Friday, September 30, 2011

Deleting content types

If a content type refuses to get deleted, saying that it's part of an installed feature, try checking the following:
  • Deploy the solution that installs the feature.  And then activate and deactivate the feature.  (I am not clear on this part anymore; tried too many things.  And mumbling about SharePoint doesn't work.  I think the walk to the cookie store helped.)
  • Delete all pages that use the content type
  • Clean up the recycle bin of all pages that use the content type
  • Go to the master and page layout gallery and delete all page layouts that use the content type
[Update 07-Oct-2011:]
Warning:  Some sections here may require deleting parts of a site collection.  I haven't found a better way.  Good thing I only needed to do it on a dev or test server.  DO NOT do on a production server; find a different way.

Use the tip from here (which I found on this StackOverflow thread) to query SQL to see what's still referencing the content type.  You may end up having to delete some subwebs. :-(
And then use the tip from one answer from the StackOverflow thread to 
  • install the solution that had the feature that the offending content type
  • activate and deactivate the feature
  • go to the page layout gallery and delete the page layouts that came from the feature; make sure to clean them out of the recycle bin and from the site collection recycle bin
  • I think, at this point, when everything related to the content type was cleaned out, it no longer appeared on the content type list.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

When to use "using" (when to dispose) on SharePoint

Roger Lamb's dispose patterns.

Good one to remember about SPContext:
"SPContext.Current.Site & SPContext.Site as well as SPContext.Current.Web & SPContext.Web properties return SPSite and SPWeb objects respectively that DO NOT need a call to Dispose() and will be disposed automatically by SharePoint."

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Skype video calling on HeroTab C8 with Android 2.3

Install and configure Skype:
  1. Go to Android Market and install Skype.
  2. View the notifications and watch as it progresses through download and installation.  If you don't see it finish installing, you won't see it in the applications list, and you won't be able to download it again from the market--the install button won't appear anymore.  If that happens, you'll need to do a Factory Reset (goodbye to your apps, settings, and other data).
  3. Start Skype and sign-in.
  4. Go to Settings on the menu and enable video calling.
Warning:  Don't try to uninstall Skype, because you'll likely end up with the situation described in #2.  [Also saw other references to this upon some googling, as in:  you'll need to do a hard reset to re-install Skype.]


Initiating a call:
  1. Select a contact and start a "Skype call".  This is very important:  do not try to start a video call from the tablet, because the app will crash and you'll get this error:  "The application Skype (process com.skype.raider) has stopped unexpectedly.  Please try again."
  2. Your contact should click on the "answer with video" button.
  3. Tap your tablet and tap on the videocam icon.
  4. Tap on the "Back camera" option (there's only one camera on the HeroTab, and it's actually front-facing).
  5. The screen will show your video and then your contact's video in a little window.  Double-tap on the little window to switch them.  Your contact's video will now take up the whole screen in landscape mode (as far as I can tell, it can't go portrait mode).

Receiving a call:
  1. Have your contact start a "Call" (not a "Video call").  If they start a video call, the Skype app on the tablet will turn around and call the caller instead.  If they accept that video call, then they'll see your video.  But you'll only see your own video.  Meh.  :-(
  2. When the call arrives on the tablet, click on the green "Video" button.
  3. The caller will see a message saying they'll need to turn on their video.  The caller need to click on the "My video" cam icon.
  4. The caller's video window now appears on the tablet.  Double-tap on it to make it the full-screen window.

This information worked for me today (2011-Sep-10).  It will likely change for later versions of either the Skype app or Android.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Cheat sheets for CSS3, HTML5, etc

Veign.com has some pretty cool guides on their development center.

CSS3 PIE

"PIE makes Internet Explorer 6-9 capable of rendering several of the most useful CSS3 decoration features."

Thursday, September 1, 2011