Technical
Webvisions is bringing its three city US conference to Atlanta on November 17th and 18th at the GA Tech hotel and conference center. Costs under $450 to attend with several pricing options available.
Web & Mobile Design, Technology and UX Conference - WebVisions
Stay tuned to this one folks – seems like a great conference with some really interesting presenters.
If you’re using SharePoint 2010 document libraries to host wmv video files and you’re NOT using the native SharePoint Silverlight video player to display them, or if you’re placing flash .SWF files in document libraries, pay attention. SharePoint 2010 will natively block HTML, PDF, SWF and other Mime types due to the Browser Handling settings.
The easy fix:
- Central Admin\Application Management\Manage Web Applications.
- Select General Settings for the specified web application
- For Browser file handling, select permissive. The default is strict.
Be aware however, that there is a certain security risk involved here as the Browser Handling setting either blocks or allows files which execute scripts in the browser. Symptoms of blocked files are basically that files simply don’t show up in player webparts, give errors about not playlists not being loaded, and that if you navigate directly to the file you will be prompted to download the file rather than just opening it in the browser (which is what happens AFTER you download it).
Dmitry of PDF SharePoint offers a great write-up here: SharePoint 2010 and Pdf Integration (part 1)
Searching for this solution was pretty frustrating because I was specifically having the problem with SWF files and when you search Bing/TheOtherGuys for “SharePoint download swf host document library…” you end up with 9,000,000 hits for how to save SWF files from places like YouTube. It was hard to find the negative of I DON’T want SharePoint to download SWF files, I want it to host them and play them in webparts and on pages.
The above paragraph was specifically so that I could search for this solution myself later, knowing full well that I am again going to use the phrase “SharePoint download SWF…”. Go go Google Juice. And Bing juice…
Microsoft has just released a Zune (PC client) update which upgrades the Windows Mobile Device Updater component. This is in anticipation of the soon (we hope) to arrive Windows Phone 7 update code named “NoDo”
MSFT Social Forums post announcing the release of the Zune software update
MSFT KB article describing the update
NoDo described by Engadget
What the heck? I just got an error message telling me that I am unable to install the 64 bit version of Office 2010 b/c I have a 32 bit Office product installed. The odd thing is that I have a 64 bit version of Office 2010 installed already! I’m trying to install Microsoft Project 2010! This must be an order of operations issue.
Logan Gray (@intensetech) of Intense Tech Inc (www.intensetech.com) gave the first of three presentations tonight. Focusing on Windows Home Server, Logan tried really hard to convince everyone that this is the next technology purchase they need to make. Find an example ready-built HP EX487 hardware chassis for under $500 on Amazon.com. The entire point is to backup and protect your important data files, photographs, and music.
Abbey Gwayambadde (@ophedian) talked about home automation and about how much things have changed since the X10 home automation presentations we saw a few years ago. Common targets for automation include lighting, audio and video distribution, HVAC, irrigation, security, and even automobiles! Companies such as Insteon and Zigbee have begun producing reliable and high quality components. Check out the components and software from mControl at http://www.embeddedautomation.com/ for a complete picture of how cool this can be.
Jim Wooley (@LinqKinq) from http://www.thinqlinq.com/ was the third batter in the lineup, presenting about the scalability considerations of Linq. Revealing coding techniques such as proper ordering of a simple Linq query to improve performance by orders of magnitude. For example:
Dim Ordered1 = (from num in randnums
order by num
where num <10).ToList
Total time: > 6,000,000 ticks
Dim Ordered1 = (from num in randnums
where num <10
order by num).ToList
Total time: > 188,000 ticks
Additional scalability and performance considerations include multi-threaded and even multi-cluster server processing centric programming with AsParallel and DryadLinq.
I was asked to help out with a problem with the deployment of a multi-tiered application from the development environment (where everything works) to the QA environment. The basic issue is that where everything works in the development environment, the QA environment is rejecting connection requests to the WCF Data Service. The exception returned is a “401-Unauthorized: Access is denied due to invalid credentials”
Debugging steps we took:
Step 1: from the client machine, try to ping the remote server. Expected result – successful return of ping test
Step 2: validate via simple console application that the issue is reproducible as working in dev and broken in QA
Step 3: check the QA server’s logs (application, security, and IIS logs) to find the exact error codes. FYI, some development machines don’t have the IIS logging feature turned on. Follow these instructions to do so.
