Occasional rantings about Dynamics CRM/365, Power BI and Azure cloud. Taking the first small steps in machine learning, Python and algorithmic trading
EQATEC has recently release comes a code-profiler that can profile your WP7 Silverlight app on real phone hardware, as well as on the emulator. The profiler is free for single-assembly applications. You can download it now from www.eqatec.com.
For more info check out Channel 9 – World’s first profiler for Windows Phone 7 or the Eqatec profiler website.
When building my Windows Phone 7 app – I needed to login into LinkedIn – unfortunately the login page of LinkedIn does not seem to scale as well as the Twitter login page so I decided to only show a specific part of the page within the WebBrowser control for Windows Phone. I kind of got it working by using the Clip property (for reference see How to: Crop an object (Silverlight))
<phone:WebBrowser HorizontalAlignment="Stretch"
Name="webBrowser1" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Height="466" Width="480"
IsScriptEnabled="True" Visibility="Collapsed">
<phone:WebBrowser.Clip>
<RectangleGeometry Rect="0,0,400,300" />
</phone:WebBrowser.Clip>
</phone:WebBrowser>
The lab Using Pivot And Panorama Controls seems to be missing file that supports the reference to the Syndication namespace - System.ServiceModel.Syndication.dll . You can copy that one over from the install directory of the Silverlight 3.0 SDK (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v3.0\Libraries\Client). You can ignore the warning message when adding the dll – everything will work correctly.
Thanks to the people who showed up on the december 2th BIWUG session despite 600 km of traffic jams - the slide decks are now available only:
Also thanks to Sven and Pieter for delivering their presentation.
A while ago I tagged – 36 best business books that influenced Microsoft leaders – here are the ones I read and definitely liked together with some extra books (the ones in bold come from the original list):
So which business books influenced you?
Some interesting stuff about software boundaries and limits in SharePoint Server 2010 – take a look at the table below. You should make a distinction between hard limits (which you simply should not exceed) and soft limits – which are a sort of recommendation.
| Soft limits | ||
| 2007 | 2010 | |
| Content DB Size | 100 GB | 200 GB |
| File Size | 2 GB | 2 GB |
| DB’s per web app | 100 | 300 |
| Site collection size | 100 GB | 100 GB |
| List items per view | 2000 | 5000 |
| Application Pools | 8 per web server | 10 per web server |
| Managed Paths | 20 per web app | 20 per web app |
| Documents in a library | 30 million with nesting. Depends heavily on usage and size of the documents | |
| Indexed items in search | 50 million | 100 million |
There is also a Technet article – SharePoint Server 2010 Capacity Management: Software Boundaries and limits – which provides some additional guidance – this also puts the numbers listed above a little more in perspective.
Content database sizes up to 1 terabyte are supported only for large, single-site repositories and archives with non-collaborative I/O and usage patterns, such as Records Centers. Larger database sizes are supported for these scenarios because their I/O patterns and typical data structure formats have been designed for, and tested at, larger scales.
For a full overview of the different white papers - check out SharePoint Server 2010 performance and capacity test results and recommendations.
In general the new scale targets for 2010 go above and beyond the ones set in 2007 but design is still important although it becomes more difficult to bring a farm down by just putting millions of docs in one library – check out It looks like you’re building a large library. Would you like help? as well as Working with large lists in SharePoint 2010 – List Throttling .
Happy SharePoint-ing
Agenda
18:00-18:30 Welcome with sandwich lunch
18:30-19:30 Building a public website with SharePoint Server 2010 – a practical case – www.vib.eu
19:30-19:45 Break
19:45-20:45 Introduction to FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010
Location: RealDolmen, Industriezone Zenneveld, Vaucampslaan 42, 1654 Huizingen, Belgium
Registration is now opened on the BIWUG site www.biwug.be
SharePoint 2010 on Chopsticks Belux
SharePoint 2010 Connections event
SharePoint 2010 Advanced developer training
TechEd 2009 Videos
Top Five Ways to Make Your End Users Heroes with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007. Asif Rehmani of SharePoint-eLearning.com shows how to instill best practices for your company and users with SharePoint Designer 2007.
