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How Your Brain Figures Out What It Doesn't Know

2010-09-18T18:15:00Z

hex0D passes along an article at NPR about a study that examined the biology behind the self-assessment of knowledge. Quoting: "We isolated a region of the prefrontal cortex, which is right at the front of the brain and is thought to be involved in high-level thought, conscious planning, monitoring of our ongoing brain activity,' Fleming says. In people who were good at assessing their own level of certainty, that region had more gray matter and more connections to other parts of the brain, according to the study Fleming and his colleagues published in the journal Science."

Samsung announces 7" iPad

2010-08-25T06:08:04Z

Behold! Samsung's Galaxy Tab. It's an iClone with a 7" display and looks lovely: shown off in the video are Android 2.2, voice calling and a camera.

‘Wi-Fi data safe’ pledge as Google hits the streets

2010-08-13T13:29:38Z

GOOGLE Street View has agreed not to capture Wi-Fi data in the Bailiwick when it visits the islands in the next couple of weeks.

Man faces jail for videotaping gun-waving cop

2010-08-02T05:33:45Z

Police officer Joseph Uhler was caught on film charging out of his unmarked car and waving his gun at a unarmed motorcyclist pulled over for speeding. When the footage was uploaded to YouTube, authorities raided Anthony Graber's home, seized his computers, arrested him, and charged him with "wiretapping" offenses that could land him in jail for 16 years. Glyn writes in:

The ACLU of Maryland is defending Anthony Graber, who potentially faces 16 years in prison if found guilty of violating state wiretap laws because he recorded video of an officer drawing a gun during a traffic stop. The ACLU attorney handling the case says, "To charge Graber with violating the law, you would have to conclude that a police officer on a public road, wearing a badge and a uniform, performing his official duty, pulling someone over, somehow has a right to privacy when it comes to the conversation he has with the motorist."

Indeed, Maryland contends that Uhler had a reasonable expectation of privacy while waving his gun around in public and yelling at a motorist with a giant video camera mounted on the top of his helmet. Remarkably, the state Attorney General has already opined that when police record in public, that is not a private conversation subject to the same laws. In other words, in any public interaction between a police officer and a member of the public in Maryland, it is private for one of them but not the other. "We have looked, and have not been able to find a single court anywhere in the country that has found an expectation of privacy for an officer in such circumstances," writes the ACLU. Sixteen Years in Prison for Videotaping the Police? [MCLU via Submitterator]

Tips for building SharePoint 2010 base VM images

2010-05-14T00:31:00Z

Now that SharePoint 2010 has RTM’d, lots of new virtual machines are emerging chrysalis-like from their proud host machines (hmm, that analogy might need some work) - whilst it’s mainly the early adopters at the moment, this will be a common process for most folks involved with SharePoint 2010 during it’s lifespan. Of course if you build many VMs, it’s worth spending time on some base images which you will use as templates for others. In this post, I’ll run through what I’ve been using as my VM “tree” which saves me time when creating new machines – if you don’t have images like this at the moment, you might be wasting time when it comes to spinning up a new environment. Even worse is being reluctant to create a new VM because it entails lots of hassle – having a barrier like this is not conducive to accurate development/testing/research because frankly, developer VMs tend to grow “baggage” which isn’t always cleaned up. My setup is developer-focused and is actually what I’m running at home on my laptop (8GB RAM) rather than at work, but you should be able to easily identify if you are working with different constraints/requirements.

The goals of creating decent base images are:

Reduce the effort across different configurations (e.g. Foundation/Server, standalone/farm etc.) by installing/configuring common elements once
Reduce the time it takes to create a new VM
Reduce human error in install process (since we do it fewer times)

Overall configuration

When creating SharePoint 2010 VMs, one of the early decisions is how to deal with platform services such as Active Directory, DNS and SQL. Briefly the choices are (focusing on AD here, but many also apply to SQL):

Have each VM host AD Directory Services, so each VM is in it’s own domain
Have a separate VM to host AD, other VMs are members of the same domain
Don’t run under AD, instead use the “create config DB using PowerShell” trick to run under local accounts. Without AD you won’t be able to do certain things (such as user profile sync, obviously) so you need to be happy with these trade-offs.

