Composed Looks in SharePoint 2013

Apart from "Designer Manager" in the SharePoint 2013, another remarkable  new feature in SharePoint 2013 branding side is "Composed" look that enables the site owners to change their site's look and feel as they wanted in just click of selecting the predefined template.(Theme).

The word composed means putting all the design elements such Master Page,Layout page,font,colour and background image and make the design template.
Later you can apply this template for your site.

Example,
If a Site collection administrator wanted to differentiate the each site under the site collection ,he /she could prefer to use the different composed looks.

To start this click on gear button on the site and click-->Change the look.

How this made up ?

Navigate to Site Settings-->Under web designer galleries->Click on Themes
There you will see the folder 15 (default theme applied on your site currently).Under this folder you will see the font scheme (.scheme),color palette (.spcolor) .

The combination of these file makes the  dynamic views on the SharePoint layouts (Title,WebPart Title,Dialog border,TopBar Text and Navigation related elements).

Here is the snapshot of the .spcolor file

Font scheme file snapshot

Microsoft Mechanics

Microsoft Mechanics

Microsoft's new initiatives to bring all the engineers those are continuously working for improving the Microsoft Products such as Azure,Office 365,Office Desktop version,Exchange Server 2016,SharePoint,OneDrive and Skype for business together and imparting the knowledge to IT workers through Video platform.
Checkout the blogs / Video
Microsoft Mechanics

File recover approach from SharePoint Template.

Disclaimer : Its a low level file recover approach from the SharePoint template.

Here I wanted to show you how to recover or retrieve the documents from the SharePoint template.
SharePoint template(.stp) is a just an zip file format. You can rename its extension to .CAB or Zip.
If you have 7.zip utility installed on your system, you can simply extract to destination folder.

Once you extracted you will see the file names with scrambled and its extension will be .000.

Manifest file along with extracted files are the master file, that you have to refer the file name and its index position.
So you can rename the file with proper extension to recover the file.
You can also automate or create the utility based on this steps using C#,FileSystem and Compression class.
If you want to record the meta data then "Rows" node will be the best place to parse through code.


Here is the steps, watch this video,

SharePoint App and SQL Permission

When you are developing the SharePoint Add-In in Visual Studio,you might seen these errors.

Error occurred in deployment step 'Uninstall app for SharePoint': The local SharePoint server is not available. Check that the server is running and connected to the SharePoint farm.

Even though you are able to view the developer site on the browser, still the Visual Studio throws the error that could confuse the developers.

Second error

Error occurred in deployment step 'Uninstall app for SharePoint': Cannot connect to the SharePoint site: Your Site Url. 
Make sure that this is a valid URL and the SharePoint site is running on the local computer. If you moved this project to a new computer or if the URL of the SharePoint site has changed since you created the project, update the Site URL property of the project.

The above error, Visual studio somehow tried to manage that the server is accessible but not the site collection.
Still you are cent percent sure , the URL is correct and accessible through browser but not through Visual Studio.

Reason:
The currently logged in user account doesn't have the required permission on the SQL Server.

Resolution:
Go to your SQL server and expand the "Security" folder under the SharePoint SQL Instance.Check there you will not find the account that has facing the above issues in visual studio.
Right click on "Logins" and select the "New Login".

Now add the "Server Role" and check the "sysadmin and dbcreator".

Again try to "Deploy" the SharePoint App project , you can able go forward through the successful messages.