Sahil Malik
CODE Author
Sahil Malik is an accomplished author and speaker who has published video courses, authored books for numerous publishers, spoken at conferences across the world, and authored for CODE Magazine for many years. In his free time, he likes to do gardening, and play with his dogs.
Detailed Bio
Sahil Malik is an accomplished author and speaker who has published video courses, authored books for numerous publishers, spoken at conferences across the world, and authored for CODE Magazine for many years. In his free time, he likes to do gardening, and play with his dogs.
Contact Information:
- Email: sahilmalik@gmail.com
Articles Authored
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“Napa” Development Tools for SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2012 - November/December
One of the biggest issues in getting started with SharePoint development are the 2091097 steps you need to go through, and the heavy duty machine you need to invest in, to create a development environment for a SharePoint and Office developer. This is not unlike the fact that creating and running a production SharePoint farm can be extremely time-consuming.
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10 Things You Wish they Told You-Part 1
Last updated: Thursday, February 21, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2008 - July/August
I talk with a number of SharePoint customers and developers. Interestingly, some of the experiences are common no matter where you go. What is even more interesting is that every time I mention the same solution, their eyes light up!In this article, I am going to talk about five things from an architect or management point of view that you wish you knew before you started your SharePoint project. In part two of this article I will follow up with five things, targeted specifically for the SharePoint developer.
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A Real World ExpressJS and TypeScript Application
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2021 - January/February
Sahil builds onto his earlier ExpressJS and TypeScript article and gets the sample application (a To-Do app that saves data to a database) up and running. He uses Bootstrap for new pages, adds support for client-side scripting using TypeScript and then adds Vue.js into the project.
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A Simple ExpressJS and TypeScript Project
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2020 - November/December
Sahil walks you through a simple ExpressJS-based Web app using TypeScript to help you get started using these great technologies together.
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AI for Absolute Beginners
Last updated: Wednesday, November 10, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2019 - May/June
If you’ve been thinking that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are a bit out of your league, think again. Sahil shows that you’re already using and benefiting from it, and you can create it too.
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Angular 2 Forms
Last updated: Wednesday, June 2, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - November/December
Sahil continues his series on Angular 2 and this time, looks at that essential element, the form.
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Angular and AOT
Last updated: Wednesday, May 12, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2017 - September/October
If Just-in-Time compilation is getting you down because of slow runtime launches, you’ll be excited to learn about how Ahead-of-Time compilation can make your apps smaller and more efficient. Sahil shows you how.
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AngularJS 2
Last updated: Monday, June 21, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - May/June
Sahil shows us a few nifty aspects of AngularJS 2 that help experienced and novice developers alike. AngularJS 2 is still in beta, but he says that you’ll love it even so.
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AngularJS2, AzureAD, and Office 365
Last updated: Friday, June 11, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - July/August
Sahil noticed that AngularJS2 requires a new way of thinking about authentication regarding application structure and tells us how to deal with it.
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App Only Permission Policy
Last updated: Tuesday, May 24, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2013 - May/June
Apps are the biggest change in SharePoint 2013. Over the past many years, SharePoint developers have been trying to figure out how to make applications work securely with each other, without users dealing with excessive passwords. Ideally, enterprises should have the confidence that installed software isn’t doing more than what they think it is doing. All this is being solved with SharePoint Apps.
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ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part Infrastructure
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - November/December
Web applications today do a number of things. They could be a banking site, a content management system, or a news Web site. In spite of the diversity of Web applications available today, it almost always makes sense to break a Web page into smaller, reusable widgets
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ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part Infrastructure and SharePoint 2007
Last updated: Friday, February 22, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2007 - January/February
In my previous article, (“ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part Infrastructure”, Nov/Dec 2006, CoDe Magazine) I talked about the ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part framework. I made the case for the emergence of Web Part or widget-like solutions, and explained the support for Web Parts in the ASP.NET 2.0 framework. However, I stopped short with a teaser into connecting these Web Parts with each other and where this story fits in with SharePoint 2007.
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Azure Active Directory
Last updated: Tuesday, July 27, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - March/April
If you want to write code for Office 365, you’re going to love this article. In it, Sahil shows us that Azure AD is a fundamental building block that you need to work with SharePoint or Office 365.
