Black Marble Blog Server

Workflow and SQL Error: Part 3

Rik — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:52:11 GMT

As you may remember from my earlier post and subsequent follow-up, we have been seeing an issue related to workflows and the Workflow History list in SharePoint 2007. As I've already mentioned, the case is with Microsoft and I also said that I would post updates as new information arrived. Today, more detail has emerged and, as promised, I am sharing.

Whilst replicating the fault today we were having trouble - one of us had a SharePoint install that failed every time and the other had one which would not fail at all. Whilst looking at possible differences we realised that the failing site was a publishing site and the non-failing site was a team site.

After some testing, I can now report that the fault I have described only occurs when the SharePoint Publishing site feature is enabled (note, the site feature, not the SharePoint Publishing Infrastructure site collection feature). If you're not using a publishing site you have nothing to worry about from the problem we see.

Speaking on Team System in Coventry

Richard — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:50:34 GMT

I am speaking at VBug Coventry on the 24th of September about Visual Studio Team System. For details have a look at the VBug events site, look forward to seeing you there.

eScrum 1,1 available

Richard — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:23:24 GMT

For those who have not seen it eScrum 1.1 is now available. This basically a update for the installer so it works on VS2008 so you don't have to go through all the manual fiddling you had to in the past.

So if you want a nice simple agile team project process, with a nice web site to give progress visibility, give it a look.

The Cops are in at Work

Robert — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:34:10 GMT

New versions of my favourite Cop(that’s police to you and I) Duo, FxCop and StyleCop are out.

FxCop 1.36 is out including but not limited to 200+ bug fixes over Beta2, new globalisation rules (I smell a Guy at work), half the memory requirement.

StyleCop 4.3 is out also including great features such as better VS integration, a bunch of new rules which you can’t live without and the final changes to make StyleCop its name :)

Netware 6.5 on Hyper-V

Rik — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:01:59 GMT

As part of a customer project I needed to create a Netware environment for testing. It's been a little while since I did any netware management and I quite enjoyed it. I did, however, encounter a couple of gotchas which I thought I'd write up for the greater good.

Netware OS

Installing the Netware OS was actually pretty straightforward. There are no integration services offered for Netware so from the outset I knew that I would need to use legacy hardware options in the virtual machine.

I created a nice big dynamic virtual hard disk for the server because I will need to install GroupWise and a whole bunch of other services later. I attached this to the virtual IDE controller, gave the machine a single processor core as anything more needs integration services, and (critically!) added a legacy network adapter. Netware isn't a huge memory hog, so I added 1Gb of RAM and off we went.

I hit a snag at the point where the server tried to identify network drivers - it couldn't find any, and I couldn't see any in the list to load manually which matched the emulated hardware.

The solution turned out to be really simple: as you step through the installation screens there is an option to allow unsupported drivers. By default that is set to no. If you change it to yes, the installation recognises the network adapter as an old DEC and loads a driver which works.

Apart from that, I have experienced no difficulties with the server whatsoever, other than I have to run the machine connection window full screen to be able to switch between console screens.

Windows Client

I will admit, this one drove me crazy for a while before my final epiphany. There is a Novell client for Windows Vista now available, but why build a Vista VPC when an XP one would need less horsepower?

I dutifully grabbed an old Virtual PC VHD of our XP base install and fired it up.

Problem number one: In order to install the integration services I need to first uninstall Virtual Server Additions. No sweat, thinks I, clicking the uninstall button. Nope - you get a nice message saying that setup can only run inside a virtual machine!
Slightly surreal, I must say. I had to fire up the machine under Virtual PC and remove the additions, then copy the VHD back on the hyper-v server and start the system so I could install the integration services.

Problem number two: Once I'd installed the Novell client I couldn't get it to see the Netware server. Nothing I did would work - I strapped down every setting I could on the client to point it at the Netware machine but it refused to connect, although I could ping between the two quite happily.
The solution, when I finally figured it out (and I must admit it was pure chance that I thought to try it) was to remove the shiny new virtual network adapter and replace it with a legacy adapter. As soon as I did that, the Novell client could communicate quite happily with the server!

