Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Early this morning we opened up the doors on our new adventure, Aptillon. Aptillon is new company founded by Todd Baginski, Dan Holme, Gary Lapointe, David Mann, Maurice Prather, Matt McDermott and myself. All of were community-minded independents who realized the value of working together to create great SharePoint solutions. SharePoint as a platform is huge and while no one single person has done it all, I can say collectively this group has done a lot of it. Read more about our new adventure at http://www.aptillon.com/News.aspx.
For those of you at BPC 2010, track down Darrin, Maurice or Dave for a chance to win a "bookshelf" of SharePoint 2010 books.
Thursday, July 01, 2010
Got a question about SharePoint? Join 18 SharePoint MVPs on a live chat on July 21 where you get to ask the panel questions around SharePoint. Eighteen MVPs are scheduled to answer your questions. The MVPs select for the July 21 chat session include those with administration, development, design and end user specialties.
Visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx for more information.
Many of you know that I have been involved in an advisory role with the Patterns & Practice team for SharePoint. Yesterday the P&P team wrapped up the 2010 guidance for developing apps using SharePoint 2010. If you are a SharePoint developer then at an absolute minimum, you MUST read the documentation that is included in the downloads. The P&P team has some of the best guidance on the various topics covered. Also included in the download is code that will provide some core infrastructure to your SharePoint 2010 projects such as logging and configuration.
Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010 is located at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff770300.aspx
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Lately I have been having some issues with debugging a fairly simple Visual Studio 2010/SharePoint 2010 project. Whenever I deploy the project to the farm, Internet Explorer launches, tries to connect to the SharePoint site and more often than not the web server times out before the debugger is attached and the site is up and running. Occasionally it loads after a long wait period but will normally time out before I get a chance to do any real debugging.
Watching VS 2010 I can see that the Visual Studio has packed and deployed the solution quickly. What I notice was the symbols loading slowly. This was noticeable because VS displays the symbols loading at the bottom of the screen. Normally these will load quick enough that they are hard to read. Now I had time to write them by hand.
Retraction of the solution by VS2010 performed quickly. If I did a Ctr-F5 to Run with out Debugging the solution was deployed and the site was displayed very quickly which makes sense because the debugger was not trying to attach to the process.
After doing some Binging on symbols slow to load there seems to be a set of potential reason why Visual Studio ( and not just VS 2010) will slow down when loading symbols. Most issues relate to someone changing the location to retrieve the symbols such as Microsoft ( internet latency) and having networked drives that were not attached ( time outs waiting on the drives). There was even an article about multiple version of the .Net framework potentially causing an issue. None of these issues appeared to be the cause of the problem. I even went as far as doing a repair on VS 2010.
After more digging, I ran across a single forum thread that someone commented on the fact that the debugger was slow to attach because of a "bad" breakpoint. Basically the post suggested that a breakpoint that might have been valid at one time, was no longer valid for whatever reason and the debugger was stumbling over it slowing down the attachment process.
The solution to my issue? Simply delete all the breakpoints in the project. Right after I deleted all the breakpoints Visual Studio deployed the solution and the site launched in seconds, not minutes. It appears that deleting all the breakpoints using the "Delete All Breakpoints" menu item under the Debug menu removed all valid and "invalid" breakpoints and let me get back to work which for today is a custom Web Part using Model View Presenter.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Mike Morton and the Visual Studio team that created the SharePoint tools have released a VS 2010 SP Power Tools pack. The Power Tools pack includes a Visual Web Part that can be deployed as part of a Sandbox Solution and an extension to display build errors when a developer inadventantly uses types or members in a sandbox solution that are not allowed.
For those who have not yet used a Visual Web Part it is a Web Part that encapsulates a user control which allows for a very nice design experience but up until now it was not allowed in a Sandbox solution. The ability to create a Visual Web Part and place it in the sandbox will make it easier to deploy Web Parts. Hats of to Mike and the VS team!
Download the VS 2010 SharePoint Power Tools at:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/8e602a8c-6714-4549-9e95-f3700344b0d9
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
The SharePoint 2010 Management Shell shot me this message earlier this week. I was logged on as a local administrator and farm administrator to boot. I was able to manage the farm using the Central Administration site PowerShell simply refused to load the cmdlets.
This warning is displayed when the logged in account does not have the correct permissions. When you get this warning as show above the simple solution is log in as someone with the appropriate permission - like the setup or farm account and run the Add-SPShellAdmin cmdlet supplying the user name as a parameter. For example to add Dbgdemo\dbishop as a Shell Admin I would run:
Add-SPShellAdmin -UserName dbgdemo\dbishop
To determine which accounts are Shell Admin accounts use Get-SPShellAdmin as shown below.