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Azure CLI
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2020 - January/February
Learn how to use your browser and Azure CLI to manage Azure resources. Also, learn why the *nix shell is my favorite.
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Azure DevOps, Docker, and Angular
Last updated: Tuesday, April 6, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2019 - January/February
Sahil shows us how DevOps (formerly called VSTS) can connect disparate functionality using two of his favorite tools: Docker and Angular.
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Azure Machine Learning Service
Last updated: Monday, March 29, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2019 - July/August
Sahil explores the limitations of Cognitive Services, the potential of Azure Machine Learning, and creating your own AI models.
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Azure Machine Learning Workspace and MLOps
Last updated: Wednesday, March 17, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2019 - September/October
It’s when you’re working with lots of data that you start looking around for an easier way to keep track of it all. Machine learning and artificial intelligence seem like the obvious answers, and Sahil shows you why.
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Blockchain
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2022 - May/June
Sahil discusses some details about how blockchains work some things that blockchains are useful for.
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Bots
Last updated: Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2018 - March/April
Bots are no longer some cool effect in a sci-fi movie. Sahil shows you how to begin programming yours.
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Chrome Debugging Tips
Last updated: Friday, February 24, 2023
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2023 - March/April
Learn why the dev tools in Chrome are still the ones that Sahil uses. Read how to use code folding, locate any file (Ctrl-p), Prettify, the snippet editor, live expressions, and more.
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Claims-Based Authentication and the Cloud
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2012 - January/February
I give up! I can’t really explain how the cloud works unless I cover the topic of authentication in the cloud first. If I didn’t tackle this topic first, I could only explain boring unauthenticated applications. The issue is, for all practical purposes the authentication fit for the cloud is claims based. There is no worldwide active directory you can rely on. There is no single aspnetdb.mdf database. What’s more, there are many kinds of authentications already - Facebook, Twitter, Google, OpenID, Windows Live ID, etc.
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Cloudy SharePoint: Office 365 and Azure
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2011 - July/August
Everyone is excited about the cloud! Well, at least that is the theory. Microsoft introduced Azure such a long time ago - how many of us are really using it? SharePoint BPOS is around, but we still run servers in our backyard! So, why now? And why are things different this time around?
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Cordova Apps with Angular and TypeScript
Last updated: Wednesday, May 26, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2017 - January/February
Sahil gives some excellent suggestions for dealing with a multiple-platform world using Apache Cordova and a single code base. He’s going to debug with TypeScript and sourcemaps, so you’ll (nearly) be a Cordova expert!
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Cryptography
Last updated: Thursday, December 8, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2023 - January/February
Keeping secrets is as old as letters and numbers themselves, and Sahil takes you on an entertaining romp through history to see how we got to where we are with encryption, and which technologies are still secure today.
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Data Structures and Algorithms
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2021 - November/December
Sahil collects his favorite tools and tells you why they should be your favorites too.
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Deploy a Real-World ExpressJS TypeScript Application Using Containers
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2021 - March/April
Learn to deploy a real-world ExpressJS TypeScript application using containerization. Deploy both the application and the database as two separate containers.
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Distributed Cache in SharePoint 2013
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2013 - September/October
The future at Microsoft is cloudy, with an increasingly bleak chance of on-premises. It’s interesting to see how Microsoft is aggressively transitioning into a device and services company, and that on-premises applications are getting step-child treatment lately. Almost all of the innovation lately happens on or for the cloud, and if we are lucky, we get morsels of treats in our on-premises doggie bag. I’m not complaining, merely observing. A move to the cloud makes a lot of sense.
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Docker for Developers
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2018 - November/December
Like everyone else, you’ve probably been struggling with virtualization taking up a lot of space on your laptop. Sahil shows you a great way to lessen the demand while increasing the performance with Docker.
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Enhance Your Search Applications with Artificial Intelligence
Last updated: Tuesday, December 8, 2020
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2019 - November/December
Search is everywhere. But unless you add it to your app, you won’t find it there! Sahil examines the various search tools in the Microsoft ecosystem and shows you how to make the most of them.
