SharePoint Extension: Get-SPWebRelative

The main reason I began writing my PowerShell extensions was that I needed to do some in-depth traversal of the SharePoint farm and its content.  I’m going to demonstrate some of those extensions now, using 
Getting an SPWeb
The conventional way of obtaining a reference to an SPWeb is:

get-spweb http://mybiglongservername:8080/path/to/web

Because this requires a fully-qualified URL, [...]

SharePoint PowerShell: Remove duplicate WebParts

Last week I received an email from a colleague who was having problems with a SharePoint 2007 upgrade.  Actually, the upgrade went fine, but when he moved a Publishing Site Collection to a subsite of an existing site collection, he ran into several problems, one of which was that each page had a duplicate set [...]

PowerShell ISE: Use it instead of PowerShell.exe

PowerShell.exe is for losers.

New Codeplex project: Winston’s PowerShell Extensions

I’ve been using PowerShell since it came out, and along the way I cobbled together a bunch of cmdlets, functions, and filters to create a fairly robust PowerShell toolkit.

Hide a TABLE column with JQuery

Yesterday I helped debug an issue with migrating from SP2007 to SP2010.  There was some old JS code where a SELECT box was filtering a ListView based on some key columns, and consequently there were some columns with GUIDs that needed to be hidden.
First of all, let me be clear that this is not a [...]

UX Anti-Patterns

I refer to this so much, I figured I’d post it so that I don’t have to keep looking for it.
Great talk on user interaction anti-patterns by Bill Scott of Yahoo! and now Netflix.
Design Anti Patterns - How to Design a Poor Web Experience
View more presentations from Bill Scott.

He’s also got a good blog at http://looksgoodworkswell.blogspot.com/.

HTML to Text conversion in PowerShell

Here’s a snippet for you.  I was extracting SharePoint profile information and needed to display the “About Me” field in an application that couldn’t render HTML, so I needed to convert the HTML to text.  This is a bit more complex than simply stripping the HTML tags out of the content.  Doing that would preserve [...]

Trying out XMind

Trying out XMind again.  Looks about the same, and I’m not that impressed with the mind-mapping UI itself, but the application shell based on Eclipse RCP is pretty slick.  The whole thing makes me want to get back into MindTree (I need to think of a new name, too).  Maybe once things settle down.  The [...]

JAD vanished from the internet

I recently started doing Java development again and went off looking for the trusty Jad compiler, which I planned on using with the JadClipse so that I could browse straight into any class.  Not for the purpose of cribbing someone else’s code, but for faster, better comprehension of how to use other libraries.  In .NET I [...]

Apple download failures are ruining my life

For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to update my iPhone to the new 2.2.1 firmware, but the download always failed.  Same with downloading a new version iTunes.  Tried and tried and tried.
Then today I got fed up, tracked down the url for manually downloading it (this forum thread is a good source).  But [...]