The problem is how to actually launch the Sharepoint modal dialog to use these functions from Javascript. Fortunalty, Microsoft provides the Sharepoint Object Model for Javascript which exposes most of Sharepoint functions to the client side (as long as the logged in user has access obviously).

Important: In the code below, the ctx.listUrlDir variable is used to determine the relative path to the NewForm.aspx file. The variable is actually declared automatically as long as you have the list/document library webpart displayed on the page. Otherwise, you need to replace that variable with the relative path to the NewForm.aspx file.

List – Create New Item

SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog({
	url: ctx.listUrlDir + "/NewForm.aspx?IsDlg=1",
	title: "Create New Item"
	dialogReturnValueCallback: function() {
		window.location = window.location.href;
	}
});

Document Library – Upload New Document

var exppath = getQSParameterByName('RootFolder');
SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog({
	url: ctx.listUrlDir + "/Forms/Upload.aspx?IsDlg=1" + ((exppath != null && exppath.length > 2) ? '&RootFolder=' + exppath : ''),
	title: "Upload a document",
	dialogReturnValueCallback: function() {
		window.location = window.location.href;
	}
});

The getQSParameterByName function code is provided at the end of this post.

Document Library – Create New Item of Custom Type

var exppath = getQSParameterByName('RootFolder');
SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog({
	url: ctx.listUrlDir + "/Forms/Upload.aspx?ContentTypeId=0x012000bd2db3db2b004dda815269e70974b696&IsDlg=1" + ((exppath != null && exppath.length > 2) ? '&RootFolder=' + exppath : ''),
	title: "Create New Custom Type Document",
	dialogReturnValueCallback: function() {
		window.location = window.location.href;
	}
 });

You must replace the value of the ContentTypeId parameter with your own!

The getQSParameterByName function code is provided at the end of this post.

Open in Windows Explorer (IE only)

CoreInvoke('NavigateHttpFolder', exppath, '_blank');

In most cases where a Sharepoint modal is involved, you can replicate any built-in function of the ribbon by looking at the URL called (via Firebug) and adapting the scripts above.

The getQSParameterByName function:

function getQSParameterByName(name) {
    var match = RegExp('[?&]' + name + '=([^&]*)').exec(window.location.search);
    return match && decodeURIComponent(match[1].replace(/\+/g, ' '));
}

The workaround is to escape the dot with a backslash. So in the above example, you would use selector #Ribbon\.Read-Title to match the specific ID “Ribbon.Read-Title”.

Note: Contrary to what some people believe, using a dot in an ID or Name attribute is totally valid and accepted, as specified by the W3C. However, it’s easy to confuse the default selector behavior for dots.

So you got in a 2/3 years contract with a cellphone service provider (Fido/Rogers/Bell/Telus/Virgin) and you’re now looking to cancel your contract or upgrade to a new phone early in your contract. In the past, you usually had to pay astronomical fees in order to cancel your contract. Fortunately, since July 1st 2010, in Quebec ONLY, a new bill (Bill 60) changes the rules of early cancellation fees (known as ECF or DECF). For some reasons, it seems to be a complete mystery as to how these new rules work. It’s not explained anywhere on any service providers. So I did some research and talked to a few representives to get the details right. So here’s how it works:

The formula is: [rebate] – ( [rebate] * [complete months elapsed] / [contract length] )

Example

So let’s say you bought an iPhone 4 16GB on July 30th 2010 on Fido.

The unsubsidized price of the iPhone 4 16GB is 649$. But you only paid 159$ for it because of the 3 year contract.
So 649$ – 159$ = 490$. This is the rebate Fido gave you (490 $). In the event you would cancel your contract right away, the maximum fee you could pay is 490$. Service providers cannot charge you more than the rebate they gave you in the event you cancel your contract at any time.

The whole formula is based on this number. Now divide the rebate by the length of your contract (in months).
For a 3 year contract (36 months), you should do 490$ / 36 = 13.61$. This is the amount that is withdrawn from the rebate for every month you complete.
So if you cancel after 2 complete months in your contract, the maximum fee you will have to pay is 462.78$ (= 490$ – ( 2 x 13.61$ ) ).
The longer you stay in the contract, the lower the maximum fee will be. Obviously, after 36 months, the amount reaches 0$.