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Excel Services in SharePoint 2010
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2010 - July/August
Excel services is yet another important pillar in Microsoft’s business intelligence offering. Business users really like Excel because it is easy to use and they can add complex formulas to Excel to express their logic.They can do so without involving the IT guy. The problem with this scenario, however, is that it becomes very difficult to share some Excel sheets with their coworkers. Usually users prefer to send workbooks via email, but sometimes the workbooks are too large for email, sometimes they have backend data connections, and sometimes workbooks send via email cause version confusion hell.
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Extending Office 365: The Developer’s Architectural Guide
Last updated: Wednesday, July 7, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - July/August
Sahil pours his vast SharePoint prowess into building apps that put languages on equal footings with one another.
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FIDO2 and WebAuthn
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2022 - September/October
If your system relies on username and passwords for security, you may be in trouble. Sahil describes how an application can securely trust a user's identity using modern software and FIDO2 with WebAuthn in Azure.
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Identify Faces with Microsoft Cognitive Services
Last updated: Friday, April 23, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2018 - May/June
When it’s time to wire your house to precipitate your every whim or need, you want to be sure that your robot doesn’t mistake “catsup” for “catnip.” Sahil talks about facial recognition and how it’s connected to speech and understanding.
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Identify Voices with Microsoft Cognitive Services
Last updated: Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2018 - July/August
In this next installment of his exploration into artificial intelligence, Sahil explores Microsoft Cognitive Services’ ability to recognize voices from a thirty-second sample.
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Is SharePoint Scalable or Not?
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2010 - September/October
If there is one topic that has generated more debate than anything else, it is the scalability of lists in SharePoint. You can find as many opinions as there are people. Because I’m one of those people, allow me to express my opinions on this as well.
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JSLint, AngualrJS, and TDD
Last updated: Friday, June 25, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - January/February
Sahil explores the three cardinal rules of working on any JavaScript project and introduces some cool new tools.
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Let’s Talk About Microsoft Graph
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2021 - July/August
It seems like everyone’s talking about Microsoft Graph these days. Sahil shows you why.
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Manage Complex Azure Infrastructure
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2020 - March/April
Learn how to use Azure CLI to automate the deployment of complicated Azure infrastructure.
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Managed Identity
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2020 - July/August
Learn to use Managed identity in Azure Active Directory to minimze the number of passwords you need. Learn to use managed identities to access Microsoft Graph.
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Managed Identity in Azure
Last updated: Friday, April 2, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2019 - March/April
Sahil uses the cloud to secure source code. You never know when someone downstream might share code with the rest of the world, and Managed Identity helps keep the things private that need to be.
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Microsoft Teams: The Developer Story
Last updated: Friday, May 7, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2017 - November/December
If you were wondering how to make sure that your team communicates well, you’ll want to follow along closely as Sahil makes a bot using Microsoft Teams.
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Mobile Apps for SharePoint and Office 365: Part 1
Last updated: Monday, August 2, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2014 - November/December
In this first installment of his new series, Sahil begins writing an end-to-end mobile infrastructure using some familiar tools.
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Mobile Apps for SharePoint and Office 365: Part 2
Last updated: Thursday, July 29, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - January/February
Sahil continues his interesting series by writing a fronted to the Mobile app he wrote the backend for in the November/December 2014 issue.
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Modern Authentication
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2020 - May/June
What does authentication mean in for applications working at Internet scale? Learn common tenets for the modern world (2020s).
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More Chrome Debugging Tips
Last updated: Sunday, May 7, 2023
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2023 - May/Jun
Sahil talks about more tools available in Chrome DevTools that can make your software development better, including these features: Find unused JavaScript on a page; jQuery selector syntax for debugging; use XHR breakpoints to debug multi-threaded JavaScript code; use conditional breakpoint in JavaScript, and more.
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More Git
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2022 - March/April
Sahil demonstrates more features of Git, this time covering Stash, using remote effectively to improve collaboration, forking and merging (the happy path), triangular workflow (using upstream) and managing/resolving conflicts.
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MVP Corner: Do You have a Heart Disease?
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2007 - May/June
Most people who undergo bypass surgery-are back for another one in just a few years-unless they die first of course.
