Recently, I was using a YAML file for storing some data for a pet project. To work with this YAML in a .NET application, I use the excellent YamlDotNet library by Antoine Aubry. One of my properties was a URL. Deserializing went fine, but when serializing back to a YAML file, things were not going as intended. In this short article, I will explain how I did fix this.

With SharePoint it's easy to configure multiple zones for your SharePoint Web Application. For example you have a Publishing Web Site with two zones. After the content is published it'll also be available on the anonymous site and most of the URLs will be automatically translated to corresponding zone URL. There are however some places this is not the case.

While working on a project with some existing code I noticed the developer did write large portions of code to get from an URL to a SPList. He probably didn’t know some of the hidden gems in SharePoint.