So to get back to the formula I wrote earlier, if you cancel after 12 completed months in your 3 years contract, the ECF you will need to pay is:

490 – (490 * 12 / 36) = 326.67$

What is ECF and DECF?

ECF (Early Cancellation Fee) and DECF (Data Early Cancellation Fee) are usually both present if you have Voice + Data plan. The rebate explained earlier is usually split in 2. For the iPhone 4 16GB on Fido, the ECF is 200$ while the DECF is 290$ (for a total of 490$, the maximum fee a service provider can charge you!). If you cancel your contract completely or ugprade to a new phone early, simply follow the formula outlined above as the ECF and DECF is combined.

However, should you want to cancel only the Data plan while keeping your Voice plan, you will need to pay the DECF only. You will need to confirm with your service provider for the exact amount as the ratio is different for every phone and provider. For example, if you want to cancel your Data plan after 12 completed months (of your 3 years contract) and the DECF is 290$, the maximum fee you can pay is:

290 – (290 * 12 / 36) = 193.33$

The same formula applies to Voice plans (ECF).

What if I didn’t get a rebate on the phone/equipment?

In the event you want to cancel a contract but you didn’t get any rebate for the cell phone equipment, the maximum fee you can pay is the lesser of 50$ or 10% of the total amount yet to be paid for the services. For example, let’s say you have a monthly plan of 30$ and you want to cancel after 12 months:

10% of (24 months remaining * 30$ plan) = 72$

But wait! 72$ is exceeding the maximum fee of 50$. Therefor, 50$ is the maximum to paid during a cancellation.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this makes it easier for Quebec residents to understand the new bill concerning early cancellation fees.
Like I said earlier, make sure you contact your service provider to confirm the fees to be paid if you cancel / early upgrade.
As we all know, these companies are experts at hiding fees in every corner…

Now where VHD becomes handy is in testing the new developer preview builds of Windows 8. Note that this method will work on future builds of Windows 8 (Beta, RC and final) as well as Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. For the purposes of this guide, I’ll assume you currently have Windows 7 installed natively on your machine and want to install the Windows 8 Developer Preview on a VHD. Before we start, you should have already burned the installation ISO of Windows 8 to a DVD or made a bootable USB installation media.

A) Create a new empty VHD

A.1) Launch the Computer Management console (found in Control Panel > Administrative Tools).
A.2) Right-click on Disk Management (under Storage) and choose Create VHD. (Note: You might need to click on Disk Management first, then wait for it to load before you can have the contextual menu with the Create VHD option.)
A.3) Enter the location of the .VHD file. I HIGHLY recommend to place this file on the root of any disk. Note that you will need to remember the path of this file for use later in this guide.
A.4) Enter the disk space (80GB is usually good for most uses) and choose the Fixed size format.
A.5) Click OK and wait for the VHD creation to complete (displayed in the window footer). It usually takes about 5-15 minutes to complete.

B) Install Windows 8 on the VHD

B.1) Reboot the computer with the installation disk (or USB drive) inserted and boot from it.
B.2) On the first installation screen, choose the language options, then click Install Now.
B.3) Accept the license agreement and then choose Custom Installation.
B.4) On this screen, a list of available partitions/disks are displayed. But it’s missing the VHD we created earlier. This is because we need to attach it first.
B.5) Press SHIFT + F10, a command prompt window will appear.
B.6) Type the following command: diskpart
B.7) Then type the command (replace win8.vhd with the name of your VHD): select vdisk file=C:\win8.vhd
—> Got an error? This is because the drive letters may not be assigned in the same order as in Windows. Fortunately, the setup lists them starting from letter C and going up. So try the command again but this time using D:\win8.vhd, then E:\win8.vhd, etc. until it works.
B.8) Once you get a successful message, type the command: attach vdisk
B.9) Once your VHD is attached, type exit, then again exit to close the command prompt.
B.10) On the screen, click the Refresh button. After a few seconds, your VHD should now appear in the list.
B.11) Select the VHD and click Next. (Note: A warning might be displayed at the bottom saying Windows can’t install to this drive. Ignore it!)
B.12) Continue to install Windows 8 as usual, following the on-screen instructions.

And you’re done! The whole Windows 8 OS is now contained within a single isolated file on your disk.
During the boot process, you will have the option to choose between your Windows 7 or Windows 8 installation. Simply select the OS you want to use!