Step 4: Find nothing especially useful so turn to Bing and Google, where the most relevant page is this totally useless forums post: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/adodotnetdataservices/thread/4065e321-d605-4cd7-8399-c5ebf2e0021c/
Step 5: Casting about in the dark, try creating a new test function in the service itself so that the GET service attempts to do the update for us – thereby eliminating the SQL connection as the potential problem.
Step 6: Last ditch effort – validate that the Services folder allows EVERYONE full control and retest. SUCCESS! Back out the EVERYONE user and put in the AppPool user so that we’re running in more of a Least Privileges manner (slightly…who can identify the security hole here?). SUCCESS continues.
In this particular case, the issue turns out to be that the AppPool user requires Modify permissions to the .svc file on the file system. Why? No idea! We simply found that the Domain Users with Read & Execute permissions was an insufficient setting.
At tonight’s Atlanta SharePoint User Group (#atlspug), Darrin Bishop (@bishopd) introduced us to the Microsoft developer guidance for SharePoint 2010 developers developed by the Patterns and Practices group. For the uninitiated, this is a fantastic set of guidance and reference applications such as guidance around data storage and a reference logging application.
Darrin started out with an explanation of how to appropriately create executable code by understanding SharePoint’s execution models. For example, we discussed how to create a sandbox solution which executes a workflow, something which is not normally allowed in a sandbox solution.
After understanding a bit more about execution models, Darrin turned to data models and tried to impart some guidance around data storage, classification, and access. The example we investigated was how list relationships worked, including lookup columns, projected columns and the referential integrity considerations.
After a quick tour through data model approaches, Darrin covered the client side object model and the different considerations for application development. Topics covered included batching of communications and call-back methods, building locally executing web parts which use client side OM approaches to asynchronously retrieve data.
The application foundations section of the presentation covered unit testing, service locator, logging, and application settings management. Unit testing specifically introduced the Microsoft Research project Pex and Moles. While Darrin only spent a small amount of time talking about the service locator pattern and the architectural implications of dependency injection, I personally went off on a tangent researching it in a bit more detail and as a result I completely missed his coverage of application settings management.
All of the above covered the slide deck, which will eventually be available on the Atlanta SharePoint User Group site for download. We spent the second half of the meeting buried in code, demonstrating all of the aforementioned practices and application blocks.
John Ramminger (@johnram) from Abel Solutions piped up during a discussion of the downloadable Microsoft HyperV SharePoint 2010 image and mentioned that the WinImage tool can be used to convert the HyperV machine to a VMWare .vmdk. As a lover of VMWare, I can’t wait to try this out!
I was trying to install the Cisco VPN client in order to connect to some client systems when I ran into an ominous installer error message. Boatloads of bad advice on the Internet later, I believe I’ve located the solution.
Error message:
Error 27850. Unable to manage networking component. Operating system corruption may be preventing installation.
Error cause:
Windows limits the number of services which may be installed on any single network adapter. Attempting to exceed this limit gives you an intelligible and understandable error message when working through the control panel but apparently gives you the above ominous error message.
In my personal case, I’ve got all the normal Windows 7 stuff installed, the HyperV Windows stuff, VMWare Workstation, and Oracle VirtualBox installed. Apparently this is one too many virtualization tools and is the root cause of my issue.
Resolution steps:
- Open the Control Panel –> Network and Internet –> Network and Sharing Center
- Click the active connection’s network adapter (mine was the Wireless Network Connection) to open the Connection Status dialog
- Click the Properties button
- <begin test for maximum services> Click the Install button
- Select Service and click Add
- Expected error message: Filters currently installed on the system have reached the limit
- Click OK to return to the Properties window </end test for maximum services>
- Remove a service by selecting a service and clicking Uninstall (I removed the VirtualBox Bridged Networking Driver)
- Click OK to commit changes and retry the Cisco installation
Credit where credit is due:
I found the solution (reposted here to not pirate bandwidth) inside of the comments on this Cisco support forums posting:
https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2015629
I just figured this one out. The issue is that you cannot add new services, likely you are running multiple virtual machine products and/or multiple VPN solutions. I am not exactly sure why, but Windows is only allowing a certain number of services/filters. See if you are able to recreate the following for a specific network adapter. Once I removed one of the VM filters (Microsoft VM in my case, the install was able to proceed successfully).