I’ve opted for:

One VM running Windows 2008 Server Core for AD DS, DNS etc. (I allocate just 256MB RAM and less than 5GB of disk space to this!)
One VM running ‘full’ SQL 2008 + SP2010 (I peg SQL to use a maximum of 1GB RAM – my feeling is that SharePoint needs it more in a developer VM)

However I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this factoring for everyone. I do it this way because I think if I have a hardware failure shortly before say, a big talk (as you can probably tell, it’s happened), I could get up and running on someone else’s borrowed laptop with a backup of the SP2010 VM pretty quickly. Sure I’d have some domain/account issues to deal with (if I didn’t have a backup of the AD VM), but it feels more self-contained and easier to restore if I had to. I might be slightly crazy on some of the logic here, and at some point I might cut over to the approach I’d generally recommend:

One VM running AD, DNS and SQL
One VM running SP2010

If you ever have other VMs running at the same time (e.g. an SP2007 VM or another SP2010 VM if you have the RAM), you will definitely see more performance with this option. You really don’t want more instances of SQL (in particular) running on the same physical hardware than you need.

My base image “tree”

In terms of a set of base images for creating new VMs from, this is what I currently have – the blue boxes represent base images, the gold ones are VMs which I actually run and use:

Hopefully the names are descriptive enough to get a quick idea of each machine’s purpose. As you can see my “instance” VMs aren’t imaginatively named, and the “-1” suffix is simply because I’ll accumulate ‘n’ instance VMs over the next few years. In the unlikely event it’s not clear, SP is SharePoint Server, whilst SPF is SharePoint Foundation!

2010-BASE

Win 2008 R2
Roles
- Application Server
- File Services
  - Web Server (IIS)
Features
- Remote admin tools e.g. AD tools
SQL 2008 SP1 CU2 (at some point I’ll upgrade this to R2) – note there is an element of risk in having SQL in a base image, and it’s important to know about this. For example I’ve not verified *everything* SharePoint needs works – I discuss the issue issue and how to deal with it further on.
WCF hotfix for R2 (KB976462)
Conveniences
- Disable shutdown event tracker (this drives me crazy on developer VMs, I can’t understand why it doesn’t for everyone!)
- BGInfo (in startup folder)
- Disable loopback check

Then sysprep’d.

2010-DEVBASE

As above with:

SharePoint 2010 pre-requisites installed
Visual Studio 2010 (RC)
SharePoint Designer 2010

Dev tools such as Reflector Pro (with the SharePoint assemblies decompiled and ready for debugging), I’ll probably add ReSharper 5.0 here soon etc.

CKS:DEV

Then sysprep’d.

SP2010-BASE

As 2010-DEVBASE but with SharePoint 2010 installed – * Config Wizard/psconfig not run.

SPF2010-BASE

As 2010-DEVBASE but with SharePoint Foundation installed – * Config Wizard/psconfig not run.

Benefit

This allows me quickly create new VMs as most of the install pain went into the base images. Even things like having Reflector Pro decompile the SharePoint assemblies (shh!) in the base image means I don’t have to repeat that step on each VM I end up using – if I’m knee-deep debugging SharePoint code I can guarantee I won’t be happy waiting 15 mins for that step to complete. It would be great if we could do more configuration than the above in base images, but I don’t think you reliably can. Also, I’d love to hear if you do things differently with your base images.

