December 2014 - Posts

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Originally posted on the MVP Award Program Blog on December 8th, 2014.

In the last year or so I have proudly referred to myself as a “cord-cutter”. I’ve dropped my cable / satellite subscription in favor of streaming services and an over-the-air antenna. When it comes to streaming, of course the XBOX ONE excels with services such as Xbox Video, Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, NBA TV and Amazon. How is that any different than any of the many streaming devices out there such as Roku, Amazon FireTV, Chromecast and more though? From a standpoint of streaming alone, there really isn’t much difference. One place that really sets Xbox One apart though is its TV functionality via HDMI pass-through and OneGuide. This allows you to watch TV while still using other Xbox One apps at the same time with Snap mode. A great feature when you want to play a game but still keep an eye on the score of the game. I wanted to make use of with over-the-air TV, but I found that there wasn’t a lot of information out there on it to date.

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Setting up over-the-air TV

When first looking at this feature, it is 100% clear that this feature is designed for those with a cable or satellite box. That’s not me. When setting up Xbox One, it allows you to set up the device relatively easily to control your cable or satellite box. To do this though you will either need an Xbox with a Kinect sensor or an inexpensive IR transmitter cable. Personally I went with the IR transmitter cable because using a Kinect in my media room would be quite difficult because I keep all of my electronics in a closet. Shop around for these cables because they tend to range in price quite a bit.

Using this IR transmitter, you simply run a cable from your XBOX to the location of the IR receiver port on your various electronics. They make transmitters with multiple emitters so you can control your TV, tuners, and even your receiver all from one able.

Now you might be wondering, how to use the Xbox One with an over-the-air antenna since you aren’t using a cable box? The answer is actually to acquire a simple over-the-air antenna tuner box. These run in price between $30 and $50 USD and can usually be found at your local electronics retailer or Amazon. I personally went with the HomeWorx HW-150PVR and recommend it because it actually works with the Xbox One. The box has an HDMI out which you can plug into the A/V HDMI input port of your Xbox One.

My first over-the-air tuner box was not supported. The Xbox One supports many brands, but be warned that some of the tuners are from brands you have never heard of. The Xbox One simply doesn’t support them all. I’ve looked for a supported list on the Internet but I haven’t seen one to date.

When you find a tuner you like, you will plug in an over-the-air antenna into the RF IN port. I have a few indoor antennas, but I’ve had pretty good success with this RCA Amplified TV Antenna. Where you live and various other factors will affect the number of channels you receive. I happen to live within line of sight of a number of broadcast TV towers so I can receive more than 60 channels. Most you likely won’t care about. The important thing for me was to get the major networks so I could watch live events like football and basketball.

When you first launch OneGuide, it will walk you through setting up the device with your electronics. Part of the process is to find you TV, tuner, and audio receiver and test whether or not the Xbox One can control them. If your Kinect can broadcast the IR signals to your devices or if you have positioned your IR transmitter in the right place on your devices, it should be able to successfully power them off, change the volume, and change the channel. If it doesn’t work, you likely don’t have the transmitter or Kinect positioned right.

Watching over-the-air TV

Once everything is configured, you can tell Xbox One that you are using over-the-air TV. It does a pretty good job of pulling down all of the channels in your area. However, you may find that things are missing or it shows you channels you can’t receive. The listing probably won’t match up perfectly but it will probably cover the core network channels which are probably the ones you are looking for anyways. When you select a channel through the OneGuide, it will send the remote control commands to choose that channel. I find it to be a bit slow mainly because of how fast the tuner responds. It’s slightly annoying but no fault of the Xbox One. You can flip quickly through channels using the up and down buttons on the remote. If you don’t have a remote yet, don’t worry. You can use your Xbox One Controller. Just press the X button to launch OneGuide and press the A button to select a channel.

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Many of the over-the-air tuners also support plugging in USB flash drives and hard drives. These can be used to add DVR-like functionality allowing you to record shows and pause live TV. If you select a show in OneGuide, it will even set up a recording for you but your mileage may vary. If you expect the experience to be as streamlined as what you get with a cable or satellite DVR, you may be disappointed. The recordings have cryptic filenames on the DVR and pausing live TV actually takes 10 – 15 seconds for it to pause it. There’s no way to get to the DVR functionality using the Xbox One controller or remote either. It’s better than nothing though.

For those of you in Europe, you may have already heard about the Xbox One Digital TV Tuner. This simple USB device takes the signal from an over-the-air antenna and allows you to use the storage on your Xbox One as a DVR. I’d love to see this make its way to the United States.

I’ve cut the cord and I haven’t looked back for a second. It used to be hard being a cord cutter, but it’s getting easier every year. Just recently, CBS announced an online service to watch live TV. They don’t have an Xbox One app yet, but I hope we see it soon along with other broadcasters. Occasionally, I wish I had a way to watch ESPN, but I have been able to get by without so far. As a recap, if you are a cord cutter and are considering the Xbox One, remember:

· You need a Kinect or an IR transmitter cable

· You need a supported over-the-air HD tuner with HDMI output

· You need an over-the-air antenna

· Apps aren’t available for some streaming services yet

If you are thinking about cutting the cord and using your Xbox One, I hope this guide was useful. Be sure and refer to Set up live TV with your Xbox One for more details on getting started.