Hyper-V and its basic virtual VGA adapter

The great thing about Hyper-V is that you can boot your VMs and let them run in the background. Should you need to see what’s going on (like a real monitor attached to a physical PC), you can use the built-in “Connect…” feature to see the VM screen. Hyper-V is using a basic VGA adapter to achieve that, which results in a 4:3 low resolution display of the VM. If you’re using that remote screen for development purposes, it’s quite counter-productive and annoying. Which is where the standard Remote Desktop (mstsc.exe) comes handy.

Isn’t that great when your host and VM can’t talk to each other?

The first thing I get while trying to connect to a VM running on my host is a “Not found” error. Sure enough, my VM has network access and so has my host. My colleagues can ping my VMs (and vice-versa) just fine, but impossible to ping the host from the VM or the VM from the host.

Don’t put your VMs on the same network adapter as your host…

Turns out it’s not a good idea to use the same network adapter for Hyper-V and your host. Even though your VMs have completely different and unique MAC and IP address, the packets are still trying to get in and out of the same physical interface which is a no-go. The solution was to use a second PCI-Express gigabit card (or a PCI) to add a second physical network adapter. The host is using the main network adapter while Hyper-V uses the second adapter. Now it all works perfectly.

I’ve seen some complex tutorials about creating local loopbacks adapters with NAT translation in order to use only 1 adapter and frankly, it doesn’t seem work the effort and it might affect performance in the end. So there you go, use 2 physical adapters for Hyper-V.

After contacting the Apple Support, all I got was a totally useless response about re-installing iTunes and that might fix the problem. Even though I knew iTunes had absolutely nothing to do with the Mac App Store, I still followed their instructions and re-installed iTunes. Guess what, it didn’t fix the issue at all. Thanks for your support Apple…not. A few posts in Apple support forums have suggested deleting the apps and re-install them. While it works, it’s not really convenient.

It turns out the issue is related to Spotlight. Apparently, the Mac App Store use the Spotlight index to find which applications are installed on your Mac. So if for some reasons the spotlight index is empty, corrupted or disabled, the Updates tab will always be empty and you’ll get the error message discussed above every single time you try to update your apps. Depending on what makes your spotlight index buggy, there’s various fixes:

Solution 1 – Spotlight works but the index is incomplete or empty:

1) Open System Preferences > Spotlight
2) Under the Privacy tab. Add your Macintosh HD (or whatever your main hard disk is called) to the list.
3) Close the window. Wait a few seconds. Then go back to Spotlight settings and remove the entry you just added.
4) The spotlight index should now begin to re-index completely. (A dot will fade-in/out inside the Spotlight icon in the taskbar)
5) Wait for it to finish and then launch the Mac App Store. You should now see updates in the Updates tab.

Solution 2 – Spotlight indexing is disabled (frequent on Mac OS X Server)

1) Open a Terminal window.
2) Type the following command: sudo mdutil -i on /
3) A message saying “Indexing enabled.” should appear after a few seconds.
4) Close the Terminal window and the Spotlight indexing should now start automatically. (Again, a dot will appear inside the Spotlight icon during the indexing process)
5) Wait for it to finish and then launch the Mac App Store. You should now see updates in the Updates tab.

It would be a good thing for Apple developers to check if the spotlight index is OK before displaying a completely useless error message to the user…

Fortunately, with the help of a colleague, we found a way to remove the tables only on defined webpartzones. Zones marked with a property called tableless=”true” will be stripped from their tables while all other Sharepoint controls won’t be affected at all.

So what needs to be done in order to get this functionnality? Follow these steps:

1) Copy the following modified C# code (notice the tableless property that was added to David Schneider’s solution) in a file called AKS_WebPartZone_Adapter.cs and place it in the AppCode directory under your server root directory (like C:\Inetpub\wwwroot or C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80).