The situation would appear to be that the Novell client stack can't communicate properly through the new virtualised driver provided by Hyper-V. Exactly why this should be, I have no idea, but it drove me wild for a good couple of hours today.

Probable I/O Race Condition

Mat Steeples — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 05:50:37 GMT

System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Probable I/O race condition detected while copying memory. The I/O package is not thread safe by default. In multithreaded applications, a stream must be accessed in a thread-safe way, such as a thread-safe wrapper returned by TextReader's or TextWriter's Synchronized methods. This also applies to classes like StreamWriter and StreamReader.
at System.Buffer.InternalBlockCopy(Array src, Int32 srcOffset, Array dst, Int32 dstOffset, Int32 count)
at System.IO.StreamWriter.Write(Char[] buffer, Int32 index, Int32 count)
at System.IO.TextWriter.WriteLine(String value)
at System.IO.TextWriter.SyncTextWriter.WriteLine(String value)
…

This error had us stumped earlier this week. It was appearing on some of our asp.net pages, but not others, and only on one server in the cluster. It was consistent though, and very easy to reproduce. After taking the server out of the load balance cluster to diagnose it, we found out that the error was consistently appearing where people had used Console.WriteLine() methods for debug code. You might be wondering why you’d want to be using this command in an ASP.NET solution, but the output is sent to the output window if you’re debugging it from within Visual Studio. However, the error was new, the servers were working fine 10 minutes ago.

On closer examination of the server, it appeared that a session was left logged on, and there was an error message in said session:

SmLogSVC terminated at 0x7c81a379 while trying to write to 0x0000008. It seems that this is part of the WMI service and takes care of some of the logging / console output.

Upon clearing this message, the webserver was up for taking requests again and carried on happily! It went off to join the load balancing farm, and lived happily ever after! My only tips for avoiding this are to not leave terminal sessions logged on to servers, as then services are allowed to restart properly if they crash.

251 ways to help the community and learn visual studio

Robert — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:07:48 GMT

I have been consistently impressed by the blog/efforts of the ever lovely Sara Ford. for those of you who do not know who Sara is, she is a SDE/T on the Visual Studio Core team at Microsoft and via her blog provides us time strapped developers with visual studio hints in bit size easy to understand chunks almost everyday. if you don’t read her blog shame on you, subscribe now.

Sara is the author of the upcoming book Microsoft Visual Studio Tips. Sara has compiled 251 tips from her Tip of the Day series, to help on your way to Visual Studio enlightenment.

Sara comes from Waveland on the coast of the US which was hit badly by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and quite wonderfully Sara is donating 100% of her author book royalties to create a scholarship fund at the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College.

Black Marble have ordered half a dozen to get things going. I would suggest ordering a copy of this book for any/all of the reasons mentioned.

Boss.

Your ClickOnce clients complain of a missing “System.Data.Entity” reference in the GAC

Mat Steeples — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:23:47 GMT

So, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 came out the other day, and with it brought .net 3.5 SP1. I’ll leave you to read the shiny new features and what it brings from elsewhere. The purpose of this post is to deal with the failure to update or install certain ClickOnce applications.

With ClickOnce being a under-advertised feature of the .net framework, nobody really published a changelog of what’s new in it. I’ve managed to dig this up though, as it became quite necessary to fix the above error. So I’ll refer you to this link which contains some hints.

ClickOnce supports the following new features:

Suite Name: Your applications can now have sub folders on the start menu
Error URL: Not used this one specifically, but I’m guessing when something goes wrong during deployment your users can be directed to this URL
Creating Desktop Shortcuts: Fairly self explanatory
Excluding a file from having a hash generated: Means that this file won’t have it’s download verified
Clear Sign the package: Means that anyone will be able to update your app without having your private key (snk file)

So if you use any of those features, your users will require .net 3.5 sp1 installed on their computers. However, instead of prompting them with this useful message, they will receive an error telling them that System.Data.Entity cannot be found.