Although, Corey Roth has mentioned products in this article, they are not an endorsement by him or Microsoft. They are simply products he has experience with and they have worked for him. Your experience may vary.

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In working on one of my upcoming articles, I captured the steps to activate a domain registered through GoDaddy.com to your Office 365 subscription.  This will serve as a reference to that article when it comes out.  Since Microsoft and GoDaddy have a partnership, adding a domain is incredibly simple.  A wizard walks you through the process of confirming that you own the domain name.  It will even update DNS records for you automatically.

Start by going to your Office 365 admin center and click on the DOMAINS link.  Click the Add domain link to get started.

SyncDomainList

When you click Add domain, it takes you to a screen that explains the steps to you.  Click Start step 1 to get started.

SyncDomainGettingStartedStep1

Next, we need to enter the name of our domain. 

SyncConfirmDomainInput

Office 365 will detect that your domain has been registered through GoDaddy.  When you click Confim ownership, it will then prompt you to sign in with your GoDaddy account.  Enter your credentials to continue.

SyncConfirmDomainGoDaddyLogin

As an alternative you can always perform the steps manually but it may take several days to complete as you wait for DNS entries to propagate.

Next, you will need to grant Office 365 permission to modify your domain.  Click the Accept button.

SyncConfirmDomainGoDaddyAuthorize

Finally Office 365 will confirm that you own the domain name.

SyncConfirmDomainComplete

When you finish, Office 365 will prompt you about how you want to add users from this domain.  For today’s article, we’ll just skip this step.

SyncDomainAddUsers

This will then mark off Step 2 as complete.  Click Start step 3 to specify its purpose and configure DNS entries.

SyncAddDomainStep2

On this screen, you’ll choose whether you want to use this domain with Exchange and Lync.  Select the appropriate checkboxes and click Next.

SyncDomainPurpose

Normally this would mean creating DNS entries manually for things like your MX record, but Office 365 will configure all of your DNS entries at GoDaddy for you.  Click Set up records to proceed.

SyncDomainRecordSetUpGoDaddy

When it completes, you will get a confirmation screen with the records it configured for you.

SyncDomainSetupComplete

At this point you are done.  You may need to wait for some DNS entries to propagate but you can soon use all that Office 365 has to provide with your newly added domain.

If you are a developer working with the SharePoint app model and have deployed a list, you might have noticed that the list settings button is missing from the ribbon.

SharePointAppListRibbonNoListSettings

Now, you typically probably don’t want to adjust list settings inside an app through the UI.  However, it’s not uncommon that you want to look at your list settings in the development process to confirm you did everything right.  For example, maybe you want to check the permissions on the list. 

If you know the List Id, you can always just go directly to ListEdit.aspx, but I find that’s a lot of work.  Instead, I found the easiest way is go to active the LIST ribbon and then click Modify View.

SharePointAppListRibbonModifyView

That will take you to a page where you can edit a view.  However, it also gives you a breadcrumb back to Settings.

SharePointAppModifyListViewSettingsBreadcrumb

You’ll now be on your list settings page.

SharePointAppListSettings2

This is a great way to manually set permissions on your list when needed.  You can also adjust a number of other settings.  Just be warned that some settings don’t work such as Information Management Policy Settings.  You will get a 500 error when you do that.

This is a simple tip but maybe some of you developers out there will find it useful.

I’ve been running Windows 10 Technical Preview since it came out on October 1st.  We’re now on our third build (Build 9879) so I thought I would share my experience so far on my Surface Pro 3.  With Windows 10, they have given us access to builds earlier than we used to get in the past.  As a result, you are going to get to deal with different challenges with each build.  That’s just what you get when installing on an early release.  We expect that though.

Dealing with issues (bugs)

When you decide to run any beta operating system, you need to decide if the potential issues are too much of an annoyance for you to get work done.  I am running this on my primary device (my Surface Pro 3).  Sometimes the issues can be a pain, but nothing has been a showstopper yet.

In the first build, we had to deal with issues such as mouse wheel scrolling not working on external monitors.  That’s been fixed.  Now the most common issue is explorer.exe crashes.  When this happens, applications in the task bar may not show an icon properly.  Be warned, it will also cause the clock to get “stuck in time”.  I found myself being late once or twice because of that.  KB3020114 is supposed to fix this issue though.  If you haven’t installed it yet, you can also mitigate this issue some by reverting back to the Start screen instead of the Start menu.  You can do this by right-clicking on the taskbar and choosing Properties.  Then click on the Start Menu tab and uncheck Use the Start menu instead of the Start screen.

Windows10ReenableStartScreen

If you use any Windows Store (metro) apps, you will notice a few issues as well.  In build 9879, any time an app gets minimized (or you lock your device), it will stop running.  This causes streaming apps such as Xbox Music or iHeartRADIO to stop streaming. 