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MVP Corner: You Can Make Money, but You Can’t Make Time
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - July/August
Time is money.And money is the root of all evil.So waste time. Right?
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My Top Three Favorite Things About SharePoint 2010
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2010 - January/February
Aside from the obvious summary here, Sahil goes into details about why you should also be happy about these three SharePoint 2010 features. In his words, these features give a SharePoint architect so much more flexibility in implementing and delivering SharePoint projects that they will invariably prove to be extremely valuable.SharePoint 2007 has been a very successful product for many reasons. Perhaps it is the good applicability of .NET to SharePoint. Maybe it is the fact that SharePoint gives you so much beyond plain vanilla ASP.NET, that it gets both techies and business users excited.Having been available for about three years now, there has been time for developers to discover a few rough edges to the product as well.
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Natural Language Understanding with LUIS
Last updated: Friday, April 16, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2018 - September/October
In this next installment of his exploration into artificial intelligence, Sahil show you how to get LUIS to understand even if you misspell or mispronounce something.
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Office 365 Connectors and WebHooks: Part 1
Last updated: Wednesday, May 19, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2017 - May/June
Just when it seems like Office 365 is everywhere, you’ll learn something that makes you glad it’s so ubiquitous. Sahil begins a new series with an interesting look at Office 365’s WebHooks.
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Office 365 Connectors and WebHooks: Part 2
Last updated: Friday, May 14, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2017 - July/August
Just when it seems like Office 365 is everywhere, you’ll learn something that makes you glad it’s so ubiquitous. Sahil continues his new series with an interesting look at Office 365’s WebHooks.
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Office 365 Desktop Apps with Angular 2 and Electron
Last updated: Friday, June 4, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - September/October
Sahil continues his series on Angular 2 and this time, adds in building cross-platform desktop applications with Electron.
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Office 365 iOS Apps Using Swift
Last updated: Wednesday, July 14, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - May/June
The world has evolved away from single-platform apps. Sahil shows us how Apple’s new Swift language encourages new opportunities, whether you’re programming for iOS or otherwise.
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On-Premises to Office 365: Identity
Last updated: Wednesday, May 11, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2013 - July/August
“Run your business, not your mail server.” I am not sure where I read that, but it makes so much sense! Every organization is moving to the cloud, and some just haven’t started their journey yet. One of the fastest and most compelling online cloud based offerings is Office 365. Available in various SKUs, you can get SharePoint, Lync, Exchange, and Office professional as cloud-based offerings. The subscriptions are as low as $2 per user per month to $20 something per user per month. Also, with SharePoint 2013, if you buy Office 365 subscriptions for your users, you don’t need to buy CALs (Client Access Licenses) for on-premises use.
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OpenAI
Last updated: Wednesday, December 13, 2023
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2023 - July/August
Sahil's article provides a brief overview of OpenAI, a research laboratory consisting of a nonprofit and a for-profit subsidiary. Over the years, OpenAI has released and invented some amazing things, such as GPT-3, DALL-E, and ChatGPT 3.5, which have made it a popular choice for tech companies. Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI, and has integrated ChatGPT into its products, such as Bing, Edge, and Microsoft 365.
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Passkey Authentication
Last updated: Thursday, February 22, 2024
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2024 - March/April
Sahil discusses the adoption of FIDO2 and WebAuthn standards to eliminate passwords and how to implement passkey authentication in your web application, demonstrating the client-side and server-side aspects of the process through an end-to-end application.
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Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2020 - September/October
Learn to create a progressive Web application (PWA) which you can deploy through the App Store or Google Play for iOS and Andoid mobile apps. PWAs are built with browser-based technologies but can act just like a native app.
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Sandboxed Solutions in SharePoint 2010
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2010 - March/April
SharePoint 2007 was a developer platform! But it took a developer with the patience of Job and the intelligence of MIT to deal with the bad development tools that we used to work with in SharePoint 2007. The picture in SharePoint 2010 is a lot better!
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Securing Azure Storage
Last updated: Thursday, November 30, 2023
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2021 - September/October
There are many components in Azure storage, which makes security a prime subject for consideration. Sahil looks at authentication and encryption to make sure that your apps are locked up tight.
