By Rosario Almaguer. When we create a Blog site for our Site Collection, the default page doesn’t show a rating section, like in the follow image:   So if you want to show a rating you can do it following these steps: 1.       Firstly, you have to click in Site Actions and select View All Site Content, in the Lists section you will find a Posts list, click on it.   2. Next, you have to access to List tab on the Ribbon and click on List Settings section. You will see a page like this:   You can see which columns are parts of the Posts list in the Columns section.   3. In General Settings section, select Rating settings and you will be linked to the follow page:     ...

By Carlos Martinez. Repository Pattern   The repository is useful when trying to separate the domain logic from the logic that retrieves the data and maps it in entity objects. The repository is a small layer between the data source layer and the upper domain layers of the application. Gets the data from the data source and retrieves it to the upper layers. Also the repository contains the persistence logic of the domain objects. This logic separation has 3 benefits: ·         The logic for web services and data are centralized ·         It simplified the unit test. ·         It provides a flexible architecture that can be adapted as the overall design of the application evolves. La...

By Daniel Ramirez.   An important thing through the Software Development Cycle is the feedback a developer gets during or after iteration. He/she gets all kinds of it, from internal things such as code, to all the way up to what’s shown to the end users.   Feedback is important In any kind of work, I believe we should always look for some kind of feedback. Feedback does not necessarily means you have done things the wrong way, it can help you see how other people see your work, and lets you know if they understood correctly the idea behind it.   Feedback lets you know if things can be improved, motivates you to continue your work. If you get an email saying "Amazing work!"...

  By Rosario Almaguer. SharePoint 2010 comes with a orange Favicon and it's present in SharePoint Root Folder\Template\Images [eg. C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\]. Open this folder and search for favicon.ico and rename the file to FaviconBackup.ico. Now copy your favicon to this folder and make sure it's named as "favicon.ico", you can change the name of you favicon [eg. MyFavicon.ico]. Now restart IIS(open Command Prompt -> IISReset), clear browser cache/temproary internet files. Close the browser and reopen then browse the SharePoint site. In SharePoint Designer 2010 select Master Pages, then select the master p...

By: Alejandro Villarreal   We recently implemented a WCF REST service which authenticates the caller before executing any of the operations it exposes. It also has help page (so users can see the supported operations and the expected inputs) which we want to expose to any user, regardless of authentication. In principle this is very easy: we just needed to identify requests to the “help” section of our service (http://myServiceUrl/help) and allow them to go through without further validation.   We have a method that returns “true” for requests that should go through, and “false” for those that shouldn’t, so originally our code to solve the problem looked like this:   if (requestUri....

By: Alejandro Villarreal During database development, unique indexes (or constraints) are very important part of the design. There’s always data for which you do not want to have repeated values, like usernames or email addresses. Different applications might have their own uniqueness requirements, but they all usually have at least one. It’s great when we can identify those requirements from the start and create the appropriate indexes up front. But what if your application now needs to enforce uniqueness on the values of a million-row table which has tons of duplicates in the production environment? A naïve solution (and definitely not appropriate for a production environment) wou...

By Guillermo Cedillo   C# is becoming more like a functional language in every release; by the other side Javascript is a functional language that was treated as a misunderstood-object-oriented-script language ¬_¬. I hope in the next years these two languages become so closer that they share the same basic principles of the functional languages.    Right now I'm looking closer to two technologies that I think they are going to be something extraordinary: RX and LINQ.   LINQ is already a powerful extension to C#, but also there's an extension for Javascript. LINQ gives you a lot of freedom in data manipulation, together with jQuery gives you flexibility and lightness in reports o...

By Alejandro Villarreal A few months ago we developed a slightly complex service that made use of query notifications to keep an in-memory copy of some database tables. The service worked like a charm, it passed QA, UAT, and went into production, where it has been working ever since. Recently, however, our client had a vague suspicion that something weird was happening with it, but could not pinpoint exactly what, and they only felt like this after a couple of weeks of the service working just fine. Restarting the service dissipated whatever problem the service appeared to be having, so we all lived with that for a while… until they found actual evidence that the service was not respondi...

by Sieena An automated vacation tracking system is an important part of any human resources department. Employee absences result in high costs for companies, and some experts estimated that they can range from 9% to 11% of your payroll. By reducing these costs with a tracking system, you will experience significant savings for your business. Vacation and leave tracking is as a helpful tool that oversees and manages all aspects of absence administration. Businesses that use this type of system will save significant savings in a variety of ways. First, these tools give businesses the ability to save on costs by using absence reporting and employee awareness techniques. HR vacation trac...

By Edith C. This is very useful when you are talking about quickly duplicate or backup your SharePoint Sites structure and information. The site template is saved through the SharePoint web user interface, which empowers users and avoids the need for administrative intervention. Now that we have a customized site, we are ready to save it as a custom site template for others to reuse. The steps to save the custom site template (for a SharePoint Team Site) are shown below: 1.       Navigate to Site Settings in your customized site. 2.       Select Save site as template under the Look and Feel section. 3.       Fill out the Save Site as Template page and then click OK.  At this tim...