You can get round this by either not using the new features, or by marking .net 3.5 sp1 as a pre-requisite in your ClickOnce manifests

Why doesn't my ActionsPane appear when I create a new document form a VSTO enabled template?

Richard — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:47:25 GMT

When you are using a VSTO enabled Word Template inside a SharePoint custom content type you have to be careful which actual .DOTX file you use within the SharePoint custom content type.

DO NOT - use the .DOTX from your VSTO Visual Studio project directory
DO USE - the .DOTX from the the project's ClickOnce publish location.

The key point here is that until you have published the VSTO project via ClickOnce the .DOTX template does not know where to find the deployment of the associated assemblies. The copy in the project directory never actually knows this location as it is just a source file not a deliverable.

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is here

Robert — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:21:40 GMT

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is now available on MSDN subscriber downloads. or from Microsoft download.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (exe)

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (iso)

there are a good number of fixes and new features in the service pack (including TR1 for you C++ philes out there)

you MUST read the readme to make sure there are no problems and with the Silverlight 2 beta 2 tools you will need to download and run the new installer

If you get a Windows Update prompt to reboot during SP1 installation, ignore it. Wait until after the SP1 installation completes and then reboot.

Visual Studio 2008 themes

Robert — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:10:51 GMT

there are some nice themes for Visual Studio 2008 but if you want your own try this online tool to get that colour scheme you have always wanted.

Argh... more media rights issues

Richard — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 07:53:34 GMT

I posted about NBC Olympic coverage - today I discovered I cannot stream BBC provided media content from the Olympics on my Windows PDA using Opera via the Vodafone 3G service. Seems the BBC does not think I am in the UK. I know Yorkshire assumes it should be independent, but I don't think it has happened yet.

I suppose this is all to be expected, technology that allows reasonable media delivery over a mobile network at a vaguely sane price is new; especially when roaming between countries/networks. I doubt we will see this problem disappear soon unless the media rights are more commonly picked up by the telco providers such as Vodfone as opposed to the broadcast media companies like NBC and the BBC.

Makes you think how long can terrestrial broadcasters last in it current form as boundaries blur between delivery mechanisms?

That said the BBC has 7 media streams up at the moment across digital terrestrial, satellite, cable and the Internet, but I still find myself watching the primary BBC1 terrestrial coverage. After watching events on the other streams that are showing coverage of just one sport, I realise that in general I want the editorial service the BBC provides on it primary coverage, unless I have a real dedicated interest in one sport.

No Silverlight NBC Olympics for us

Richard — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 10:19:02 GMT

After the announcement at Mix of the NBC Silverlight Olympic streaming service I was looking forward to have a look at what had been created. Turns out you have to be in the USA to watch it, I assume due to media rights issues, a bit of a shame. I hope something can be worked out with a small fraction of the 2200 hours of content so we can all see what Silverlight can do for such a major event.

Back to the BBC Flash streams then............

ps. I suppose it is to be expected, you get the same problem with the TMS cricket coverage and other BBC Internet streams

Blog mirror

Richard — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:56:34 GMT

My blog is now being mirrored at http://msmvps.com/blogs/rfennell/Default.aspx as well as being available in it's real location http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rfennell

To quote MSMVPS it is The Ultimate Destination for Blogs by Current and Former Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals.

Moving the document store in TFS

Richard — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:50:00 GMT

I have at last got round to moving the location of the WSS sites used by our TFS server from the WSS instance running on our TFS Application Tier (AT) to our main 64bit MOSS 2007 server farm. A job I have been putting off for ages.

I decided that there was nothing on the TFS WSS sites of importance, other than documents (which I could easily copy) so decided to create new WSS sites as opposed to trying a backup and restore model.

