Friday, December 31, 2010

Code profiler for Windows Phone 7

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.

 

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Crop the webbrowser control in a Windows Phone 7 app

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>




Thursday, December 16, 2010

Windows Phone 7–Solving the missing dll issue in Training Kit Lab–Using Pivot and Panorama controls

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.

Thursday, December 09, 2010

Slidedecks BIWUG on SPS2010 WCM and FAST Search 2010 available

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.

Monday, November 15, 2010

SharePoint Server 2010 Capacity Management– talking about software boundaries and limits

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

 

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

BIWUG Session on SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search Server 2010 on December 1th

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

Tuesday, November 09, 2010

SharePoint 2010–Training videos overview

SharePoint 2010 on Chopsticks Belux

SharePoint 2010 Connections event

SharePoint 2010 Advanced developer training

TechEd 2009 Videos

SharePoint 2010 – Visual How to’s

Big Bang Theory and Information Management videos

MVP for another year

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.

Rational Guide to Multi tenancy in SharePoint 2010

Spence has an interesting series of articles about multi tenancy in SharePoint 2010 – a must read

Monday, November 08, 2010

Quick Tip–Accessing guest from host with VMWare Workstation

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.

Technorati Tags: ,,

Overview of SharePoint 2010 powershell cmdlets

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

Tuesday, October 05, 2010

BIWUG Presentations september 2010 online

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.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

SharePoint Server 2010 “System.ServiceModel.EndPointNotFoundException” in OWSTimer.exe

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”.

Building a claims viewer webpart for SharePoint 2010

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>");
}
}



Have fun ….


Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Form Based Authentication in SharePoint 2010 and what it has to do with Claim Based Authentication.

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 authentication
  • Claims based authentication mode

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:

  • Windows claims (when you log on with NTLM or the Kerberos protocol)
  • Forms-based authentication claims (when you use an ASP.NET membership and role provider – so use a SQL Server or Oracle database as back-end store)
  • Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML) claims -when you log on by using a security token service (STS), such as Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2.0.

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:

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

BIWUG goes Facebook...

I just started a BIWUG group on Facebook - join us if you are interested in sharing information around the Microsoft Information Worker Community in Belgium and Luxemburg

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Powershell changes from SharePoint 2010 beta to RTM

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)