Go Beyond with the Business Data Catalog. Todd Baginski, enterprise solution strategist at Advaiya Inc., provides a series of demos using BDC runtime APIs and custom Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services in Silverlight applications.
Social Networking and User Profiles for Business. Matthew McDermott, MVP with Catapult Systems Inc., explains social networking profile integration in SharePoint.
Saving the World, One Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Deployment at a Time: Backup and Disaster Recovery. Todd Klindt of Solanite Consulting, and Shane Young of SharePoint 911 discuss data protection and recoverability in SharePoint Server 2007.
Automate Business Processes Using InfoPath Forms with Integrated SharePoint Designer Workflows... All without Coding! Asif Rehmani, of SharePoint-eLearning.com, provides a deep dive into Office SharePoint Designer workflows, which let ordinary business users build and validate complex data-driven forms in InfoPath.
SharePoint 2010 – Visual How to’s
About a month ago I found out that I have been renewed as SharePoint Server MVP. For people who don’t know what a MVP is– here’s Microsoft’s definition:
“This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Services technical communities during the past year.”
I became an MVP in 2005 and have been working with the Belgian SharePoint community ever since – it has been a great experience and I look forward to the next year.
Spence has an interesting series of articles about multi tenancy in SharePoint 2010 – a must read
Most SharePoint 2010 developers probably use VMWare workstation (or Virtualbox). But what if you needed to access your SharePoint 2010 environment running in a VM from your host environment? I actually needed this to write a Windows Phone 7 app for SharePoint Server 2010 and since I can’t install the Windows Phone Developer Tools on Windows Server 2008 – I decided to use the install on my Windows 7 host and access SharePoint 2010 from there.
Quite easy – just change network settings to use VMWare Network Adapter VMNet1 (Host only) - A private network shared with the host - this way you can access the host from on your guest OS.
Ever wondered how you can quickly generate an overview of the available Powershell commandlets for SharePoint 2010? Try the next command:
Get-Command –PSSnapin “Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell” | select name, definition | format-list > C:\SP2010_PowerShell_Commands.txt
The presentations from the BIWUG session in september 2010 are available on www.biwug.be in the meeting presentations document library :
I would like to thank the people from Quest for providing the excellent location as well as our two speakers – Fouad and Karine.
If you get this error on your SharePoint Server 2010 development machine – ""System.ServiceModel.EndPointNotFoundException” in OWSTimer.exe – then you probably need to manually start the ForeFront Identity Manager Service – it did the trick for me …
SharePoint Stef provided the solution (and additional explanation) in his blogpost – SP2010 “System.ServiceModel.EndpointNotfoundException”.
When running through the MSDN article – Claims Walkthrouhgh: writing claims providers for SharePoint 2010 – I noticed that it did not clearly showed how the webparts where build which showed the overview of the claims for a specific request. Reza pointed me in the correct direction by sending me the link to a post from Steve Peschka (a must read blog for people who work with SharePoint and claims) – Figuring out what claims you have in SharePoint 2010.
Some things you should know when you try to build a claims viewer webpart of your own:
The code is actually pretty simple – you can use a Visual Web Part (new in 2010) or a standard webpart – here’s a snippet
IClaimsPrincipal cp = Page.User as IClaimsPrincipal;
if (cp != null) {
IClaimsIdentity ci = (IClaimsIdentity)cp.Identity;
foreach (Claim c in ci.Claims) {
sb.Append(c.ClaimType + " " + c.Value + "<br>");
}
}
Starting from SharePoint Server 2007 it is possible to use the ASP.NET membership and role provider for authentication purposes (meaning you are not limited to pure windows authentication). SharePoint Server 2010 extends on this model by providing claim based authentication.
For authentication 2010 in SharePoint you can choose between 2 models:
Classic mode is provided mostly for legacy purposes since claims is the way forward – take a look at Plan Authentication Methods (SharePoint 2010) on Technet for more details.
