I’ve started working on a new project at my company and it is a massive project compared to anything I have done previously. We are not short on technologies in this project starting with an angular web site all the way to using elastic search. One of the challenges we faced daily was releasing all the different systems that is part of project into dev, test, staging and production.

1. Create SharePoint 2013 Farm
2. Create SharePoint site collection with development template.
3. Upload app into “app in testing” library.
4. Create new site using IIS on the vm where the SharePoint is installed.
5. Assign identity for application pool for database connection string to use windows authentication.
6. Install App Management Shared Service Proxy.
7. Miscellaneous Findings
8. Useful Resources

I have been working on a SharePoint provider hosted app. In this project, we have an azure website, a database per installation of the app, and couple of web jobs. This blog is about my attempt at creating a build system which for now will run every night if there was any check ins since the last run of the build. I want the build to do a number of things.

I have a web api which surfaces some odata collections using the asp.net web api v2 together with OData v3. I tried to use OData v4, but Excel ‘Add data feed’ wasn’t liking that at all. But, I wanted to have some way for the user to authenticate themselves before using service. I preferred to use OAuth in order to achieve this as it met all my other requirements.

If you have wondered why the tfs drop folder doesn’t contain the app.publish folder like it does when you run the command msbuild.exe /p:IsPackaging=true /p:OutputPath="D:\dev\" in your local machine, it’s because the property /p:PublishDir also needs to be set in addition to /p:IsPackaging=true.

I recently started working on a complex ASP.NET MVC 5 Project with Entity Framework 6. This is the first time I am building an actual, to be production ready, deliverable web site on MVC. Of course, there are a lot of challenges and I am battling my way out of each one at a time. One of these challenges was working with Entity Framework and seeding dummy data using code first migration. I found really hard to keep track of the relationships, and the errors were mounting up . And no one wanted to dig their hand into the mess.

The specific scenario I am trying to address here is when you have a page that is deployed into the SharePoint AppWeb and you are trying to access data from that AppWeb using a WebApi project for example.

I decided to start a new asp.net mvc project with web api and use a bit of angularjs functionality. I had heard about mocha testing library which you can use do a tdd style development for my angularjs codes. I saw this pluraral sight course AngularJS for .NET Developers by Joe Eames, and Jim Copper; which has a topic on Creating a Test in AngularJS. But, the video shows how to use jasmine testing library instead of mocha which is what I wanted to use.

I understand that a lot of developers out there have given up writing unit tests for SharePoint developments. But, that doesn’t stop you from writing integration tests.

One of the cool thing about Entity Framework is that you can use code first to build up your database while you are developing your application.