The time travellers ego…

I was just watching “Back to the Future 3”, and it was at the part where they were discussing the driving their car into the future on track that didn’t yet exist. The explanation was sound at first, sure the track doesn’t exist now but in 100 years it will so we will appear and glide along…

But the earth is rotating, fast, about 1,674.4 km/h it would seem. So maybe you take that into account and travel to the exact same time of day in the future (or past), which the movie might imply by only having a date on the time circuit’s.

But the earth is also moving, fast, about 108,000 km/h through space, orbiting the sun. This means that the earths position in space tomorrow at this same time of day will 2,592,000 km away from where it is now. So only if the orbit of the earth around the sun is perfectly consistent, the best you could do is travel forward by years, so that you appear on the earth as it passes by at the perfect moment and is at the same point in its daily rotation as to pit you at the right spot on the surface.

But there’s more… Just as the earth orbits the sun in our solar system, our solar system orbits in the Milky Way Galaxy. This galactic year, as it’s called, takes anyway from 200 to 250 million earth years. That’s a pretty big margin of error, and even if you got it perfect, you would only be able to travel forward or back in steps of galactic years. That might explain why so many cartoons show people jumping back into the past and landing face to face with a T-Rex.

Now without doing a bunch of research, I would assume based on the various theories of universal expansion and contraction that our galaxy is also moving, either towards, away from, or around some other central point. So this again would mean that the odds of you moving to another moment in time where the train tracks are in the exact same point in the universe are slim to none.

So either ol’ Doc Brown was not only able to move through time but also calculate and reposition the delorean to another point in the universe based on “approximate” measurements at the high end, all while also ensuring that their forward movement was maintained relative to the surface of the earth as it spun and moved through space as though in a huge gyroscope, or… the earth is the center point for all of space time, and so all changes in time would be relative to the earth as a fixed point in space… Talk about thinking you’re the center of the universe.

All that said, it is a great movie.

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Packaging and Deployment – ‘missing types’ compiler errors using Visual Studio 2012 and SharePoint 2010 tools

For a while now, the team and I have been dealing with a odd behavior in Visual Studio 2012 and SharePoint 2010, disruptive to the point that I actually scripted out the whole build and packaging process from the command line just to package up our WSPs (SharePoint packages).  Basically it happened like this… we has a solution with a combination of Class Library projects and SharePoint projects, and were able to compile the projects individually or as a solution in Visual Studio, but when trying to package or deploy them to SharePoint via Visual Studio we would receive a variety of errors about missing types.  These missing types were all part of the class projects that were referenced by the SharePoint projects, providing a variety of utility classes and such, which all compiled fine when simply doing a build, but were reported as missing when we attempted to create SharePoint packages.

Well with no useful information from Visual Studio, the issue just sat on the side lines until either time or frustration found me.  The fact that we could compile from the command line using MSBUILD only added to the confusion, but gave us an opportunity to ignore the issue as long as possible.  But alas, all good things must come to an end, and I found myself in a situation where I needed to actually deploy from within Visual Studio, and so I looked again at the issue.

Well with a bit of speculation, and some criticism of the SharePoint tools for Visual Studio, here’s what seemed to be going on.  The SharePoint project templates and tools are designed for moving forward, and are not friendly to changes or reworking.  This is obvious in the management of features and packages, with the unfriendly two column UI for adding and removing items.  An important thing in SharePoint packages is sequence, however only one of the many item list in the SharePoint tool UIs provides buttons for reordering and unfortunately this is not the one.  In the case of this issue, it appears to be the package additional assemblies.  As time went by and code was refactored and moved to enhance reuse and organization, more project assemblies were added to the various packages.  However, the sequence of the assemblies isn’t easy to manipulate and can intermittently cause issues packaging issues when code a lower level project is changed, as the project additional assemblies appear to be recompiled during packaging either in a weird order or with weird references.

Without spending an inordinate amount of time looking into exactly why, what seemed to help mitigate the issue, was to open the package files in notepad and reorder the additional assemblies such that they would be added in the same order that they would naturally be compiled.  This seemed to clear up the issue, allowing to the SharePoint package projects to be published and deployed again.

So the lesson here would seem to be, make sure you monitor and reorder your package additional assemblies…

Feature contents is another one to watch for order, but that’s a different story.

XSLTListViewerWebPart with Custom List view

Locate the Views node in the list definition schema.xml file, add a new view entry, giving it a new unique baseviewid (using an already in use baseviewid will inherit the others settings without allowing you to customize anything set it the previous views using that id*); I generally start with 101 and increment from there. Set all the view settings you want, such as sorting, filters, columns, etc, and save it.

In the elements.xml file of the module containing the web part page you want to add the custom view to, add a new view node (or use an existing one) and set the BaseViewID of the view to the ID you used in the schema.xml file.

Now if you want to do this when you don’t have a list definition (schema.xml) to edit it is not supported out of the box completely in SharePoint templates. I will discuss further shortly, as we had a specific set of customizations to make and most solutions where maintenance heavy (hard-coded or implementation specific), where I instead implemented a generic method to reuse for any view.