If you plan to use anything other then plain windows authentication you have to go for claims based authentication (CBA). Claims based authentication in 2010 supports the following underlying authentication mechanisms:
Claims based authentication in 2010 is implemented on top of Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) – so I recommend that you take a look at this blog post to get you started with a number of resources – Windows Identity Foundation resources for SharePoint 2010 developers.
I wanted to try out Forms-based authentication claims using SQL Server as back-end store and I tried out a number of walkthroughs but this one worked like a charm – Configuring claims and form-based authentication for use with a SQL provider in SharePoint 2010 (Thanks you, Spence for pointing me in the correct direction)
Some additional remarks:
References:
When testing some SharePoint 2010 Powershell scripts I noticed that there have been some changes in the naming from beta to RTM – for a good overview check out Changes in SharePoint 2010 powershell commandlets (Forums)
Update: Apparently there is also a Technet page which describes the changes – Updates to Windows PowerShell cmdlets (SharePoint Server 2010)
The number of available seats for the BIWUG session of september 16h has been increased to 45 people (previously 30 people) so 10 people can still register – go quickly to www.biwug.be
The Microsoft Innovation Center in Belgium organizes a number of interesting events:
All sessions are in French – and registration is possible through – www.mic-belgique.be
BIWUG (www.biwug.be) is announcing another session about SharePoint on September 16th at the Quest offices in Diegem.
Agenda
More details and registration on the BIWUG site – www.biwug.be
A while ago I wrote about the new multilingual capabilities of SharePoint 2010 based on the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) – see Multilingual User Interface (MUI) in SharePoint 2010 – Part I and Multilingual User Interface (MUI) in SharePoint 2010 – Part II. But beware – apparently not all site definitions support the MUI.
If you try to enable alternate languages for a SharePoint 2010 meeting workspace you will get an error stating “this site is based on a template that does not not support alternate languages”.
Now if you want to find out which webtemplates support MUI you can run the following Powershell script:
$siteUrl = "http://hades/"
$site = get-spsite $siteurl
$site.GetWebTemplates("1033") |foreach {Write-Host $_.Title $_.Name $_.SupportsMultilingualUI;}
you will get a listing of all installed webtemplates within thesite collection specified by the url parameter. Notice the SupportsMultilingualUI property of the SPWebTemplate object – for the Meeting Workspaces and Blog site definitions this will return False.
Next is the complete listing returned on an install with SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition.
Global template GLOBAL#0 True
Team Site STS#0 True
Blank Site STS#1 True
Document Workspace STS#2 True
Basic Meeting Workspace MPS#0 False
Blank Meeting Workspace MPS#1 False
Decision Meeting Workspace MPS#2 False
Social Meeting Workspace MPS#3 False
Multipage Meeting Workspace MPS#4 False
Central Admin Site CENTRALADMIN#0 True
Wiki Site WIKI#0 True
Blog BLOG#0 False
Group Work Site SGS#0 True
Tenant Admin Site TENANTADMIN#0 True
Access Services Site ACCSRV#0 True
Assets Web Database ACCSRV#1 True
Charitable Contributions Web Database ACCSRV#3 True
Contacts Web Database ACCSRV#4 True
Issues Web Database ACCSRV#6 True
Projects Web Database ACCSRV#5 True
Document Center BDR#0 True
(obsolete) Records Center OFFILE#0 True
Records Center OFFILE#1 True
Shared Services Administration Site OSRV#0 True
PowerPoint Broadcast Site PowerPointBroadcast#0 True
PerformancePoint PPSMASite#0 True
Business Intelligence Center BICenterSite#0 True
SharePoint Portal Server Site SPS#0 True
SharePoint Portal Server Personal Space SPSPERS#0 True
Personalization Site SPSMSITE#0 True
Contents area Template SPSTOC#0 True
Topic area template SPSTOPIC#0 True
News Site SPSNEWS#0 True
Publishing Site CMSPUBLISHING#0 True
Publishing Site BLANKINTERNET#0 True
Press Releases Site BLANKINTERNET#1 True
Publishing Site with Workflow BLANKINTERNET#2 True
News Site SPSNHOME#0 True
Site Directory SPSSITES#0 True
Community area template SPSCOMMU#0 True
Report Center SPSREPORTCENTER#0 True
Collaboration Portal SPSPORTAL#0 True
Enterprise Search Center SRCHCEN#0 True
Profiles PROFILES#0 True
Publishing Portal BLANKINTERNETCONTAINER#0 True
My Site Host SPSMSITEHOST#0 True
Enterprise Wiki ENTERWIKI#0 True
Basic Search Center SRCHCENTERLITE#0 True
Basic Search Center SRCHCENTERLITE#1 True
FAST Search Center SRCHCENTERFAST#0 True
Visio Process Repository visprus#0 True
On a SharePoint 2010 development machine you typically want to see the full stack trace when an error occurs. In SharePoint 2010 you will need to modify 2 web.configs:
The settings that you need to change are still the same:
Happy SharePointing …
If you are a SharePoint developer and you are planning to start with SharePoint 2010 – definitely take a look at these links:
In Access 2007 you were able to publish data to SharePoint 2007, Access 2010 – in combination with SharePoint Server 2010 extends this functionality by allowing you to publish full Access applications to SharePoint including forms, reports, queries, etc … This can be done without involvement of developers or server administrators. Once published, your Access application can be worked with from within the SharePoint native web interface.