The Add-SPShellAdmin cmdlet will add the account to the correct database and windows groups. This can all be done manually but it is genreally easier to run the Add-SPShellAdmin cmdlet under an account that can run the managment shell. Once the account has been added as Shell Admin you can switch back the user and PowerShell should load the cmdlets.
What can be confusing is the fact that administrators can manage the farm using the Central Administration pages but not using the managment shell. Why is that? When administrators manage the farm using Central Administration pages they are accessing the farm using the Central Administration's app pool account - which has all the necessary privillages on the local macine and the databases. When working with SharePoint using the managmemnt shell there is no app pool to get between the administrator's account and the farm. The account requires the permissions.
To get more deeper into the hows and why's check out Zac's blog post on the topic:
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/zach/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=56
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Live Chats to Learn more about SharePoint - with 28 MVP Experts Do you have questions about SharePoint? Want to learn more about the recently launched SharePoint 2010? By popular request, 28 SharePoint MVPs from around the world are participating in two live chat events about SharePoint: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx . These events are a great opportunity to tap into the vast knowledge of these industry professionals who are regarded as the best in their field. Two opportunities are available to join the conversation. Times were chose to accommodate most of the world.
On Tuesday May 25th, tune in between 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Pacific time to chat with the following MVPs:
Agnes Molnar
Bill English
Brian Farnhill
Bryan Phillips
Clayton Cobb
David Mann
Matt McDermott
Paul Stork
Rob Bogue
Rob Foster
Sahil Malik
Saifullah Shafiq Ahmed
Serge Tremblay
On Wednesday May 26, tune in between 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Pacific time to chat with the following MVPs:
Andrew Connell
Becky Bertram
Bil Simser
Chandima Kulathilake
Claudio Brotto
Gary Lapointe
Darrin Bishop
John Ross
Michael Mukalian
Muhanad Omar
Paul Galvin
Randy Drisgill
Shane Young
Todd Bleeker
Zlatan Dzinic
Learn more and add these chats to your calendar by visiting the MSDN event page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx
Monday, April 26, 2010
Get your SharePoint questions answered on April 27th at 4pm PDT by a collection of SharePoint MVPs and on April 28 9am PDT. Join me and a handful of SharePoint MVPs on April 27th including Bill English, Becky Bertram, Sahil Malik, Shane Young, Clayton Cobb, Asif Rehmani, Agnes Molnar, Matt McDermott, Rob Bogue, Sifullah Shafiq Ahmed, Serge Tremblay, Mike Oryszak as we chat about SharePoint 2010.
And if you do not get enough SharePoint chat on April feel free to return on April 28 to chat with Andrew Connell, Bil Simser, Bryan Phillips, Chris O'Brien, Dan Attis, David Mann, John Ross, Kevin Laahs, Muhanad Omar, Randy Drisgill, Spence Harbar, Michael Mukalian, Rob Foster , Woody Windishman and Paul Stork.
Get all the chat details from: http://blogs.msdn.com/mvpawardprogram/archive/2010/04/23/join-28-sharepoint-mvps-in-a-live-chat.aspx
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
Did not get to MIX 2010? Missed all the great announcements? If you are in the Springfield, IL area on April 20th stop by for the Best of Mix. Dave Bost of Microsoft will be in Springfield, Il to provide a Best of Mix session. Dave will recap items such as the Windows Phone 7, Silverlight 4, oData and IE9.
To register for this free event go to:
https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=147474
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Simple enough, I was creating a timer job that got "stuck" initializing. After a few resets and reinstalls the custom timer job just would not exit from the initializing state. After a few IISResets and redeploys there was no change. The job would initialize but not complete. A check of the ULS showed errors associated with the new timer job:
"The previous instance of the timer job 'xyz', id '{Cf27333E-482D-47CC-B098-38B86167DBCF}' for service '{3eeee14-CEB0-450B-A6B8-AAB48549E6F8}' is still running, so the current instance will be skipped. Consider increasing the interval between jobs"
Strange error since the timer job had no actual executing code, basically it was a simple shell of a timer job. Ultimately the ULS gave it up… The SharePoint Timer service was getting Login Errors for Timer jobs trying to execute. Stopping the SharePoint Timer Service, re-entering the User Id and password and a start up allowed the custom timer service to fire without issue.