August 2005 - Posts
So I'm stuck in the airport waiting to pick up my brother whose flights are always delayed (it must be some kind of karmic revenge - he must have caused a lot of people to be late in a past life). While I'm wanding around trying to fill an hour and a half with no place to sit down, I meander over to one of the ubiquitous news stands and pick up an interesting looking magazine - Technology Review - MIT's magazine of innovation. It's a really cool magazine with all kinds of articles that are really interesting; nuclear power, holographic memory, mesh networks, synthetic biologics, etc.
One of my favorite articles talked about mesh networking (this is not the article from the print version) - what I see as the future of networking for our world. The concept is fairly simple. Get a bunch of wireless access points together and let them intelligently route traffic around. Wireless = easy to install and create huge areas of coverage. Intelligent = self healing networks - when a node goes down the other nodes simple route traffic around the problem in a very fluid manner. Really cool. Check out the Microsoft Research site on mesh networks (maybe ready for use inside of 5 years?). What's really cool about this is if we get to the point where we have truely omnipresent wireless connections to the internet where ever we go, we will begin to incorporate connected technology into our lives in ways we can barely imagine now. Wireless in the car, wireless sewn into your clothes, etc. Very nifty stuff.
I'll probably end up subscribing to this magazine (I'll replace one of the other magazines I don't read with this)
-- Matt Ranlett
Yesterday we had the INETA Chalk Talks at the MSDN Event. The three speakers were great - Mark Dunn and Shawn Wildermuth sort of tag teamed with each other while talking to the group (37 people including the speakers!) about ADO.Net 2.0 and ASP.Net 2.0. We had some great information flowing out of our speakers, and our audience got involved - at one point actually coming up to the whiteboard and drawing out questions. Don Browning talked to us about some source control management processes and service orientation concepts. He got the most questions of any of our speakers while he explained how Turner developed multiple features of a single product in parallel without one team impacting another. His explainations of how Turner achieved service orientation by mapping "outside types" defined in contracts to "inside types" used by the valiation and business logic brought into clarity the difficulties of defining contracts and then putting that heirarchical data into a relational database.
The MSDN Event itself was a great set of presentations from Glen covering ASP.Net 2.0 Glen actually has a bunch of MSDN DVDs with the content if anyone missed out. I'm sure if you come to a user group we can get you a DVD. Because of the availability of these DVDs, I'm not going to rehash his content.
-- Matt Ranlett
Today is my last day with MATRA Systems Inc. I've accepted another position elsewhere in town. I'm sorry to be leaving MATRA because I've got a bunch of great friends here and I've been doing this job so long that I can do parts of it with my eyes closed. I'm a little nervous about the new place - it is a much smaller IT shop which means I'm about to have a lot more responsibility resting on my shoulders. However, the size of the IT shop at the new place means I'll get to play around with some new things that I've not had a chance to work with yet. This should be good.
-- Matt Ranlett
10 people turned up for Jim Wooley's presentation of the DotNetNuke survey module. Since Jim and I wanted to post an online survey and Jim wanted to extend the module to allow open ended questions and comments as part of the survey, we looked at his work in the group. Check out Jim's blog to see his writeup of his work.
After Jim's presentation, John Crawford showed us how to create an addin for Visual Studio by demonstrating one of the 101 VB.Net Sample projects posted by Microsoft. John managed to get everything working, but he had trouble getting the debugger to work for debugging, since the client app was Visual Studio itself. Jim showed everyone a trick for attaching a Visual Studio debugger to a running instance of Visual Studio.
-- Matt Ranlett
Microsoft has released some end to end SharePoint Portal Server labs in the form of their SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Discovery Kit. Download these hands on labs to "go beyond learning about a particular component of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to understanding how to build a divisional portal site solution, how to deploy Web applications that integrate tightly with the portal site environment, how to use SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services to track and analyze portal site usage, and lastly, how to customize the portal site user interface".
-- Matt Ranlett
I ran across this question in the newsgroups, "How do I impersonate one of my users so I can see what they see on their MySite?"
Well, if you are faced with a similar problem, you can use the RunAs command - runas /user:Linda1 "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe http://localhost/myportal/" This works in WSS to see all the personalizations the user has done on their non-shared view of the page.
Another option is to go to the User Profiles Administration (SharePoint Portal Server only), find the user that you are working with, and click the drop down next to their name. In this drop down is 'Manage Personal Site'. This will show you their MySite.
-- Matt Ranlett
[edit] - I've added a link to the RunAs command documentation in the Windows XP documentation. This command also works on Windows Server 2003
When you install SharePoint on a web box, it takes over all of the virtual directories in IIS. This isn't a problem unless you want to run a traditional ASP.Net application on the same server. When you try to go to an ASP.Net application on this box OUTSIDE of SharePoint, you get an error like this:
Server Error in '/asptest' Application.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Configuration Error
Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration
file required to service this request. Please review the specific error
details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.
Parser Error Message: The XML file c:\inetpub\wwwroot\web.config could not be loaded. Access to the path "c:\inetpub\wwwroot\web.config" is denied.
