tips & tricks
Easy access to SharePoint Central Administration for developers
One of the places you visit on regular as a SharePoint developer is Central Administration. From there you can deploy Solutions, create Web Applications and Site Collections and Manage Service Applications. And although most developer spend a fair amount of time in Central Administration it’s quite surprising that the only way to get there is either by memorizing a random port or using the shortcut from the Start menu. But there is a better way.
Better conditional content for anonymous users with LoginView
SharePoint 2010 ships with the SPSecurityTrimmedControl that allows you to conditionally display content to users based on their permissions. On top of that it gives you the ability to display content to anonymous/authenticated users only which unfortunately doesn’t work. And although you might want start off and develop something of your own, it turns out that for all this time there was a solution for this just around the corner.
Inconvenient SPWebConfigModification development with Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools
The new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools simplify the process of developing SharePoint 2010 Solutions. By encapsulating much of the plumbing of the packaging and deployment process they enable developers to create SharePoint 2010 Solutions easier and faster. Unfortunately in some scenario this simplification comes with a price and working with SPWebConfigModifications is one of such scenarios.
Easy installing SharePoint 2010 Solutions with PowerShell
SharePoint 2007 shipped with the STSADM command-line tool which was meant to be used for all kind of administration tasks like installing and deploying Solutions. Although the STSADM is still available in SharePoint 2010 for backwards compatibility the recommended way is to use PowerShell instead. SharePoint 2010 ships with a great number of PowerShell cmdlets which simplify the process of administering your SharePoint Farm. And although PowerShell is way more powerful than STSADM, it adds some extra complexity.
Programmatically determining which Claims Authentication Type has been used to login with Claims Based Authentication
Claims Based Authentication introduced with SharePoint 2010 allows you to login to a SharePoint site using multiple Authentication Providers. In some scenario you might need to determine which Claims Authentication Type has been used to login in order to conditionally show some content. Find out how this can be done using the new Claims API provided with SharePoint 2010.