Archive for June, 2006

Improving SharePoint performance

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

This is a neat trick to improve the performance of your Sharepoint Box if you have custom webparts installed. Normally, the SharePoint indexer kicks in to index the pages, and when it does kick in, it causes an additional hit on the server. There may be cases, when you don’t want your custom webparts to connect to backend data systems and process the data when the indexer is accessing it. So what we have done, is to check if the current account calling the page, is the service account or not. If it is the service account, then just dont do anything. This way, we bypass the entire processing of each of our custom webparts, when the indexer is accessing them and hence decrease the overall load on the server.


On many systems, the indexer is set to kick in every 10 – 20 mins, so it is quite a bit of saving on extremely busy systems.

Posted in SharePoint | 1 Comment »

Extracting dll’s out of the GAC

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006

I was recently asked how to reference the Microsoft.SharePoint and few of the other SharePoint dll’s in a project while developing on a non SharePoint machine. The solution is quite simple which we often seem to neglect.


This is applicable for any assembly which is installed in the GAC. If you use the Windows Explorer, you can see those assemblies in the Windows\Assembly\GAC folder, but cannot copy them out of there. To access the internal structure, use the command shell, by typing cmd in the Start->Run menu. Navigate to the GAC folder and you will see all installed dll’s as folders, which inturn will contain the corresponding folders for each version. Just copy the dll’s from there to some other location and you have successfully extracted the dll’s from the GAC.

Posted in SharePoint, dotNet | 7 Comments »