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, [...]

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 [...]

Easy Progress Reporting in Powershell

I decided to write a function to make it easier to report progress in PowerShell.
The Problem
You may be familiar with Write-Progress, but if you’re like me, you probably don’t use it that often, partly because  you don’t use it that often, so whenever you want to it means you have to go look up the help [...]

Get it together, Google Chrome!

I love me some Google Chrome.
It starts fast and feels very lightweight, and managing each tab as a separate process seems to handle my laptop resources much better than Firefox does.  I also dig that I can drag tabs from one window to another.  
It took me a while to figure out that I need [...]

New utilities

Digging Cubic Explorer and WinSplit Revolution

ListView: Using DisplayIndex when Paging

Just learned that you need to use a row’s DisplayIndex rather than its DataItemIndex when retrieving its DataKey value.  Otherwise, stuff is not going to work with paging.
Not obvious.  But I guess it makes sense.  
DataItemIndex is the index of the row within the overall data set.  DisplayIndex is the index of the row within [...]

Weirdest Visual Studio bug ever

The Bug
My loathing for Visual Studio continues.
Suddenly, every time I ever tried to search for anything, the search wouldn’t even start.  It would just say:
No Files Were Found To Look In.
Find Was Stopped In Progress
Gross.  Nothing fixed it.  Restarted.  Nothing.  
The Real Problem is that Visual Studio is Giving Me CTS
The search feature was [...]