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Security and Same Origin Policies
Last updated: Thursday, November 10, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2022 - November/December
Just when you’re thinking that you have this whole security thing covered, Sahil pokes a large hole in a common perception.
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Service Account Management in SharePoint 2013
Last updated: Thursday, September 2, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2014 - September/October
Managing security is very important, and SharePoint provides several ways to manage password accounts. Sahil gives us the story.
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Session State in SharePoint 2010
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2011 - September/October
The title of this article is a misnomer, but I still picked this title because it is indeed the problem we are trying to solve. The problem is session state, especially in-process session state, is just evil. It makes your application less predictable, less reliable, less scalable, and locks you out of possibilities such as Windows Azure.
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SharePoint 2007 and the Thin .NET 3.5 Development Model
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2008 - November/December
As I am flying back home over the Atlantic, I can’t help but think how much better SharePoint has become after the introduction of .NET 3.5. I have repeatedly insisted that one of the reasons behind SharePoint 2007’s huge success is the application of ASP.NET 2.0 concepts to SharePoint.In this article, I am going to talk about the specific improvements .NET 3.5 has brought to the SharePoint 2007 platform, and how that has made my development life so much better. I will talk of three exemplary examples, and in subsequent articles, I will splice each one of these topics in further depth.
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SharePoint Applied - Stsadm Is Your Friend
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2008 - March/April
I am a self confessed command line junkie. Sure I see value in GUIs, and GUIs are great to get accustomed to a tool, but once I start crawling, I like to walk, run, and then fly. And when I fly, a GUI’s sluggishness in getting tasks done becomes seriously annoying.
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SharePoint Applied: CAML, Your New Pet
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2008 - May/June
SharePoint is a very powerful platform. It gives you a very easy-to-setup place to put your data in.And you know what happens when you have a tool like SharePoint? People use it! And then when people have been putting in data, they want to retrieve it, in all sorts of weird ways. Putting in data is only half the story, and I’d argue the easier part. It is fetching the data in a meaningful and targeted manner that separates the wheat from chaff.
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SharePoint Applied: Document Management in SharePoint 2010
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2009 - November/December
SharePoint, while good for many things, is probably better at some than others. One thing companies use SharePoint a lot for is Document Management.
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SharePoint Applied: SharePoint 2007 with WCF and Silverlight
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2009 - March/April
Silverlight 2 just went RTM. This product is unique because for the first time in the Microsoft world, you have .NET running cross platform, in a secure way, without all the deployment hassles. It has the ability to bring rich UI, right within the browser-much like Flash, but with more capabilities and a .NET heart.So, what does this mean to you-the SharePoint developer? Well, as I elucidated in my previous article, developing rich UIs in SharePoint 2007 isn’t exactly my idea of a good time! In fact, it is a bit like a 3-year old playing drums on your head all night long while his 7-year old sister is sticking chewing gum in your hair as you are trying to sleep because you have an early morning 7 AM meeting tomorrow in a recessionary economy.Take heart! The thin .NET 3.5 development model makes it all easier.
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SharePoint Applied: To Kerberos or Not
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2009 - September/October
Whenever you create a new SharePoint website, one of the questions SharePoint asks you is to select an authentication mechanism. Should it be NTLM or should it be Kerberos?The first time I installed SharePoint, I picked Kerberos, because it sounded like a tropical fruit, only to be prompted that this will need more work! Given that I’m the laziest person you know, I changed my selection to NTLM, and went with the less naggy version instead!
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SharePoint Applied: 10 Things You Wish they Told You-Part 2
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2008 - September/October
In my previous article, I talked about 10 things you wish you knew before you started your SharePoint project.The first five things were focused more towards the architecture and management of the project. In this article, I will follow up with five things targeted specifically for the SharePoint developer.
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SharePoint Applied: Azure ServiceBus and SharePoint 2010
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2012 - March/April
The cloud means many things. It means Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Bing and - oh yes - Windows Azure! Windows Azure, as you know, is Microsoft’s cloud operating system. It consists of many parts, but at a high level you can say it includes Compute (web and worker roles, plus storage), SQL Azure and AppFabric. AppFabric, in turn, consists of AppFabric Access Control, ServiceBus, and Cache. This article concerns ServiceBus, and its integration with SharePoint 2010 and Office 365.