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Security;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages;

/// WebPartZone Adapter
/// Created by David Schneider
/// http://blog.sharepoint.ch
/// Based on AKS

namespace AKSAdapters
{
  public class AKS_WebPartZone_Adapter : System.Web.UI.Adapters.ControlAdapter
  {
      protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
      {
          bool inEditMode = false;
          System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPartZone wpz = Control as System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPartZone;
          if (wpz != null && wpz.Attributes["tableless"] != null)
          {
              SPWebPartManager swpm = (SPWebPartManager)SPWebPartManager.GetCurrentWebPartManager(wpz.Page);
              inEditMode = !swpm.GetDisplayMode().AllowPageDesign;
          }
          if (inEditMode)
          {
              // Render the WebPartZone
              writer.Indent++;
              writer.AddAttribute(HtmlTextWriterAttribute.Id, wpz.ID);
              if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(wpz.CssClass))
              {
                  writer.AddAttribute(HtmlTextWriterAttribute.Class, wpz.CssClass);
              }
              if (wpz.LayoutOrientation == System.Web.UI.WebControls.Orientation.Horizontal)
              {
                  writer.AddAttribute(HtmlTextWriterAttribute.Class, "AspNet-WebPartZone-Horizontal");
              }
              else if (wpz.LayoutOrientation == System.Web.UI.WebControls.Orientation.Vertical)
              {
                  writer.AddAttribute(HtmlTextWriterAttribute.Class, "AspNet-WebPartZone-Vertical");
              }
              writer.RenderBeginTag(HtmlTextWriterTag.Div);
              writer.Indent++;

              // Render the web parts
              if (wpz.WebParts.Count > 0)
              {
                  WebPartCollection wpColl = new WebPartCollection(wpz.WebParts);

                  foreach (System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart wp in wpColl)
                  {
                      writer.WriteLine();
                      writer.AddAttribute(HtmlTextWriterAttribute.Class, "AspNet-WebPart");
                      writer.RenderBeginTag(HtmlTextWriterTag.Div);

                      wp.RenderControl(writer);
                      writer.RenderEndTag(); // Div
                      writer.Indent++;
                  }
              }
              writer.RenderEndTag(); // Div

              writer.Indent--;
              writer.WriteLine();
          }
          else
          {
              // If we are editing the page --> render the web part as usual.
              base.Render(writer);
          }
      }
  }
}

2) Edit the compat.browser file which in the AppBrowser directory located in your server directory and add the following piece of code after the opening tag:

3) In your page layouts, add the property tableless=”true” to all your WebPartZones.

Your pages will then be free of tables without affecting core Sharepoint functionality such as the ribbon and other editing functions. Enjoy.

1) Open My Computer and click Organize > Folder and Search Options

2) Under the View tab, uncheck the Hide protected operating system files (recommended) option.

3) On your desktop, you should now see 1 or more Desktop.ini files. Delete all of them (no, it won’t break your system, they are auto-generated).

4) Reboot your computer. Problem solved!

Note: I still get the bug when copying or moving files from a network drive but anything done locally on the computer seems to work again.
You might want to re-check that setting in Folder and Search Options once you’re done.

The trick is to call the .upgrade() method your app settings object. The system will look for previous versions of your application in the App Data directory and copy the user settings to the new version automatically.

Properties.Settings.Default.Upgrade();

But now we have a problem. How do you know when the upgrade method should be called? As we don’t want to upgrade everytime the application is started, but only the first time after an upgrade. The solution is to create a new user settings variable that will be used to determine whether an upgrade is required. You can either make it a string and save the current application version, or make it a boolean and set it to True by default. I personally find the boolean method easier to use and this is the one I will explain below:

In your application load function (private void Window_Loaded in WPF), simply use this code:

if (Properties.Settings.Default.UpdateSettings)
{
   Properties.Settings.Default.Upgrade();
   Properties.Settings.Default.UpdateSettings = false;
   Properties.Settings.Default.Save();
}

It is important to place this code before anything else that use the user settings in the load method. In the above example, UpdateSettings is the user setting variable I created and set to True by default. When the application launch, it will check whether the UpdateSettings variable is set to True. If it’s the case, it will perform an upgrade. We then set the variable to False so that it doesn’t perform an upgrade the next time. Finally, we save the new settings. Why does it work? Because we set the user setting to True by default which will only occur after a new installation of the application.

Enjoy!

The page ‘/path/somefile.master’ allows a limit of 11 direct dependencies, and that limit has been exceeded.

You can easily increase that limit as it is actually set in your sharepoint web.config:

1) Browse to C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\

2) Open the folder corresponding to your Sharepoint website.

3) Edit the file web.config

4) Do a search for “safemode“.

5) Change the property DirectFileDependencies from 10 to a value your choice.

6) Do an iisreset command and you’re done!