As I was working on understanding the process for expiring login cookies recently, I found what seemed like a pretty big problem. For SAML claims users, once they got their login cookie from ADFS, they would never seem to time out. Meaning they could close the browser, and several minutes or even hours later…
Bypassing the Multi Authentication Provider Selection Page in SharePoint 2010
SIDE NOTE: Yet another kudos to the fabulous folks that run this site. This latest version now retains even LESS formatting from Word and Visual Studio than before! I didn't think it was possible to make this site any worse than it was, and yet you've shattered, dare I say blown away, my expectations in…
Using the New SharePoint 2010 Ratings Feature in Search
In this blog I thought I’d show how to use some of the cool new features in SharePoint 2010 with some of our old favorites from SharePoint 2007 to create an interesting search results experience. We’re going to do all of this WITHOUT WRITING ANY CODE! Even though Steve is a developer, he empathizes with…
Create An Easy PDF Preview for Search Results in SharePoint 2013
I saw this question flying around the other day and thought it was kind of interesting. Someone was asking about the cool new thumbnail previews you get for items in search results in SharePoint 2013. They really liked how Microsoft Office documents work and wanted to be able to do the same thing with PDF…
Replacing the out of box Name Resolution in SharePoint 2010 – Part 2
A while ago I posted an entry on how to configure your custom claims provider to replace the out of the box claims provider (http://blogs.technet.com/speschka/archive/2010/04/28/how-to-override-the-default-name-resolution-and-claims-provider-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx). I wanted / need to follow up on that posting, because we found some additional details that you will want to have in hand should you go down this route. …
How to Create Multiple Claims Auth Web Apps in a Single SharePoint 2010 Farm
The question has been coming up more frequently lately about how does one configure multiple web apps that use claims authentication in SharePoint 2010. The primary point of confusion usually comes around the SPTrustedIdentityTokenIssuer. As I noted in a previous post (http://blogs.technet.com/speschka/archive/2010/02/17/planning-considerations-for-claims-based-authentication-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx), you can only associate a token-signing certificate from an STS with one SPTrustedIdentityTokenIssuer. …
Root of Certificate Chain Not Trusted Error with Claims Authentication
Some of you playing with claims authentication may get what seems like a strange error. Youv'e set everything up on your STS and SharePoint, you try and hit the site, and you get a big error and stack dump that says "The root of the certificate chain is not a trusted root authority". You look…
Using Dreamweaver and Design Manager with SharePoint 2013
SharePoint 2013 includes a number of new features to make it easier than ever before to style and publish web sites. One of those features is Design Manager; it allows you to do things like create different channels for your content – such as one set of pages for full size browsers, one for mobile…
Free Developer Search Tool for SharePoint 2010 Search and FAST Search for SharePoint
I've been working on a developer tool off and on for months now to help working with the query engine in SharePoint 2010. It's come far enough along that it's probably ready for some folks to start using it. I've been debating about putting it up on CodePlex as more of a community project so others…
Update to Guidance for Patching AppFabric on SharePoint 2013 Distributed Cache Servers
For those of you who had the "pleasure" (okay, slight sarcasm there) of watching me in the SharePoint Ignite materials talk about distributed cache, you may recall that our guidance at the time SharePoint 2013 shipped was that you should not patch AppFabric on SharePoint servers independently – meaning that if it needed patching the…