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SharePoint Applied: BCS with Visual Studio 2010
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2010 - May/June
Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is a set of out-of-the-box features, services and tools that enhance SharePoint by streamlining the creation of solutions with deep integration of external data and services into SharePoint!SharePoint 2007 had a similar technology called BDC. But BDC was much more primitive compared to BCS.
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SharePoint Applied: Enterprise Content Types
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2010 - November/December
This article is excerpted from Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Building Solutions for SharePoint 2010 by Sahil Malik, published by APress, copyright 2010 and is printed with the publisher’s permission.
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SharePoint Applied: Large Files in SharePoint 2010
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2012 - July/August
When a team at Microsoft first conceived of SharePoint, the product team decided that the content database was the best place to store file uploads in SharePoint. Before you pull out daggers, consider that there were many advantages to this choice. You can never have a virus corrupting the server in an upload that goes into the database. No filename issues. Transaction support. Easy backups, etc. Also, believe it or not, for a certain file size (smaller the better), databases can actually offer better performance than traditional file systems for storage. In addition, the product team decided to rely heavily on GUIDs and clustered indexes inside the content database - again, a choice with positives and negatives.
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SharePoint Applied: SharePoint 2007 Ninja Debugging
Last updated: Saturday, January 18, 2020
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2009 - July/August
One of the challenges of working as an on-demand consultant is that I frequently get called into projects where the SharePoint installation is a bit sick, and it is in production.All the usual tricks have been tried, and the Infrastructure Ogre won't let me install Visual Studio on the production systems to truly be able to debug the problem. Yet another problem of being an on-demand consultant is that the clock starts ticking even before I've understood the problem description.One of the challenges of working as an on-demand consultant is that I frequently get called into projects where the SharePoint installation is a bit sick, and it is in production. All the usual tricks have been tried, and the Infrastructure Ogre won't let me install Visual Studio on the production systems to truly be able to debug the problem. Yet another
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SharePoint Applied: The MasterPage Story in SharePoint 2010
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2011 - May/June
MasterPages are SO much better in SharePoint 2010 that only in rare cases should you should make a page that isn’t based on one. Sahil explains why.
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SharePoint Applied: Visual Studio 11 Beta and SharePoint Development
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2012 - May/June
SharePoint 2007, in many ways, was a v1 release. It was the first time .NET was properly applied to SharePoint, and from SharePoint 2007 onwards the product has done very well. Partly because of the rich built in functionality that comes with SharePoint and party because of its extensible nature - things developers can do.
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SharePoint Applied: Workflows in SharePoint 2013, Part 2
Last updated: Thursday, June 2, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2013 - March/April
In my last CODE Magazine article, I professed my love for SharePoint 2013 style workflows. I must say, having been spurned by SharePoint 2010 style workflows, falling in love with a technology with the same name was not easy. In that article, I talked about how workflows can now finally scale and perform; I talked about how to setup workflows and how to use them in SharePoint designer. Microsoft introduced numerous enhancements in SharePoint designer 2013 surrounding workflows, but in this article, I wish to switch gears a bit and talk about the Visual Studio side of things
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SharePoint Applied-Search Your Legacy Data
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2007 - November/December
In these series of articles, I intend to take on common everyday problems that face organizations and solve them using SharePoint. If you already use SharePoint, you will probably raise an eyebrow and think “Neat!” at the end of the article. If you don’t use SharePoint yet, maybe this will tip you over the edge.
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SharePoint Content Database Performance
Last updated: Wednesday, December 29, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2014 - January/February
SharePoint guru Sahil shows us how to get the most from SharePoint installations by making sure that they run as fast and efficiently as possible.
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SharePoint Custom Code Performance
Last updated: Tuesday, September 7, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2014 - July/August
If you’ve ever wondered why SharePoint is so slow and if there was anything you could do about it, you’ll want to read Sahil’s exploration of this common problem.
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SharePoint Framework Extension
Last updated: Thursday, May 6, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2018 - January/February
Sahil teaches you how to organize and automate your work using one of the new features in SharePoint: Extensions.
