SharePoint Development: Tools of the Trade

Posted on 19 February 2014 by jaywll

As I noted in my last post, lesson two of my SharePoint development series is still nothing more than an item in the “someday” section of my to-do list at the moment, but in the meantime I thought I’d share a few tools that I find invaluable when I’m doing SharePoint development work.

Notepad++
Any good text editor with a focus on code will do, but Notepad++ is my tool of choice, not least because it’s available in a portable version that I can run on my work computer without having to ask our IT department to install anything for me (not that I would ever run unapproved software, obviously. I’m just saying you could).
SPServices jQuery Library
I’ll be introducing this little gem in lesson 3, if/when I get around to writing it.
Find List and View GUIDs
SharePoint lists and views all have unique IDs assigned to them by the system, and it’s useful (again, for reasons that will become clear later) to be able to find them. This simple tool does just that.
SharePoint List Item Editor
Another simple but extremely useful tool. This one presents lists in a grid view which is great for mass-editing, copying and pasting from Excel, etc, etc.

Enjoy!

Update:

I’d previously also listed SharePoint CAML Query Helper in this list, with the caveat that I hadn’t actually tried it but screenshots I’d seen made me hopeful that it would make the process of building CAML queries (which are the method by which you can control what data from a list is returned to you when you’re using SPServices) easier.

It’s is a worthwhile tool to have in your toolbox and it’s great for testing CAML queries, but it didn’t make building them as easy as I’d hoped.

What I want is a tool that lets me select a list field, enter the criteria by which I want to filter on that field, and then spits out the CAML query that I need to use. If anybody knows of such a tool please let me know in the comments!

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Multitasking

Posted on 19 February 2014 by jaywll

It’s a common belief that women are better multitaskers than men, although I don’t know that’s really true.

For one, for every study (like the one reported on in the link above) that says they are, there are two that say it isn’t. More to the point though, I don’t actually believe that true multitasking exists.

You may well be able to two things at the same time, like talking on the phone while you drive, but I don’t believe anybody has the capacity to think about two things at once. That’s why people talking on the phone while they drive smash into things so often.

Multitasking as we know it, then, is all about switching your brain quickly from one train of thought to another in much the same way as a computer presents the illusion of multitasking by running two things at once. And I like to think I’m pretty good at it. Usually.

Last week I went to work on something I was especially excited about. There was a lot of effort involved, but I got two weeks worth of work done in five and a half days only because I was so enthusiastic about what I was doing – and as a result I didn’t really work on anything else.

So what’s my point? If you’re waiting for the next post in my SharePoint development series then that’s why you’re still waiting. I have some other post topics I have vague plans for too, but for the time being you’ll just have to wait some more. I have work I should have done last week to catch up on.

Shrapnel