Another issue with Windows Store apps is that they will all crash at once.  You’ll find that all of them simply have stopped running.  There is a process named Application Frame Host which powers all of your Windows Store apps to run in windowed mode.  When this process dies, so does your Windows Store apps.  When this happens you simply restart the application.

Windows 10 Features to adjust to

Windows 10 adds the ability to runs Windows Store apps in windowed mode.  This sounds great in theory, but I find myself constantly adjusting the windows sizes as they are never right.  This especially applies when you drag them onto secondary monitors.  When you drag them over, display scaling messes it up when you try to snap them in one continuous action from the primary monitor to the secondary.  This means you’ll have to snap the application again.  I then often find myself resizing the application two or three more times to get it to snap just right. 

I am not a fan of the new Start menu at all.  The titles have no sense of arrangement and they are just all jumbled together.  This leads me to go back to the original Windows 8.1 style Start screen.  I know I am probably one of the few people on the planet though that prefer it though.

Selecting a WiFi network has a new touch friendly menu.  This allows you to connect but getting to advanced network settings from here is tough.

Windows10WifiSettings

OneDrive (consumer) has also changed as I mentioned in my last article.  It changes the way synchronization happens.  For the most part I think it probably works better now but occasionally I still have issues.

Surface Pro 3 specific issues

The Surface Pen works in Windows 10 just fine.  However, the ability to wake the device up while it is sleeping by pressing the button currently does not.  I didn’t find myself using that feature very often though as cool as it is.

I have had a lot of issues with the device waking up and running instead of going into connected standby mode with Build 9879.  I have pulled my Surface out of my bag to find it running hot more than once.  I honestly don’t think connected standby works at all right now so I have started shutting the device down when I want to make sure it doesn’t come on.

Battery life is also considerably less with Windows 10.  I’ve found that this happens every time I run a beta operating system though. 

Should you install it?

Unless you are just dying to see the new features, I would probably not install Build 9879 on your Surface Pro 3.  None of the issues are absolute deal breakers, but they can be annoying at times.  However, they aren’t so bad that I am considering going back to Windows 8.1.  I am just going to hold out until the next build.  Microsoft has announced a Windows 10 event on January 21st, so I would guess we’ll see something around then.

If you do decide to proceed with the install you can get it by joining the Windows Insider Program.  Be sure to read the Before you Install link and have backed up your data or have it in the cloud somewhere.

- @coreyroth on twitter

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I have been working with the new Office 365 Groups feature a little bit and I wanted to see how I could surface them from a regular SharePoint Online site.  In my example today, I have created two public groups and three private groups.

GroupList

My first thought was to use Search.  Ultimately, I knew the file storage behind groups was powered by a site collection.  I just need to figure out which WebTemplate was being used.  You can see the name of the site collection fairly easily by looking at one of the documents in search.  It’s simply stored at /sites/<GroupID>.  You can see your Group ID when creating the group initially.

CreateGroupWithGroupId

Using the REST API, we can then just assemble the URL with /_api/web onto the existing URL such as https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/GroupID/_api/web.  Looking through these results I found out that the WebTemplate for the site is simply named GROUP.  Now that we have this, we can query search using the WebTemplate managed property.  The query we want is simply:

WebTemplate:GROUP

You can type this directly into the keyword textbox in your Search Center.

GroupsInSearchCenter

Now wait a minute.  I am in five groups but it’s only showing me two.  After doing some research and some additional queries, I discovered that no matter what I did, search could never find private groups or the documents within them.  I am not sure if this is a bug or it is intentional, but as of right now you can only see public Groups with search.  Still this might be valuable to you, so you could always use this query inside the Content Search web part.

GroupsInContentSearch

I am hoping that we can query private groups as well in the future, but it’s still nice to be able to query your groups if you use a lot of public ones.

When working with SharePoint Apps in Visual Studio 2013, you might receive the following error during deployment.

App installation encountered the following errors:
  
  @"Error 1
        CorrelationId: c423d0af-c32b-4702-8be3-a3c1a4b3010e
        ErrorDetail: There was an error during the operation.
        ErrorType: Configuration
        ErrorTypeName: Configuration
        ExceptionMessage: RestrictAssociationToId - ListId Lists/ListName
        Source: Common
        SourceName: Common App Deployment
Error occurred in deployment step 'Install app for SharePoint': Failed to install app for SharePoint. Please see the output window for details.

VisualStudioErrorWorkflow

Although there are a number of causes for this, I find that these are typically related to dependencies in your Feature Manager.  Take a look at mine below.

VisualStudio2013FeatureManager

As you can see for some reason, my list is not included in the package.  Although this example is simple, it’s not uncommon when you start dealing with multiple features and lists.  The specific ExceptionMessage trictAssociationToId - ListId Lists/ListName is because I have a workflow associated with the list, but the list is not getting deployed.  Once I add the list back to the feature, the issue goes away.

If you start receiving errors like this go back and look at your feature manager and make sure everything in your project is getting deployed in the order you want.