Add templates

The first step is to make sure the templates for the WSS sites I needed were present on the MOSS farm. These are installed on the TFS AT WSS as part of the main install, you also get the option to run the MSI on a separate MOSS farm. Historically this has been a problem for us as the TFS installer did not support 64Bit WSS, however a power toy has been released for just the job. The only problem was when I ran this I got an error

'No templates for Windows SharePoint Services Extensions were uploaded....'

This pointed to a WSS config issue, but the MOSS farm seemed to be working fine. Instead of fiddling with this I just decided to install the templates manually.

Now we use eScrum, but I thought I would be good and install the two MSF standard ones as well. These are stored as .STP files. I copied these files to the MOSS web server (you can find them on the AT using search) and ran the stsadm command as below:

Stsadm.exe" -o addtemplate -filename MSFAgile3.0.stp -title VSTS_MSFAgile30
Stsadm.exe" -o addtemplate -filename MSFFormal3.0.stp -title VSTS_MSF_CMMI30
Stsadm.exe" -o addtemplate -filename escrum.stp -title eScrum
iisreset

Update: Note that the -title in the commands above is case sensitive, it must be eScrum not escrum.

Site location

Next I decided that I did not want the TFS sites to be created on the default /sites managed path. So we created a new managed path of /tfsprojects. (Central admin, application management, define managed paths)

Test MOSS

Once the templates were installed and the managed path created I made sure all was OK by creating a new site collection (using the Central admin, application management, create site collection).

It is worth doing this to make sure you used the correct STP files - there is a potential issue here if you upgraded from TFS 2005 in the past you may have stray WSS 2.0 format STP files hanging around you need version 3.0 ones.

Reconfigure TFS

The TFS AT needs to be reconfigured to point at the new farm. This is done from the AT using the TfsAdminUtil command. tfsadminutil configureconnections will list the current settings.

You need to edit the SharepointUri, SharepointSitesUri, SharepointAdminUri and SharepointUnc to point at the MOSS farm as opposed to the WSS on the TFS AT. The general form to change these is:

tfsadminutil configureconnections /SharepointUri:http://server1.domain.com

Once all the changes are made Visual Studio can be loaded to get at Team Explorer. Now in theory the new setting should be picked up, but you might need to delete the local cache (c:\documents and settings\[username]\local settings\application data\microsoft\team foundation).

Creating New Team Project

At this point I think it is good idea to try to create a new team project and make sure the Sharepoint site is created with the correct template and rights.

Fixing up old Team projects

If all is working you can now fix up the older projects. Basically all that is required is that a site exists with the correct uri e.g,

http://server1.domain.com/tfsproject/project1

You create this site collection using the MOSS Central admin, just like the test site created previously after the templates were installed.

Once this created you should be able to right click on the team project in team explorer and open the portal site. Now you might hit rights problems here depending who you are logged in as. It is a good idea to check that the newly created site has the correct permissions set i.e make user the TFS project contributors have equivalent rights set on the newly created WSS site.

The final step is to copy any documents over from the old site (on the AT) to the new site on the MOSS farm.

Once this is all done you system should be using the MOSS server farm without any problems.

A Digital Road Trip

Richard — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:31:13 GMT

Over the past few days I have been travelling around the country by car, something I have not done for a while, preferring the train. It was a good chance to try out a couple of gadgets. One I have had a for a while, my HTC Touch Cruise phone, but the other was new a Pure Highway DAB car radio.

So what did I learn?

The phone

I have recently set my phone to use push email (so constantly sync'ing with Exchange during office hours). This seems to have had a serious adverse effect on battery life. I had not noticed this before as I usually connect my phone to my PC via USB when in the office thus keeping it charged and up to date. Whilst away, without really thinking about it, I had expect my usual (pre push email) 3 day battery life, but the constant sync and using the phone as a camera knocked this down to about 8 hours! The simple solution seems to be to set the sync to every hour, thus reducing the data calls.

More seriously the MicroSD card in the phone failed. If it were a 'real' hard disk I would guess at MBR corruption (don't know enough about SD technology to say if it is the case here). When I popped it into my PC I saw it was 75% full but could read no data (just like on the phone), I formatted it and it all worked fine again. My guess is that power loss on the phone occurred during a disk write and hence caused the corruption - not what I would expect, I expect kit to fail safe. This failure was a shame as I lost photos of the Triathlon National Relays and also my TomTom maps.

