very similar to my web app), there is SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges. This ensure a block of code runs as the app pool account. The equivalent in asp.net is as follows:

using (System.Web.Hosting.HostingEnvironment.Impersonate())
{
}

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.hosting.hostingenvironment.impersonate.aspx

Quicknote: A couple of links…

Rob Nowik — 6/25/2011 10:38:38 AM

I’m currently debugging WCF, as a reminder, here is an article on how to configure tracing and logging. I simply just put the relevant entries into my web.config and created the folder for my log file to be place in. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa702726.aspx

Also, here is a link to force self-signed certificates to appear as trusted on a development environment. http://www.robbagby.com/iis/self-signed-certificates-on-iis-7-the-easy-way-and-the-most-effective-way/

SharePoint 2010: Synchronously Deploying Solutions (WSPs)

Rob Nowik — 4/27/2011 6:53:16 PM

When developing larger SharePoint solutions (with multiple developers and environments), we normally write a series of PowerShell scripts to ensure that all our custom functionality and structure can be repeatedly deployed. The problem that commonly arises with this is that SharePoint solution files (wsps) are deployed asynchronously, meaning that later operations in PowerShell scripts can fail. A while ago, i posted a rough article on execadmsvcjobs with SharePoint 2010 (click here to view the original article). I have experimented polling the “Deployed” property of a WSP in PowerShell, however I did not find this robust in some cases.

I have recently hardened my mechanism to ensure that my PowerShell scripts wait synchronously for solutions to deploy / retract as follows (based on a excellent post by Gary LaPointe (see here))

Note that this example assumes a solution to be activated globally (i.e. not at a specific webapp), and that also deploys to the GAC.

        1: Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell"

       2: $ErrorActionPreference = "stop"

       3:  

       4: $solutionPath = "C:\DummySolution\DummySolution\bin\Debug\DummySolution.wsp"

       5: $solutionName = "DummySolution.wsp"

       6: $featureName = "DummyWebPart"

       7: $urlToActivateFeature = "http://mywebsite/sites/test"

       8: $webAppUrl = "http://mywebsite"

       9:  

      10: Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath $solutionPath

      11: Install-SPSolution -Identity $solutionName -GacDeployment -WebApplication $webAppUrl

      12:  

      13: do 

      14: { 

      15:     Write-Host "Sleeping for 2 seconds to allow wsp to deploy"

      16:     Start-Sleep 2 

      17:     $solution = Get-SPSolution $solutionName

      18:     if ($solution.LastOperationResult -like "*Failed*") { throw "An error occurred deployment." }

      19:     if (!$solution.JobExists -and $solution.Deployed) { break }

      20: } 

      21: while ($true)

      22: sleep 5  

      23:  

      24: Enable-SPFeature -Identity $featureName -Url $urlToActivateFeature

SharePoint: Calling Services from PowerShell

Rob Nowik — 1/14/2011 4:10:22 PM

Nice article on calling services from PS.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/Blogs/zach/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=9

Active Directory with PowerShell Links

Rob Nowik — 1/6/2011 5:56:39 PM

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd378937(WS.10).aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee617195.aspx

Import-module ActiveDirectory

Quicknote: SharePoint / VS 2010 – Ensuring features activate in the correct order

Rob Nowik — 10/11/2010 6:23:35 PM

Just a quick one – when you have feature dependencies in SharePoint features, the order in which they are activated when F5ing in VS2010 is not controlled by feature dependencies, but the order the features appear in the package (see

http://www.martinhatch.com/2010/04/controlling-order-of-feature-activation.html)