General notes

The following are some notes around the images and the process I use to clone:

The base image VMs are not joined to any domain
The images are all sysprep’d – if you’re not doing this with your base images, you will run into issues if you ever run 2 machines at the same time on the same domain
- Note that sysprep resets lots of things, including Windows activation and the Windows Update status (Windows will report that updates have never been installed, though whatever updates the base image had will actually be there).
Hopefully everyone knows this, but in SharePoint 2010 (as with 2007), it’s not possible to have base images which have SharePoint installed and configured. Or rather, it’s possible but if VMs are created from such images they cannot reliably exist on the same network/domain, let alone the same SharePoint farm. This is because SharePoint stores the machine name in the config database, and if you ever want two instances running on the same network/domain you’ll need to rename one instance, which will then not match up with it’s database entries. The latest point you can get to is with the SP installation done but the Config Wizard not run – kind of inconvenient, but…
…of course PowerShell can help with making the rest of the configuration (e.g. provisioning/configuring service applications) as repeatable and quick as possible. Gary Lapointe (a man that should know if ever there was one) suggests that a 100% PowerShell scripted configuration may be out of reach in the current release due to some config steps which can’t really be done with PowerShell, but at some point I’ll likely try and stitch together some scripts which suit most of my needs.

Process to create a new VM

To create a new VM, I follow this process – note there are some hooky SQL steps here due to it being included in a sysprep’d base image, keep reading for why and how this can now be avoided:

Do a VMware (or Hyper-V) “clone” from a sysprep’d image (this will usually be my SP2010-DEVBASE image)
Start VM and then:
- Change machine name
- Join to COB domain
- Do Windows updates, reboot
Grant the account which will be used to run the SharePoint config wizard rights in SQL. Since sysprep has changed the SIDs of the accounts, no user has permissions to SQL Server at this point. To fix, we need to start SQL in single-user mode and add logins/permissions:
- Any any accounts which need SQL permissions outside of what the SharePoint config wizard will grant when it runs. The main example here is the domain account used to install/configure SharePoint, in my case “COB\sp_setup” (which should also be a local admin):
  1. Open SQL Server Configuration Manager
  2. Stop the main SQL service.
  3. Go into the properties of this service, and on the Advanced tab find the Startup Parameters property. Add “;-m” to the end (without the quotes, ensure you have no spaces) and click ‘OK’.
  4. Restart the service (you’re now in single-user mode).
  5. Create a SQL login for your install account, and add to the following server roles:
  6. Note that if you had SQL service accounts running as built-in system accounts, there could be further work to do there. I have a domain account for this purpose and didn’t run into issues with SQL service accounts.
  7. I’ve also seen references that the server name in SQL needs to be updated, but that’s not my experience.
Run SharePoint configuration wizard/psconfig
Do other configuration e.g. service apps

Sysprep and SQL – a better way

So that’s a bit of a smell – what’s the deal? Briefly, it is not supported to run sysprep on a machine running SQL Server, something I’m not sure lots of SharePoint folks know. There is no way in hell I’d think about doing things this way with images used for a client’s environment – some research suggests things like Reporting Services and DTC transactions are examples of SQL areas which do not play well with sysprep. However, like me, you might find sysprep’d images with SQL work just fine for SharePoint developer VMs, depending on what you’re doing. The alternative is somewhat more complex, but I’ll likely cut over to it fairly soon even for my home stuff – SQL Server 2008 R2 (released a couple of weeks ago) adds support for sysprep! Basically it’s a two-step installation process, the first half of which is done in the base image (“prepare”), the second in each instance (“complete”).

Josh Meyer has a great walkthrough of the overall process for creating SharePoint 2010 VMs.

Some background reading on sysprep and SQL:

hacksugar: Wireless iTunes syncing makes it to jailbroken iPhones

2010-05-14T18:00:00Z

Filed under: iPhone, Jailbreak/pwnage

Cables, schmables. Why occupy valuable USB slots when you can make iTunes data fly magically over virtual intertubes to and from your home computer? New to the jailbreak world, Wi-Fi Sync introduces over-the-air sync to iPhone devices.

The application works like this: you install a client app on your desktop computer (10.5 and 10.6 Mac only at this time), which you can download for free from the Wi-Fi Sync website. Then, run the $9.99 Wi-Fi Sync application on your iPhone. Your phone will appear in iTunes' sources list as a connected device. You can then sync your device, just as if it were plugged in at a standard USB port.

TUAW hacksugar: Wireless iTunes syncing makes it to jailbroken iPhones originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 14 May 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Reboxing my iPad

2010-04-13T13:43:21Z

I liked a YouTube video: I'm taking it back to the store just because I don't see a use for it and don't see a need to spend $500.

Airplane repo men

2010-03-29T18:57:16Z

Nick Popovich is a repo man, but not of cars. If an individual, or a company, falls too far behind on their airplane payments, the bank may call Popovich to bring back the bird. He's the proprietor of Sage-Popovich, whose repo pilots have repossessed some 1,200 planes. From Air & Space Magazine:

In Russia and Colombia, where foreigners can be kidnapped, the company rolls with bodyguards. The extra muscle is strictly for self-defense, however. If repo resistance escalates to the physical, “you just have to walk away,” Popovich says.
Well, he says that now. During a repo in the mid-1980s, both sides got physical. A U.S. financier had hired Popovich to snatch a Boeing 720 from a tour operator in Haiti who was in default. Though the aircraft had a book value of only $600,000, an airport manager refused to release it unless a million dollars was deposited in a Swiss bank account. Having made arrangements with an entrepreneurial Port-au-Prince airport employee, Nick showed up around midnight with an air starter (720s lack an onboard auxiliary power unit to start engines). The field had been closed for hours when the team fired up the big turbofans. As he began adding power, Popovich says, “I saw the first tracer rounds streak over the top of the airplane.”
He veered to a stop and Haitian troops swarmed the airplane, bayonetting fuel cells in the wings. “I got out and shoved one of them,” Nick says with a sigh. “The rest of them beat the hell out of me and threw me into the national penitentiary in downtown Port-au-Prince. A dirt-floor cell with no roof and 35 people in it.” In addition to the million-buck drop in Switzerland, the Haitians wanted $150,000 to release Popovich. “The American embassy did nothing for me,” he grumbles. A week later, however, the regime of dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier collapsed. The prison gates were thrown open. “Everyone ran out into the street,” Nick laughs. “But that plane is still down there today. The only commercial aircraft that got away from us.”

"Grab the Airplane and Go"

Previously:

Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You're Using XCopy, You're Doing It Wrong

2010-03-24T18:36:48Z

I did three talks at Mix 10 this year, and I'm going to do blog posts for each one, sharing what I talked about and some code if it's useful.

I did a talk on Deployment called "Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You're Using XCopy, You're Doing It Wrong."

You can download the talk here, or watch it online:

VIDEO Download: MP4 Video, Windows Media Video, Windows Media Video (High)

I always try to sneak cooler titles into conferences if I can. It's better than "WEB101: Deploying Websites using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010's WebDeploy OneClick Publish Wizard Super Karate Monkey Death Car September CTP R2." Well, maybe not way better, but still.

Here's an outline of what Deployment Related topics I tried to cover

Web Packaging - Offline vs. Online
- From VS 2010
- From IIS Manager
Web.Config Transformation
- Transform Syntax
- Locator Syntax
- Why not XSLT?
Deploying
- Command Line
- What If Switch
- From IIS
- Content Sync
DB Deployment
- Scripting Source DB
- Adding custom SQL Scripts
Download and Deployment of Open Source
- Web PI
- App Gallery
One Click Publish
- Using Web Deploy (Ms Deploy) WMSVC
- Using Web Deploy (Ms Deploy) Remote Agent
- Using InProc Web Deploy (Ms Deploy)

Here's some cool highlights about WebDeployment in Visual Studio 2010. You can right-click on your web.config and click "Add Config Transforms."

When you do this, you'll get a web.debug.config and a web.release.config. You can make a web.whatever.config if you like, as long as the name lines up with a configuration profile. These files are just the changes you want made, not a complete copy of your web.config.

You might think you'd want to use XSLT to transform a web.config, but while they feels intuitively right it's actually very verbose.

Here's two transforms, one using XSLT and the same one using the XML Document Transform syntax/namespace. As with all things there's multiple ways in XSLT to do this, but you get the general idea. XSLT is a generalized tree transformation language, while this deployment one is optimized for a specific subset of common scenarios. But, the cool part is that each XDT transform is a .NET plugin, so you can make your own.

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:template match="@*|node()">
  <xsl:copy>           
    <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="/configuration/appSettings">
  <xsl:copy>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
    <xsl:element name="add">
      <xsl:attribute name="key">NewSetting</xsl:attribute>
      <xsl:attribute name="value">New Setting Value</xsl:attribute>
    </xsl:element>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Or the same thing via the deployment transform:

<configuration xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform">
   <appSettings>
      <add name="NewSetting" value="New Setting Value" xdt:Transform="Insert"/>
   </appSettings>
</configuration>

Now, to express this concretely, here's my new NerdDinner web.debug.config:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- For more information on using web.config transformation visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125889 -->
<configuration xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform">

  <system.web>
      <customErrors mode="Off" xdt:Transform="Replace">
      </customErrors>
  </system.web>
  
</configuration>

and here's the web.release.config. Note that I update connectionStrings, change appSettings (in this case, Twitter library stuff), and change the system.web section, turning on customErrors and removing the debug attribute.

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<!-- For more information on using web.config transformation visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125889 -->

<configuration xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform">

  <connectionStrings>
    <add name="ApplicationServices" xdt:Transform="SetAttributes" xdt:Locator="Match(name)" connectionString="foobar" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
    <add name="NerdDinnerEntities" xdt:Transform="SetAttributes" xdt:Locator="Match(name)" connectionString="foofoo" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" />
  </connectionStrings>

  <appSettings>
    <add key="twitterConsumerKey" value="#$@*)$(@*$)@(*)$(#@*" 
          xdt:Transform="SetAttributes" xdt:Locator="Match(key)" />
    <add key="twitterConsumerSecret" value="2340928402"
          xdt:Transform="SetAttributes" xdt:Locator="Match(key)" />
  </appSettings>
  
  <system.web>

    <customErrors mode="On" defaultRedirect="/Dinners/Trouble"
           xdt:Transform="Replace">
      <error statusCode="404" redirect="/Dinners/Confused" />
    </customErrors>

    <compilation xdt:Transform="RemoveAttributes(debug)" />
  </system.web>
</configuration>

This is just config transforms, which is a small part of the whole deployment process. I also showed the packaging process and the package deployment that can happen with one-click from within Visual Studio, or can be initiated from IIS, or at the command-line from your Continuous Integration solution.

The WebDeploy packaging and deployment solution is also what the Web Platform Installer uses. It's all the same engine. This screenshot is me importing an open source application directly from a zip file. Note it's more than just what files to use, it's also setting ACLs (Access Control Lists, or permissions) and creating an IIS application. This just scratches the surface.

Check out my talk, I hope it helps you out. There's more content in that 60 min talk than I could easily put in a single blog post.

Related Links

Web Deploy Team Blog
Vishal Joshi's Blog - piles of great posts on Deployment in depth
ASP.NET Deployment Content Map on MSDN
Example Web Application that uses the Web Deployment APIs directly from Owais Shaikh
Code Download and the Web Deployment Tool (MSDeploy) - Remote Management options from Kristina Olson
Overview Post for Web Deployment in VS 2010
Powershell Scripts and Web Deployment from JC

Web Deployment Forums on IIS.NET

Folding plug wins design accolade

2010-03-17T12:11:58Z

An innovative folding plug for UK sockets is named as the overall winner at this year's Brit Insurance Design Awards

Pulling the tablecloth out from under the place-settings with a performance motorcycle

2010-03-11T06:09:50Z

This is a very clever way to promote your performance motorcycle: BMW chains a very, very long tablecloth with a very, very elaborate cluster of place-settings to a S 1000 RR "superbike" and has a driver roar off, taking the cloth away and leaving the dinner setup intact. Impressive acceleration!

Video: BMW S 1000 RR pulls off the old tablecloth trick (Thanks, Alan!)

Previously:

HOWTO beat the London cops on a BS terrorism stop

2010-03-06T17:21:10Z

Glyn sez, "The Love Police do an amazing job demonstrating how to get out of being searched under section 44 of the Terrorism Act. Stopped by police outside the Tower of London, they avoid being searched, having to give their personal details and having their camera film looked at simply by stating the law, remaining calm and polite. (Although keeping the video camera rolling probably helped too.) The police sent an Inspector (rather senior), two Sergeants, five officers and four police cars. But in the end they walk away."

The Love Police: How to Escape a TERROR STOP (Thanks, Glyn!)

Previously:

Copernicium Confirmed As Element 112

2010-02-24T21:41:00Z

Several sources are reporting that the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has confirmed Copernicium as element 112 on the periodic table of elements with the symbol Cn. "The naming of the new element will be the culmination of a long, fraught journey involving fierce competition, dashed hopes, clever detective work and even a brush with scientific misconduct. With a nucleus containing 112 protons — 20 more than uranium, the heaviest of the naturally occurring elements — it will be the weightiest atom whose existence has been confirmed so far."

Infographic: buying DVDs vs pirating them

2010-02-19T06:24:04Z

This pithy and funny chart does a superb job of explaining how the insertion of a lot of "business model" (FBI warnings, unskippable trailers, THX vanity sequences) makes buying a DVD a lot worse than pirating the same disc online. I rip all my kid's DVDs (not least because she has a tendency to scratch them to hell), and the difference between firing up a movie on a laptop and it just starting versus trying to explain to a toddler why Daddy has to spend five minutes pressing next-next-next menu-menu-menu is enormous. I think it all comes down to the stuff in the DVD-CCA spec that allows DVD creators to flag sequences as unskippable: that's such an attractive nuisance, it's bound to attract every hard-sell marketer and power-tripping fool in any media company, who will eventually colonize it with so much crapola that it comes just short of destroying the possibility that anyone will voluntarily pay for the product. (Be sure to click below for the whole thing)

If you are a pirate, this is what you get (via Making Light)

Previously:

CodeSOD: Else... where?

2010-02-01T14:00:00Z

"I had a professor once who said that given enough NAND gates, he could rule the world," writes Rob B. "This was a roundabout way of saying that, using a whole bunch of NAND gates, you could create the function of any other logic gate. You shouldn't, because the other logic gates exist and it would be hugely wasteful to use NAND gates to do the same thing, but it can be done. It turns out this applies to code as well."

"We got some utterly garbage C++ code from a subcontractor. The error-to-lines ratio was amazingly high, and there were a lot of things to hate about it (like having one global function to get bits from a binary value which didn't work, and several different localized one-off solutions which did work). My main WTF moment, however, was the following."

while(true)
{
    if(mainType == 7)
    {
        subType = 4;
        break;
    }

    if(mainType == 9)
    {
        subType = 6;
        break;
    }

    if(mainType == 11)
    {
        subType = 9;
        break;
    }

    break;
}

"Just look at that for a minute," Rob continues, "I spent a lot of time thinking about this. The while loop is only there so that the break can be used to jump over code. I've never seen an unconditional break at the end of a loop before, but there's a first time for everything."

Rob added, "all I can figure is that the developer honestly didn't know that there is such a thing as 'else if'. But he did know about 'if', 'while', and 'break', so he cobbled together an 'else if' in the most ridiculous way possible."

