Chris Coulson's Developer Notes

  • SSD Freezing Fix

    A while back I picked up an SSD to speed up my laptop. It worked great – I got a nice improvement in speed, especially when running virtual machines, which I use regularly. I’d really recommend it as an upgrade. Although it worked great 99% of the time, I ran into an issue where the…

  • Filter a SharePoint Calendar List With a Date Picker

    I was trying to add a date picker to allow the filtering of a Calendar list in SharePoint. Unfortunately I had SharePoint Foundation, which is missing the Date Filter web part which only comes with the Enterprise edition of SharePoint. I found this article, which works great for filtering a specific date.  My calendar items…

  • Removing Null Characters (0x00) From Values in SQL Server

    I recently came across a problem while crawling a BCS data source in SharePoint 2010. Most of the 130,000 records were getting indexed, but I was getting an error on 25 records: Error while crawling LOB contents. ( ‘.’, hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character. Line 25, position 10. ) When I first took…

  • Encode h.264 and WebM videos for MediaElement.js using FFmpeg

    I recently added a video player to a client’s site. I found John Dyer’s MediaElement.js to be an excellent solution for doing this. As long as you provide both an h.264 and WebM encoded version of the video, it will play natively on almost all browsers. For unsupported browsers it will fall back to Flash.…

  • Improving the MediaElement.js Loading Animation

    I’ve been using MediaElement.js recently, to display videos on a client’s site. One thing that bothered me was the loading animation that played. It looked unfinished – showing up in a small dark square – almost like it was supposed to be completely transparent, but wasn’t.  Here’s an image of how it is in the…

  • Easy Handling of Http Range Requests in ASP.NET

    I was recently working on adding video playing capabilities to a client’s existing ASP.NET application. They had video files that had been uploaded by users, and they wanted to allow the users to be able to preview the files on the web. I found MediaElement.js to be a excellent solution for this: As long as…

  • Adding Breadcrumb Navigation to SharePoint 2010 Application Pages

    The application pages in my SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack were not properly displaying the breadcrumb navigation. They didn’t include ‘Site Settings’ in the navigation – they went straight from Home to the application page. I used the following blog entry to add the breadcrumb navigation: http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2008/04/16/adding-breadcrumb-navigation-to-sharepoint-application-pages-the-easy-way.aspx Unfortunately after making the changes, I still didn’t see…

  • Bulk Delete SharePoint Site Users with PowerShell

    Below is a PowerShell script for deleting a filtered list of users from a SharePoint site.  Simply copy the script to a .ps1 file, adjust the $SITEURL to the url of the site and adjust the $USERNAMEFILTER to a lowercase string that is contained in all of the usernames you would like to delete. The…

  • Bulk Delete ASP.NET Membership Users

    Below is a SQL script that can be used to delete a list of users from an ASP.NET membership database.  It retrieves a list of users into a temporary table and then deletes the users from all the relevant tables in the database.