Source File: c:\inetpub\wwwroot\web.config Line: 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.2300;
ASP.NET Version:1.1.4322.2300
To get around this, you have to tell SharePoint that this path is excluded. What you do is go through the Central Administration...Configure Virtual Server Settings...My Web Site...Define Managed Paths and add your app's URL to the excluded paths list. Do this then try to go to your URL again and Presto! Everything works!
However, this can get annoying when you have lots of applications to exclude. How could you script this same action? Try something like this:
Enter the following in a command prompt in the bin dir
"STSADM.EXE -o addpath -url http://localhost/yourwebapp -type exclusion"
-- Matt Ranlett
Has anyone tried to use SharePoint, registered themselves, and been frustrated by the fact that the little icon next to your name in a document or contact list shows you as offline? How do you make yourself show up as online so people can send you IM messages?
The answer is...the e-mail address you have registered to Windows Messenger (not MSN Messenger) has to be the same e-mail address as the one in you SharePoint profile.
-- Matt Ranlett
Flipping through Greg Hughes' blog, I found this entry talking about SharePoint site templates. Now that Microsoft has gotten the ball rolling with their recent release of 30 SharePoint templates, Bil Simser has created a SourceForge project for more site templates. The project is new and therefore there might not be a lot there yet - give it time.
-- Matt Ranlett
Have you ever had to do something administrator-ish and wished you could have done that task from a script file (because, let's say, you need to do the same task on 2000 machines)? Welcome to the TechNet Script Repository, part of the TechNet Script Center, where you can find all kinds of scripts doing all kinds of administrator-ish things. Want to install a printer on hundreds of remote machines? Check out this sample! Joining computers to a domain? How about this sample?
WMI and Administrator scripting are really powerful tools and I've got it down on my list of things to do to learn more about them before I have to learn about MONAD.
-- Matt Ranlett
Given my recent fascination with all things SharePoint, I stumbled across this link for InfoPath training in MSDN. Previously, I've never had a need for any InfoPath documents because work simply didn't require it and basically, I didn't know a lot about it. Now, with these great hands on labs style training exercises from MSDN, I'll learn a lot more about InfoPath and be able to use the tool the way it was meant to be used.
Plus, if you didn't know, SharePoint supports it!
-- Matt Ranlett
Calling all developers with questions - come ask the experts in a completely informal setting. Don Browning, Mark Dunn, and Shawn Wildermuth (in alphabetical order) are going to be on hand to present a short whiteboard topic and answer any and all questions you might have.
Bring questions!
Bring catcalls!
Bring rotten tomatos! (on second though - leave those at home)
This Thursday (Aug 25) at the Regal Cinemas Chamblee theater. The chalk talking begins at 9:00am.
Check out what Glen Gordon has to say about all of this: http://blogs.msdn.com/glengordon/archive/2005/08/22/454824.aspx
-- Matt Ranlett
Has anyone been frustrated by the plethora of login requests SharePoint makes when you're working with Office documents out of a document library? You have to log into the site, you have to log in to make a change to a document, and log in again to save that change back (sometimes). Annoying.
Well, you can eliminate some of these login requests by adding your SharePoint site to your machine's trusted domains:
To add a site as a trusted domain, open Internet Explorer. Select Tools...Internet Options. On the Security tab, select the Trusted sites icon. Press the Sites button. Type in the domain name of your SharePoint server (ex. "https://www.mysharepointsite.com") and hit Add. Hit OK on all the remaining dialog boxes until you're back to IE. This should help.
You can also follow the advice in this article and make a change to an XML file and reduce the number of login requests even further: http://articles.icscentral.com/Kb%20Articles/271/823553.aspx
-- Matt Ranlett
I ran into this question online and felt I knew the answer, so I thought I'd post it online and share it with the world:
Hi, I'm pretty new to SPS and had a few theoretical questions for you
pro's out there. I am installing SPS into a home building company. We have
about 300 employees across a pretty wide geographical footprint. I am
installing SPS on a single system with it's own instance of SQL. It has 120GB
for storage, 2.8 GHz CPU and 2 GB RAM.
1. When installing SPS 2003, I did not select "Server Farm Mode". I
am not using a server farm but heard from someone that I should have
selected this option anyway. Is that true?
When you install SharePoint (WSS anyway) you generally want to pick the Server Farm choice because that allows you to specify the name of the SQL Server machine. If you pick the typical install, you end up getting MSDE installed as a named instance. Picking the Server Farm (and using SQL Server) allows you to use the tools SQL Server comes with - Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer and the like.
Now that you've installed Sharepoint with MSDE, you'll want to go about changing the SQL Server you're connecting to. Check out this article in the Windows SharePoint Services Administrator's Guide: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/wss/2/all/adminguide/en-us/stsf17.mspx
--Matt Ranlett
http://codecamp.jaxdug.com/
Jacksonville is putting on a code camp featuring presentations tracks like Architecture, Dev, Smart Client, and more. Check out the site and be sure to attend!
-- Matt Ranlett
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