Why Reflector is a Developer's Friend

If you have been wondering why some .net developers rave about Reflector as the one tool that rules them all, and have thought that maybe you should give it a try, here's a little tale about how it made my day better... (hope it encourages you)

Whilst attempting to bind an SPGridView to a LinqDataSource, one of the requirements was to use the filtering features of the SharePoint gridview (that's one of it's strengths above the standard GridView control).

I came across a post by Robert Fridén that described how to enable filtering when binding to an ObjectDataSource. An SPGridView property named FilteredDataSourcePropertyName needs to be set, and that must contain the name of the property on the bound datasource which will be called when filtering the data. In other words, it requires a string containing the name of a control property.

For an ObjectDataSource, that property is named "FilterExpression". I decided it was highly unlikely that the LinqDataSource would use the same property name, so I turned to Reflector.

In Reflector, I found and opened the System.Web.Extensions dll, browsed to the LinqDataSource class and then looked through the properties. Didn't need to right-click and disassemble the dll in this case, as one of the properties was named "Where". Sounded a good option for filtering. So I used that as the FilteredDataSourcePropertyName value, played around a little with the FilteredDataSourcePropertyFormat property of SPGridView, and hey presto the filtering worked. Sure, I could have looked through the MSDN documentation, but with Reflector I can browse inside the methods of the data source class if needed.

If you've not yet delved inside the .Net dlls with Reflector, give it a go. You'll be rewarded!

...and by the way, as tempting as it was I just couldn't bring myself to put the word"best" in the title ;-)

VMWare Virtual Machine 'Failed to Lock the File'

Scary moment occurred last week when one of my virtual machines failed to start from VMWare Workstation. The reported error was "failed to lock the file". A bit of searching revealed that I needed to delete the .LCK file in the VM's folder.

The cause for this (I think) was that I had opened the virtual disk of this VM as a mapped drive on the host machine (TIP: very useful feature to get at files from the VM without powering it up - just right click on the .VMDK file in Windows Explorere, and you'll see a couple of options there to map the disk as a drive). That drive was still mapped when trying to start the VM, meaning that the host machine was accessing the VM's files.

Some OWSSVR Parameters are Case-Sensitive

Experimenting with some owssvr URL protocol calls today, and kept getting error pages back when trying to retrieve data from a particular view by specifying a "View" parameter in the querystring

e.g. http://[site url]/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?CS=109&List={list Guid}&View={View Guid}

Tried swapping various list ids, and removing the view id parameter. Well, it turns out that the View ID is CASE-SENSITIVE, yet the List ID value is not case-sensitive. Cunning way to throw me off the scent, there!

MOSS Search Box Missing Search Scopes

Had a situation where the search box on the SharePoint home page on a MOSS site was missing the "All Sites" and "People" options in the search scope dropdown.

Luckily John M. Cass has posted a fix - if the display group named "Search Dropdown" is missing (you only see the group named "Unused Scopes" on the Search Scopes admin page in the Site Settings), add a new group named "Search Dropdown" and add the two scopes to that group.

Thanks for that, John.