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System.Transactions and ADO.NET 2.0
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2006 - May/June
Data is the blood in your system; it sits in its comfortable home of a database, and camps out in the tent of XML, but it deserves to be worked with in a reliable and consistent manner.But why should only data-related operations be reliable? Shouldn’t you want to write reliable code for your other operations? The introduction of System.Transactions in .NET 2.0 brings a paradigm shift of how you will write reliable transactional code on the Windows platform. This article dives deep in the depths of how System.Transactions works, and how you can use it to your advantage. You will also see how you can leverage existing System.Transactions integration within ADO.NET, and why you need to really understand what is under the magic carpet.
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Terminal Tricks
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2021 - May/June
Sahil offers some of his favorite development productivity hacks on the Unix terminal. If you use a Mac and the Windows subsystem for Linus, these will help you.
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The 12-Step Recovery Program from a SharePoint Error
Last updated: Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2011 - January/February
Hello, my name is Sahil, and I am a worsening SharePointoholic. SharePoint is built on ASP.NET 2.0 - pretty much like human beings are made up of carbon and water. There is a lot in SharePoint that isn’t in ASP.NET. Not only is SharePoint a complex ASP.NET 2.0 application, it also has numerous concepts for things such as profiles, role providers, authorization etc., that are different from ASP.NET.
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The Basics of Git
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2022 - January/February
Sahil discusses Git and how to get started with Git; love it or hate it, it works and we all use it for source control. Learn some Git tips and tricks to use it better.
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Top Azure Active Directory Mistakes
Last updated: Tuesday, August 29, 2023
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2023 - September/October
Sahil examines some of the most common mistakes and misunderstood concepts that cause insecure applications in Azure Active Directory (Entra ID if you are on board with the new name for the product). The protocols he covers are portable to any identity platform. Some common mistakes and misunderstood conceptsinclude:: redirect URIs in identity protocols, mixing different types of OpenID Connect (OIDC) flows in a single app, managing client secrets, managed identities, and understanding token validation.
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TypeScript: The Best Way to Write JavaScript
Last updated: Tuesday, June 29, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - November/December
In this continuation of his series, Sahil focuses on TypeScript and why it’s mandatory if you want to write good, reliable code in JavaScript.
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Web API Authentication
Last updated: Friday, December 22, 2023
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2024 - January/February
In this article, Sahil explores the intricacies of validating access tokens in web API authentication. They emphasize the importance of identity and security in this process and discuss the parties involved, such as the identity provider, the relying party (RP), and the web API. The article delves into topics like acquiring and caching access tokens, as well as validating their signatures and claims. Sahil also touches on best practices for storing and managing refresh tokens.
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Web Application Authentication
Last updated: Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2023 - November/December
Sahil takes a look at web app authentication in OIDC. Read a good, quick synopsis of OIDC: tokens, endpoints, and grants.
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Workflows in SharePoint 2013, Part 1
Last updated: Thursday, June 9, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2013 - January/February
If we have been friends for a while, you must know my opinions about workflows in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007. I didn’t think they were very good, especially from a performance and scalability point of view. Frankly I think Microsoft should have called them “workslows.” Though, I don’t think it was the implementation in SharePoint that was the issue, it was fundamental issues with Workflow Foundation, compounded by the nature of SharePoint that acerbated the issues. Well, I am happy to say that Workflows in SharePoint 2013 are something I feel quite comfortable recommending to anyone, and I hope to make that case in this article.
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Write Cross-Platform Apps using Electron
Last updated: Wednesday, June 23, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2016 - March/April
Using this new tool and a few familiar ones, Sahil shows us how to build a simple app that we can sell on Apple or Windows App Stores.
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WTF.js
Last updated: Friday, July 2, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2015 - September/October
Sahil takes a look at some strange behavior on the part of JavaScript. He provides a list of common mistakes and what to do about them.
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Xamarin versus Cordova
Last updated: Friday, May 21, 2021
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2017 - March/April
These days, you can’t target only one platform with your innovative apps. They have to look good on many types of devices and operating systems. Sahil looks at how Xamarin and Cordova translate into native apps and how you can use a combination to build even more versatile systems than ever before.