The loss of TomTom raised an interesting point, I had got too use to it's ease of navigation so I had not bothered to write down anything other than the postcodes of my hotels. Luckily I still had a road atlas in the car and had my confirmation emails in the phone (not stored on the SD card) so could dig out phone numbers so I could call for directions.

The radio

The BBC has not stopped going on about 'digital radio now available in cars' for a while. I love radio and so decided to get one. The Pure model picks up the DAB signal and re-broadcasts it as FM to the standard built in car radio. The key bit here is the special windscreen mount aerial (I had tried by handheld DAB radio in the car in the past too no effect).

Around Leeds it has been working OK, once you find a free FM frequency for rebroadcast. The real test was how well it picked up DAB around the country, the coverage map showed it was good, but can you trust it?

The answer for me is to paraphase the poem 'when it was good it was very very good, but when it was bad it was horrid'. It was great to actually hear the TMS cricket on a DAB station like Radio 5 Live Sports Extra, and equally good to clearly hear an AM talk station without the usual hiss. The problem was they just dropped out with no warning, sometime due to obvious local geography such as a deep cuttings, but usually for no obvious reason whist driving down a straight flat motorway. This seemed particular bad in South Yorkshire and the East Midlands, especially when leaving the motorway network but still on major A roads such as the A38.

So what did I learn?

A simple summary - as with all IT take a backup - whether it be an FM radio or a road atlas. Technology is good until it fails.

SharePoint Federated Search

Andy Dawson — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:41:52 GMT

One of the new features introduced with the recent SharePoint Infrastructure Update are the Enterprise Search Features that were shipped with Search Server 2008 and Search Server 2008 Express, that were not included in the original release of SharePoint 2007. This includes some Search core platform performance updates, a unified administration dashboard and Federated Search. The latter of these updates is the one I'd like to discuss briefly here.

SharePoint always had the facility to allow you to index external sources of data (e.g. an external web site), however the new Federated Search capability of SharePoint 2007 also allows you to include sites that use the OpenSearch 1.0/1.1 standard. The Federated Results web part allows you to display the results in a separate section of your search results page.

To make sue of the Federated Search capabilities, you need to add Federated Locations, then add the Federated Search web part to the search results page and modify the settings of the web part. The web part is typically added to the SharePoint search results page to provide extra sections at the right-hand-side of the page showing results from the Federated Locations.

I won't go through the steps to set up a Federated Location here, as there is a Microsoft video which describes the process very well. Note however that you can modify the look and feel of the returned results from within the Add Federated Location page by modifying the XML shown on the page and that you can restrict the use of the Federated Location you are setting up to specific sites within your farm. You can also pass credentials to the Federated Location if you need to do so.

Microsoft have also provided an online gallery of pre-configured Federated Search Connectors (Locations) at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=95798. There is a link to this gallery at the top of the Manage Federated Locations page within the Search Administration area of the SSP on your farm. By default, Microsoft provide the following Federated Locations installed with the Infrastructure update:

Internet Search Results (Live Search)
Internet Search Suggestions (Live Search)
Local Search (unscoped local search index)

The following Federated Locations are available (as at 1st August 2008) from the online gallery:

Live.com News
Yahoo News
Wired
The Register
MSDN
Technet
Wikipedia
Encyclopedia Britannica
Yahoo
Flickr
Yahoo Images
YouTube
PodScope
Technorati
Google Blog Search

These are available for download and import directly from the online gallery; just follow the instructions at the bottom of the page!

Once you have the Federated Locations you wish to use set up, the Federated Results web part needs to be added to your search results page. Navigate to your search results page and add the Federated Results web part the a web part zone on the page as you would any other web part. To change the Federated Locations the web part uses, modify the shared web part and drop down the listbox at the top of the settings; this contains the items in your Federated Locations list.

