Author Archives: Etienne Bley

Take ANY SharePoint 2010 or 2013 Library. Does clicking on “Open in Explorer” hang your computer with an error after 1-2minutes?

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Lets say you have a SharePoint Library and want to open in in Explorer to a whack of files by copying them in rather than through the web interface. BUT you cannot as there is an error. In SharePoint’s Library ribbon, you can if you…

Click Library -> Open with Explorer

And it hangs your computer for about 1-2 minutes – arriving with an error box

“Your client does not support opening this list with Windows Explorer”

Root Cause: The webclient services is not running and (in my case) COULD NOT start. Do this …
 Continue reading →

Dropbox .. your fired!

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Dropbox cannot be run as service and always up has failed us making it so.

So … what next?

The New Office Add-in helpful links

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After researching and finding some good information on the new office add-in I have found the following links that will help anyone in designing them:

Build your first excel add-in

Excel JavaScript API

Excel JavaScript API in detail

VSTO vs JavaScript API

Office UI Fabric

GitHub Library of Office UI Fabric with coding examples

Inserting Images Word Only

Other options with JavaScript API for Word only

How to deal with files with a name longer than 259 characters?

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The fileinfo class that is the standard class to use for getting fullname of a file will produce an error when the path is too long. This is a path that windows allows but the class can’t handle the error. More on the subject is described here.

After much research I installed the nuget package ZetaLong Paths. Just searched for it and chose the appropriate file as shown below.

The article that pointed me to the solution can be found here. It also lays out some alternative methods.

After I installed the package I was able to use fileinfo methods such as fullname without any path too long error. Just change fileinfo to ZpFileInfo for methods using fileinfo.

Configuring and getting an RDS SQL Server dB from local to AWS – what a pain

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The documentation is sooo not complete at AWS to get a dB restored from local to the AWS server. The error I had when i ran the stored proc (below) was “Database backup/restore option is not enabled yet or is in the process of being enabled. Please try again later.” These guys got me started, but I was still a long way off, this guy finished the missing link. The instructions below hopefully will help. I wished I would have recorded this but .. this article is my best memory of how I solved it.

Connecting was mental too – I added a firewall rule – but adding to the default one was the trick that made it work. Now, after doing all this, I see why – you have to make “groups” of this or that and then apply those groups. That is the key to making things work on RDS. Continue reading →

Update a Visual Studio Project After Installing it using Windows Installer Method

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You have to configure two items in the installer as described below:

  1. Increase the Product Version number under General Information and then create a Upgrade Path if not done already.
  2. Change the Product Code.

Now you can do the following steps below.

In order to update a project after it has been installed follow the procedure below:

  1. Make changes in the project, test, and build
  2. Install using the setup.exe

Choose SQL Cloud Service

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UPDATE POST RDS trial: OH NO: RDS has no sysadmin rights and the app I need has Stored Procs that need that. So I installed an EC2 instance which is a fancy way of saying “got a computer up and running, logging into it using RDP and installing my own SQL express”. Gee I could have done that in the first place 🙂 Alas. BUT … a super cool article with how-to’s for both RDS and EC2 setup. A CLI is also avail. Firewall calc.

After doing some digging, AWS is likely a good value for a SQL server. It is called AWS RDS. It can be sized and all sorts of databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server etc) can be chosen and the power of the machine and file size can be chosen. $20-$100 for 20GB of space. But that is not all you have to think of when sizing up the machine. Here is an RDS matrix.