jQuery is a powerful library which simplifies working with JavaScript. Using CSS-like selectors it allows you to grab DOM elements on a page and run some operations on it. As you might’ve guessed the power is not only in what kind of operations you may perform but also how efficiently you are able to select the elements that you’re interested in. jQuery ships with quite a few filters among which Content Filters: selectors which allow you to select DOM elements based on the text they contain. And while the standard filters allow you to do some basic comparisons they are not powerful enough in more advanced scenarios.

By default WSPBuilder builds solutions with the DeploymentTarget attribute set to GlobalAssemblyCache. All assemblies provisioned by the solution will be deployed to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) of the target web server which might not always be desirable/doable. There are a couple of ways of how to change the DeploymentTarget to the bin directory of the target Web Application.

Last week I got an opportunity to work with SharePoint Search. As you could imagine it didn’t go that easy at all and to be honest the SQL-like statements didn’t make it for me at all. And unless I’ve seriously missed something, I’ve found out that there is no easy way to exclude empty text results in SharePoint Search. At least it seemed so…

Recently, while working on a new JavaScript mockup I’ve noticed that JavaScript lacks a decent support for retrieving values of object properties. Constantly checking whether both object and property makes the code almost unreadable. But isn’t there a better to get the values of object properties and keep the JavaScript code to the minimum?

For the last couple of weeks we’ve been thinking here at Imtech ICT Velocity about how we could improve our SharePoint development process. During the last year we have gathered a lot of different tools which help us to automate the routine. And while they all are definitely very useful, they make the development environment quite complex. Maybe even too complex. One of the improvements we thought about was integrating all these different tools we have made into Visual Studio. Imtech Fields Explorer is the first one to go.