Using these settings, you can

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Search,Web Parts,Federation

also modify the number of results that are returned, the number of characters displayed in the summary and URL, whether to return results asynchronously, whether to show the loading image (a miniature version if the standard SharePoint 'processing' animation) etc. As usual you can also target the web part via the Audience controls.

We use the TechNet and MSDN Locations provided on the online gallery, and very useful we find them too!

Unable to access My Tasks in Project Web Access

Rik — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:51:35 GMT

Sometime ago we noticed an issue with My Tasks in Project Server. Certain users were unable to access My Tasks at all - they simply got a SharePoint error page.

A little jiggery-pokery with callstack and custom errors later, we saw that the error referenced a GUID for a task. I then searched the Project Server Publishing DB for the task GUID and subsequently located the project to which it belonged. If I edited the project in MS Project and updated the server, removing the task assignment from the user, they could access my tasks.

For anyone who has a similar problem, here are the SQL queries you need:

select * from dbo.MSP_TASKS where TASK_UID='<Task GUID>'

select * from dbo.MSP_PROJECTS where PROJ_UID='<Project GUID>'

Most odd. So I logged a call with our friends in Microsoft Support.

It's been parked for a while, but I received an email from support today advising me that the Infrastructure updates would help. Funnily enough, I'd already installed them (we keep our SharePoint farm as fully patched as we can), so that was almost all the way there.

Finally, they provided a short SQL script to run against the Publishing DB. This would identify any tasks that were orphaned and correct the issue. Luckily, we had none!

SELECT MP.PROJ_NAME, MAS.PROJ_UID, MAS.TASK_NAME, MAS.TASK_UID, MR.RES_NAME, MAS.RES_UID,MAS.ASSN_UID FROM MSP_ASSIGNMENTS_SAVED AS MAS INNER JOIN MSP_PROJECTS AS MP ON MAS.PROJ_UID=MP.PROJ_UID INNER JOIN MSP_RESOURCES as MR ON MAS.RES_UID=MR.RES_UID WHERE TASK_UID NOT IN(SELECT TASK_UID FROM MSP_TASKS_SAVED)

When I experienced the problem there were no hits in my old friend Google so hopefully this will help somebody, somewhere.

Here are the links to the infrastructure updates for completeness. Remember to read the docs carefully on installing these babies!

Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695)

Infrastructure Update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (KB951695), 64-bit edition

Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297)

Infrastructure Update for Microsoft Office Servers (KB951297), 64-bit edition

Infrastructure Update for Project 2007 (KB951547) - English

Configuring ActiveSync on Windows Mobile for Exchange Push

Rik — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:30:40 GMT

I'm not certain how many of you will find this useful, but I had a question about configuring the Touch Diamond to talk to Exchange which I regrettably failed to notice.

It's an interesting point of debate, now I come to think of it. When I got my Diamond the first thing I did was confgigure ActiveSync directly on the device. Whilst I do connect to my laptop from time to time, I don't actually have any real sync going on between the two, other than possible for OneNote and Notes. How many people out there still use Outlook to sync their phone information if Exchange Push is available?

Anyway, back to the plot. To get this all going without using Windows Mobile Device Center or ActiveSync, grab your phone and go to Programs via the Start menu.

In Programs, find ActiveSync.
In ActiveSync, select Menu and then choose Configure Server
In Server address, enter the name of your Exchange server. This is the same as the hostname you use for OWA (e.g. mail.mycompany.com)
If your server needs https rather than http, tick the option monikered 'this server requires an encrypted (SSL) connection)'
Tap Next and you will be asked to provide login information - username, password and the name of your Active Directory domain. Make sure 'Save password' is ticked or the automatic sync won't work and you'll have to enter your password each time you trigger a manual sync.
Tap Next once more and you will be able to select what gets synchronised. I have an unlimited data plan and I hate losing stuff, so I tick every box - Contacts, Calendar, E-mail and Tasks.
If you're being clever at this point, tapping Menu will allow you to get to the advanced options, where you can configure how conflicts are handled and what connection to use (normally this should be 'Internet')
Tap Finish and the phone should sync.