PS Access Services is part of SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise edition – check out SharePoint 2010 edition comparison for more details
I noticed the following error recently in one of the Access web databases driven by Access Services in SharePoint Server 2010.
“This report failed to load because session state is not turned on. Contact your SharePoint farm administrator. Troubleshoot issues with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation. Correlation ID: 6968e6db-d139-4b88-bf5a-7c39c2e4a6be Date and Time: 6/16/2010 7:37:01 AM”
The strange thing was that the State Service was in running state (within SharePoint Central Admin > Manage Service Applications). Underlying Access Services seems to use a ReportViewer Control so this article – Using Access Services with SQL Reporting Services provided the solution:
Enable the Session State for the farm by opening the SharePoint Management Shell. Enter the command [Enable-SPSessionStateService –DatabaseName “foobar”] — The DatabaseName value is the database that will be created on the computer that is running SQL Server. Perform an IIS reset.
Funny video - a fictional discussion between a business software salesperson and an IT Manager. …
Dear CEO, yes it is time to move away from Windows XP – here are some reasons why:
If you agree or disagree … just leave a comment
I finally collected all the presentations and code samples from the different sessions about SharePoint 2010 at our first SharePoint Saturday here in Belgium. Enjoy
Mental note – need to check links listed below about SharePoint 2010 – some interesting stuff in there. Probably something to do during the summer holidays…
Did you know that there’s a great way to learn to work with the SharePoint 2010 platform. Just download SharePoint Foundation 2010 - if you would follow the logic of naming from the previous versions, this would have been Windows SharePoint Services 4.0 – together with SharePoint Designer 2010. These tools do not have any additional license cost. So why not try them out…
I did some demos recently at a SharePoint event @RealDolmen last week and one of the things I demoed was PowerPivot – a technology not specifically linked to SharePoint but it can be integrated. So here goes my PowerPivot elevator pitch:
PowerPivot is a separate add-in for Excel which adds an in-memory cube which allows you import enormous quantities of data with incredible speed into Excel from different data sources. You can define relationships between these data sources and parse through this data using pivot tables, pivot charts or using the new Data Analysis Expressions (DAX).
If you want to learn more about PowerPivot definitely take a look at PowerPivot Component Architecture which is an excerpt from the Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot Planning and Deployment technical white paper.
As I already mentioned in one of the SharePoint 2010 practice sessions here at RealDolmen – Business Intelligence on the Microsoft platform is a great value proposition. With SharePoint as front end visualization plaform you can create amazing looking dashboards – here are a collection of links which came through in the RSS feeds I follow but I’m still surprised by how people still seem to ignore this great feature set.
Here’s a collection of links which will help you get started with Enterprise Search on the 2010 platform. With the addition of Fast to the Microsoft Enterprise gamma the functional spectrum which is covered has broadened enormously. Have fun …
Starting points:
Learning material:
Technical articles:
Background info: