SharePoint

PSSPUG: SharePoint Saturday Redmond 2011: SPDiag, Visio Services, and Upgrade

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On Saturday, I attended the SharePoint Saturday Redmond 2011 event held by Puget Sound SharePoint User Group at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wa. Here are some notes, announcements, and guidance I took down during the morning sessions.

Keynote

Speaker:
Bill Baer
Technical Product Manager
SharePoint Product Group
SharePoint MCM

Announcement: SharePoint Diagnostics Studio Version 2.0 (SPDiag.exe)

  • Will be released as part of upcoming SharePoint Administration Toolkit in about a month
  • Will supplement the SCOM and the Health Analyzer to provide advanced diagnostics
  • Surfaces diagnostic data from all servers across the farm, remotely
  • Reports: Base, Capacity, Performance, Availability, Usage
  • Integrated search: Can report on data by Correlation ID, Date/Time, or User
  • Snapshot/Export report to view offline
  • Two components: SPDiag.exe (Client) and ExtendedDiagnoticProviders.exp (Farm solution)
  • Will be released via the SharePoint team blog

Visio & SharePoint with a Twist of Silverlight (Developer)

Speaker:
Barb Coplen
Portal Program Manager
Server & Tools Business, Microsoft

Demo and walkthrough of how to use Visio Services, a SharePoint list, and Visio Services JavaScript API to build a dynamic view of clickable shapes and additional details in a SharePoint Web Part page.

SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Strategies & Best Practices (IT Pro)

Speaker:
Joel Oleson
SharePoint Technology Evangelist
Quest Software
http://sharepointjoel.com

  • Pre-Upgrade: Verify system requirements, run STSADM -O PREUPGRADECHECK and Test-SPContentDatabase
  • Database Attach is the best way to upgrade your content
  • In Place is the best way to upgrade your SSP to Service Applications
  • If you feel “stuck” with In Place upgrade due to hardware constraints: Take one of your WFE servers out of the farm, rebuilded it as a new SP2010 farm, use the existing SQL infrastructure, do the Database Attach upgrade to that server, then rebuild/add the other servers as part of the upgrade window
  • Unless you have a lot invested in your SSP, don’t upgrade them as it is much cleaner / less trouble to just start with clean Services Applications
  • Guidance for Service Application installation:
    • Don’t turn them all on initially, rather install them as you need them
    • Guidance is to roughly match the SharePoint SKUs
    • Baseline = Service Applications in Foundation
    • Next = those in Standard
    • Last = those in Enterprise
    • Example: Microsoft IT, for internal deployment, turned on only those that matched their 2007 environments, then installed the additional Service Applications incrementally over time
  • Upgrades that take longer than a weekend: Either AAM redirection (not preferred) or see if your business can handle Read Only
  • Items not compatible with Visual Upgrade = off
    • My Sites
    • Project Server
    • Report Web Part
  • Information on upgrading Fabulous 20 templates: http://bit.ly/dhQUjd

SharePoint 2010 Advanced Developer and IT Professional Training

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Earlier this year I was fortunate to take a week off and virtually attend the SharePoint 2010 Ignite Developer training. This was an intense deep dive into the new capabilities of SharePoint 2010 and included a number of virtual labs where we got to practice new learnings on actual servers.

After digging around my email for links to these training materials for download I was pleased to find that this training has now been made public, including many of the virtual lab exercises! See links below and enjoy.

SharePoint 2010 Advanced Developer Training
SharePoint 2010 Advanced IT Professional Training

Certification Update – October 2010

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Over the last few months I have accumulated a few more certifications in ADO.NET 3.5, as I work toward MCPD 3.5, and SharePoint 2010. Check my About page to see a list of my current certifications.

PC Building: Hyper-V Server

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Last winter I set out to build my own PC. This was something I had never dared try before but felt I was obligated to complete to truly call myself a geek.

This would not be a machine loaded with components with names like i7 and Radeon. I wanted to build a Hyper-V server; one that would host 4 or 5 virtual machines that I could experiment with, utilize for testing/training purposes, and do things that i just couldn’t do with my company laptop.

After a few months of shopping, giving NewEgg.com and Fry’s a bunch of money, and assembly in my spare time I now have something I am pretty happy with. (Given this is my first PC build)

I hope to use this box heavily over the next few months as I ramp up on SharePoint 2010 and try to complete my MCPD-EA.

Processor:
Intel Xeon X3440 Lynnfield 2.53GHz 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Server Processor
Allows me to utilize the multiple cores for the multiple virtual machines and supports Hyper-V.

Motherboard:
Intel S3420GPLC LGA 1156 Intel 3420 ATX Intel Xeon 3400 series Server Motherboard
Paired with the processor and gives me plenty of SATA ports for a bunch of hard drives setup with on-board RAID.

Power Supply:
Antec EarthWatts EA650 650W Continuous Power ATX12V Ver.2.2 / EPS12V version 2.91 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC “compatible with Core i7/Core i5” Power Supply
I think this should be plenty of power given I am using on-board video.

RAM:
Kingston 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Registered DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Server Memory Model KVR1066D3Q8R7S/4G (X2)
Pretty spendy but supported by the motherboard and 8GB is enough for the 4-5 virtual machines I want to run.

Hard Drives:
Western Digital Caviar Blue WD3200AAJS 320GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive (X2)
Western Digital Caviar Green WD5000AADS 500GB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Hard Drive (X3)
Initially, setup a RAID-1 with the Blue pair and a RAID-5 with the Green set, however, had to remove the RAID-5 array when the RAID controller consistently had problems and ended up corrupting one of the drives. I don’t know if it was the RAID controller or the drive but got rid of the RAID for now at least.

Case:
Antec Two Hundred Black ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
Got a great deal from my local Fry’s Electronics. Makes my lame-o server look like a gaming machine, which is nice.

OS:
Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V

SharePoint Guidance: Released

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Microsoft patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance has been released to MSDN!

http://www.microsoft.com/spg

Updated: SharePoint Guidance 1.0 – Nov 2008

Here are a few of the topics you will find inside:

  • Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring, and packaging
  • Design tradeoffs for decisions many developers encounter, such as whether to use SharePoint lists or a database to store information
  • Implementation examples that are demonstrated in the Training Management application and in the QuickStarts
  • How to design a SharePoint application for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration
  • How to set up different environments including the development, build, test, staging, and production environments
  • How to manage the application life cycle through development, test, deployment, and upgrading
  • Team-based intranet application development

    • You might also see my name, along with the names of a couple of others from Avanade, in the Authors and Contributors section. (Updated to refer to SharePoint Guidance 1.0 – Nov 2008)

    MCTS: WSS 3.0 – Application Development

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    Last Saturday I was able to pass the 70-541 exam to earn the MCTS: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Application Development certification. Not only will I be working on my MCPD certification this year, but also the WSS/MOSS certifications. Check my About page to see a list of my current certifications.

    Dynamic Cascading Drop Down Lists

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    Recently, I have been doing a lot of ASP.NET development inside of SharePoint. Once area that I have found to be quite tricky, although not SharePoint-specific, is dynamic ASP.NET controls. In particular, managing postbacks when you have dynamic ASP.NET controls.

    Here is a link to the source code for a Visual Studio 2008 solution, which demonstrates the use of dynamic cascading ASP.NET drop down lists that happen to query SharePoint.

    Nichols.DynCascadingControls.SharePoint.zip

    If you are not developing on a SharePoint box you can simply replace the SharePoint queries with some other data source such as a generic list.

    Please provide comments if you have any feedback.

    Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

    SharePoint Guidance: Second Release

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    The second release of SharePoint Guidance from the Microsoft Patterns & Practices SharePoint Guidance team is now published on Codeplex at http://www.codeplex.com/spg.

    Updates included in this release:

    • Refactor code to leverage MVP pattern where applicable.
    • Refactor SPList-related SharePoint code with the Repository Pattern.
    • Unit tests for manager and presenter classes using TypeMock.
    • And much more…
    Disclaimer: This will evolve (and change) significantly. At this stage the RI provides a basic set of WSS features with accompanying guidance. This is not a CTP or a BETA.

    Stay tuned for new releases about every two weeks or so.

    SharePoint Guidance: First Release

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    The first release of SharePoint Guidance from the Microsoft Patterns & Practices SharePoint Guidance team is now published on Codeplex at http://www.codeplex.com/spg.

    Disclaimer: This will evolve (and change) significantly. At this stage the RI provides a basic set of WSS features with accompanying guidance. This is not a CTP or a BETA.

    Stay tuned for new releases about every two weeks or so.

    Deployment issues using Visual Studio 2008 SharePoint Workflow project templates (Access is denied.)

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    The addition of SharePoint sequential and state machine workflow project templates to Visual Studio 2008 did wonders for SharePoint workflow developers. Specifying SharePoint Debug Settings that allow you to do a “right-click Deploy” that GACs the DLL, installs and activates a workflow on a SharePoint instance, and associates it with a SharePoint list on that instance eliminates a lot of manual steps.
     
    There is one issue, however, that arises when the workflow project is under source control. This issue yields the following errors in Visual Studio:
     
    “Access is denied.”
    with
    “Cannot copy workflow.xml to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\[Project Name]\workflow.xml.”
    or

    “Cannot copy feature.xml to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\[Project Name]\feature.xml.”

     
    Unfortunately for the first few months I just dealt with this issue using this workaround:
     
    1. Open the path to the workflow feature folder.
    2. Delete feature.xml and workflow.xml.
    3. Go back to Visual Studio and click Deploy.
     
    I finally realized that when the Deploy command in Visual Studio for the workflow projects does a copy of the feature files to the 12 hive, it copies the read-only attribute as well if you do not have those files checked out in source control.
     
    If you are having this issue, simply check out feature.xml and workflow.xml from source control and your deployments with SharePoint workflow project templates should no longer have this error.