To make sure Push is enabled, where new items get sent to your device as they arrive you need to alter the Schedule, which is an option on the main Menu in ActiveSync. Pick your options to suit your preferences. I would stongly suggest that you make sure 'use the above settings when roaming' is NOT ticked unless you have deep pockets!

As ever, I hope this helps somebody out there.

SharePoint Website Schematic

Rik — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:14:39 GMT

I find myself drawing the same diagram over and over again in meetings to explain how SharePoint sites relate to IIS web sites, how managed paths and alternate access mappings fit and why you need to extend the SharePoint web application if you want more than one authentication provider.

After some of my colleagues pestered me to draw it again, I decided to create an electronic version, and since everybody seems to find it so useful I thought I'd post it here as well.

Rather than talk about it, I'm going to post it 'blind' and invite comments from you, my enthusiastic audience as to how easy it is to understand and any errors or omissions there may be.

With a little luck, somebody will find it useful!

Site Policies and FBA in SharePoint: Update

Rik — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:01:16 GMT

My apologies to Craig, who posted a comment to my earlier post about our FBA problems and I didn't notice until today.

To update you all on the situation, the fault is still with Microsoft and I have not yet received a hotfix.

However, for anybody considering FBA in their deployment, I would not let this issue stop you. There are two reasons I say that:

Normally with FBA you would extend the web application in question, having both FBA and Windows authentication available on the same content via different URLs. This makes your life easier with things like indexing and management.
The workaround I detailed is a good temporary solution to the problem with only minimal impact on the user experience (in that certain options are offered which may not work too well in Office when using FBA).

Hopefully this answer's Craig's question and assuages any doubts about the wisdom of deploying FBA in your SharePoint solution.

WPF Performance

Robert — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:32:17 GMT

When I was at DDS a nice chap asked me if I knew about WPF performance and the answer was no but I did do some digging and just for the record this is what I found , comments welcome.

Perf in WPF

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970683.aspx

Perf tools for WPF

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa969767.aspx

the most important bit could be .NET 3.5 SP1

http://blogs.msdn.com/jgoldb/default.aspx

you need to make sure that the problem is not poor code performance ( your code )

http://blogs.msdn.com/timothyc/archive/2006/02/28/540291.aspx

Virtual BizTalk -

Robert — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:44:02 GMT

The BizTalk CAT/UE team have just released the “Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Hyper-V Guide”.

It covers Deploying, Evaluating and Testing BizTalk with Hyper-V. if you are even thinking of virtualizing BizTalk read this guide.

'Unable to find control' when programmatically adding ASP.NET validation controls

Richard — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 22:11:07 GMT

I have been building a webpart that needs client side validation. I kept getting the error:

"Unable to find control id txtNotes referenced by the 'ControlToValidate' property"

Now most of the posts say just use the command to get the 'real' ID at runtime

this.rfvNotes.ControlToValidate = this.txtNotes.ClientID;

But this did not work, in the end the form I found worked was:

protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e)
    {
        base.OnInit(e);
        this.txtNotes.ID = "txtNotes";
        this.rfvNotes.ControlToValidate = this.txtNotes.ID;
        this.rfvNotes.Enabled = true;
        this.rfvNotes.Text = "* Required";
    }

The key step was to set the textbox ID manually, it seems that if this is not done it is the root of the error.

Life with a Diamond: nearly two weeks on

Rik — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:30:20 GMT

I said I'd post again once I'd had the Diamond a little while. It's now been two weeks and I can honestly say I'm completely happy with it. Battery life for me is fine - I charge it about every three days and it chugs along with exchange push pretty much constantly. I am quite comfortable with the soft keyboard and I can honestly say I haven't noticed any issues with the speed of the device either.

I don't usually go for silly little apps on my phone, but I couldn't resist this one. It shows just what you can do with the accelerometer. The force is strong in this one!