This is one of those posts where the main target is myself. Today a coworker of mine ran into some trouble getting SC DPM to install properly. The problem turned out to be a permissions issue which is detailed on a TechNet page that seems to be a bit disconnected from the rest of the directions.
Matt Beaver wrote up an extremely easy to follow, concise set of directions for configuring DPM here - http://mattbeaver2002.spaces.live.com/default.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0&sa=73386213
The missing permissions in our environment came into play during the “Registering the WSS Writer Service” section. As you are attempting to run the configuresharepoint.exe commandline utility, keep the following guidance in mind(Technet):
Type ConfigureSharePoint -EnableSharePointProtection.
Enter your Windows SharePoint Services farm administrator credentials. This account should be a local administrator on the WFE server. If the farm administrator is not the local administrator on the WFE server, you must grant the following permissions on the WFE server:
- Grant the WSS_Admin_WPG group full control to the DPM folder (%Program Files%\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM).
- Grant the WSS_Admin_WPG group read access to the DPM Reg key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Data Protection Manager).
I hope this helps you as it helped me!
Don Browning from Turner Broadcasting came out of the fun buildings which bring you the Cartoon Network (and those other channels) to talk to the group about the new architecture features of Visual Studio 2010. Those changes include:
- 6 new designers
- case model – a visual view of user stories (including dependencies) backed to TFS (2008 or 2010) work items
- class diagram – UML class designer NOT tied to code so you can make changes without messing up code
- activity diagram – looks like a flowchart to show logic
- sequence diagram – across a given span of time, what objects get used or come into play
- component diagram – helps you define service interactions
- Layer diagram
- architect explorer – architectural view of code supporting class view and solution view
- model explorer – model elements that are reusable are listed in the model explorer, which is a repository model of elements
- code analysis visualizations – a static analysis turned graphical including graph mode, force directed mode, and matrix mode.
- Integration with TFS – supports the storage of model elements in TFS and can be tied to work items.
The talk was clearly popular as we had a huge turnout at about 65 people!
All I can say is “Holy cow, when can I have this?” Oh, and I’ll pay the $350 for that device!
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/481
Truly awesome stuff coming out of the MIT Media Lab
Thanks go out to Joris for showing me this video
I bought an iPhone game today – an awesome game called Crayon Physics Deluxe. This little app is incredibly cool. You get to draw shapes and lines with your finger and have these amazing Rube Goldberg Crayola machines spring into action. I showed this to a few co-workers and they’re off to grab the desktop version of Crayon Physics (free demo available here). This is really worth a look.
Now imagine this thing on a Microsoft Surface table!
I love it when tools work exactly right. This was so simple to do once I had the tool installed correctly I just had to blog about it.
I was faced with the requirement of migrating SOME but not all of the lists and document libraries from one SharePoint 2007 farm to another SharePoint 2007 farm and I had to preserve ALL of the security settings and user created alerts. However, there were certain things which had to be left behind. So I turned to AvePoint and a trial version of the DocAve 5.0 Administration Suite’s Content Manager. This tool was brilliantly simple to configure and use to instantly move content between the farms.
Notes:
- I was migrating content inside of the same AD domain. There is a domain and user mapper utility (seen near the top of the screen in the screenshot) but I was not required to use it
- I had to call support twice to work out an issue where my chosen service account didn’t have the right credentials on the required servers, but after the IT department straightened out my security I was able to do the rest myself. Credit goes to the AvePoint support team and Mr. Dae and Ms. Chan for their excellent off-hours help.
- The content migration service account needed to be a farm admin on both farms and a local admin on the web servers and DB servers. Once this was set correctly, I received no errors and my content is in place EXACTLY how I wanted it.
Here’s an annoying bug I encountered. Don’t know if this impacts anyone else, but my 5 second search attempt yielded no results so I thought I’d throw this out there for the world to read.
If you have an open Citrix Metaframe connection to a remote machine and you try to fire up a VMWare Workstation (I’m using version 6.5.1), the VMWare screen will show up incorrectly. In my case, the screen was offset too far to the top and left. I was basically able to see about 2/3rd of the screen from the bottom right corner up. Very odd. I rebooted the VM three times. When I shut down the Citrix connection and started up the VM, everything was fine again.
You have been warned!
[EDIT] – This problem only occurs if you have the Citrix connection up BEFORE loading the VMWare machine. Going in the opposite order allows everything to work as expected.
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