IIS ends debugging session because of a timeout

When debugging SharePoint code in Visual Studio, sometimes the debugging session will end unexpectedly. If the error is "Web site worker process has been terminated by IIS", then removing the timeout is really easy. You just need to set Ping Enabled to false and the Ping Maximum Response Time to a really large number. You can also follow these instructions.

HTML5 video

One of the best options is VideoJS. I recently looked into it and found these advantages:

1) It works with IE8. It seems to use a Flash player wrapper to play the mp4 video.

2) It supports subtitles and captions in different languages.

3) It's simple to use. You can get started with just a few lines of code.

4) I found Firefox doesn't support mp4, but ogg files will work.

5) It works in mobile devices without any support.

6) It's open source

Continuous integration for iOS using Hudson

Lately I've been involved in mobile projects, and CC.NET is obviously not a choice for continuous integration. I've been reading a lot of good comments on Hudson so I gave it a try. It's really easy to install, just download Tomcat and drop the hudson .war file in the webapps folder. Then run ./startup.sh and you have Hudson running!

Well, that's the first part. The second part is configuring your projects. Everything is really simple, I just want to point out that you definitely want to install these plugins:

1) Subversion (or a plugin for your preferred source control system)
2) Email-ext
3) Log parses (this is necessary because Hudson was returning a successful build when it actually failed)

The configuration of these plugins is simple so I won't cover that. You'll get errors for sure but a quick google search will get you around them.

Certificate error when connecting to SVN from Xcode

This is a really dumb error. Make sure that in the dialog "Verify Certificate" you click "Show Certificate" and then check "Always trust "servername" when connecting to "url". 

SharePoint ListView that points to List from another site in the same site collection

In a few words, it's not possible. SharePoint ListViews only load lists from the current site. My solution was to use a .NET ListView that has its DataSource property set to SPListItemCollection.GetDataTable().

Of course, you also have to set the Layout template of the ListView, as well as the EmptyTempate and the ItemTemplate. It's just a couple of extra lines of code to write.

Best free SVN GUI client for OS X

There are not a lot of (free) options out there. I started using just the command line version of svn, and then briefly downloaded a trial version of Versions. Then finally I came across svnX. It has the basic functionality a developer needs on a daily basis (update, revert, commit and diff). However, if you are an administrator, it won't help you to create branches, new repositories and such. I highly recomment svnX for simple tasks.

Download it here.

How to -correctly- use SharePoint Property Bags

There are quite a few posts on property bags and how to use them. All of them are incomplete because:

1) There are several ways to access the property bags and the correct one is not always shown, and,
2) The code is incomplete.

Microsoft suggests that methods like SetProperty, AddProperty and DeleteProperty are used to access Property Bags. Also, remember to call SPWeb.Update() to save the changes. If you don't your changes won't persist.