Please visit http://stephen.natw.id.au for all archived and new posts.

If your computer Operating System (OS) is  Windows Vista, and you use virtualisation for development purposes (e.g. SharePoint solutions), then the following tips and tricks will help you boost overall computer performance:

1. Add more RAM to the computer. Obviously the more RAM you have, the faster the performance becomes. For running a basic Windows Server 2003 image with SQL Server 2005 and SharePoint Services (WSS or MOSS), I recommend at least 768 MB of RAM for the image, and at least 768 MB for your host OS (Windows Vista). I recently upgraded my work laptop from 2 to 3GB and could immediately notice the extra performance.
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2. Enable Virtualization in the host computer BIOS. If you use a DELL notebook, press F2 to get into the BIOS when the computer restarts. Navigate to POST Behavior  > Virtualization, and enable virtualisation.
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3. Run image from a different hard drive.  For example, a portable hard drive
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4. Disable unnecessary visual effects. Right click on My Computer, then select Properties. Click Advanced system On the System Properties window, click tab Advanced, and Performance Settings.
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   In the Visual Effects tab, select Adjust for best performance.
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   Also change the desktop wallpaper by selecting a solid colour.
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5. Disable unnecessary services. Open the Services console (Start > Run… > [Type in "services.msc"]. Disable the following services:

• Superfetch - though marketed as “Maintains and improves system performance over time.”, it seems to do the opposite
• Themes – this will disable Windows Vista themes

Having worked with ASP.NET websites for a couple of years, I often run into problems with different culture settings in development, staging and production servers.

For example, you develop an ASP.NET web application on your local PC and test on a staging server, both of which have Australia setup as their location. Now the application is about to be deployed to a production server. It is often the case that to save on running costs, the client chooses US-based shared servers over Australian-based ones. As a result, you notice that the site displays date in a different format – e.g. mm/dd/yyyy ( 12/25/2008 ) instead of dd/mm/yyyy ( 25/12/2008 ).

Of course as with many shared servers, you don’t have the privilege to change the global settings on the server as it would affect all other websites hosted on the box. A quick and easy way to overcome this is to add a setting to the web.config file:

<configuration>
   <system.web>
      <globalization culture="en-AU" uiCulture="en-AU" />
   </system.web>
</configuration>

Further reading: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bz9tc508.aspx

I recently worked on a project whereby the user needed to upload one or more files, and store metadata for these files. As most of the metadata was reflected in parts of the filenames, there was also a need for an automated process to extract and pre-populate to the relevant fields upon upload.

The solution consisted of a document library with custom columns to hold the metadata. The automation process was taken care by event handlers. Upon a file upload, the event handler would try to extract metadata from the filename, and populate the values into the metadata fields in the edit form page. The user could then choose to accept or modify the metadata.

Sample code goes here - coming soon!

A few important/useful notes…

1. Brian Wilson wrote a great set of tutorials on SharePoint event handlers.
2. Don’t forget that when creating an event handler class, it must inherit SPItemEventReceiver.
3. In my scenario above, the best place to put the code was in ItemAdding, as oppose to ItemAdded. One big difference between the two methods is that ItemAdding is synchronous. This means that the page will wait for the code to finish execute before displaying the metadata screen – perfect for me to extract and populate metadata values from filenames. ItemAdded, on the other hand, is asynchronous. Hence the page will not wait until the code has finished executing.
4. Use properties.AfterProperties, as oppose to BeforeProperties.
5. Dispose SPSite and SPWeb objects as required. Roger Lamb has a nice and clear explanation about WSS 3 and MOSS 2007 dispose pattern.
6. In most cases, you will need to refer to list fields by their internal names, except when the field name contains full stops (“.”) - I’ll come back to this in the future with some explanation why.
7. For development purposes, use third party tools such as SharePoint Inspector to attach the event handlers to the list, as oppose of building and deploying features to do this.