The Environmental Impact of PHP Compared To C++ On Facebook

2009-12-20T15:52:00Z

Kensai7 writes "Recently, Facebook provided us with some information on their server park. They use about 30,000 servers, and not surprisingly, most of them are running PHP code to generate pages full of social info for their users. As they only say that 'the bulk' is running PHP, let's assume this to be 25,000 of the 30,000. If C++ would have been used instead of PHP, then 22,500 servers could be powered down (assuming a conservative ratio of 10 for the efficiency of C++ versus PHP code), or a reduction of 49,000 tons of CO2 per year. Of course, it is a bit unfair to isolate Facebook here. Their servers are only a tiny fraction of computers deployed world-wide that are interpreting PHP code."

NOW AVAILABLE MSDN: SharePoint Administrator's and Developer's Guide to Code Access Security

2009-12-18T22:56:24Z

An article I worked on has recently been published on MSDN. The article, SharePoint Administrator's and Developer's Guide to Code Access Security, introduces CAS to SharePoint administrators & developers and then walks you through why it’s important & relevant to SharePoint. Then I dig into how to trouble shoot, the different deployment options for custom code and finally how to create deploy custom CAS policies.

While the article is written for SharePoint 2007, everything applies to SharePoint 2010 as well.

SharePoint administrators and developers should have a strong working knowledge of .NET code access security and how to work with it in the context of custom SharePoint solutions. This article explains .NET code access security and why it is important to SharePoint administrators and developers. It then goes into the details of the different configuration options, advises on best practices in managing code access security in SharePoint environments and walks through a complex scenario.

Hope it ends up being a good reference for some folks!

» MSDN: SharePoint Administrator's and Developer's Guide to Code Access Security

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,cas,code access security

New PowerShell Script Simplifies Content Migration into SharePoint 2007 and 2010

2009-12-15T20:43:28Z

Mattias Wollnik from Microsoft has created a nifty PowerShell script that makes it much easier to move content from file shares into SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 beta sites. The...

[[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Change blindness experiment

2009-12-14T20:53:56Z

Dinotopia artist James Gurney posted this video about a "change blindness" experiment. 75% of the participants didn't notice that the experimenter who bent under a counter was replaced by a different person. Says Gurney: "Here's proof that most of the time we look but don't see." I think Matisse said something to the effect that he didn't really see things unless he was painting them.

Tool-using animals: Now with 100% more invertebrates!

2009-12-14T22:51:22Z

Warning: This video contains footage of an octopus hiding under a coconut shell that it has carried around just in case it needed to hide from something. Watching this footage may contradict your previous assumptions about animal tool use, and may be too adorable for some viewers.

National Geographic: Octopuses Carry Coconut Shells as Instant Shelters

gringod's shared items in Google Reader

How Your Brain Figures Out What It Doesn't Know

Samsung announces 7" iPad

‘Wi-Fi data safe’ pledge as Google hits the streets

Man faces jail for videotaping gun-waving cop

Tips for building SharePoint 2010 base VM images

Overall configuration

My base image “tree”

Benefit

General notes

Process to create a new VM

Sysprep and SQL – a better way

hacksugar: Wireless iTunes syncing makes it to jailbroken iPhones

Reboxing my iPad

Airplane repo men

Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You're Using XCopy, You're Doing It Wrong

Folding plug wins design accolade

Pulling the tablecloth out from under the place-settings with a performance motorcycle

HOWTO beat the London cops on a BS terrorism stop

Copernicium Confirmed As Element 112

Infographic: buying DVDs vs pirating them

CodeSOD: Else... where?

The Environmental Impact of PHP Compared To C++ On Facebook

***NOW AVAILABLE*** MSDN: SharePoint Administrator's and Developer's Guide to Code Access Security

New PowerShell Script Simplifies Content Migration into SharePoint 2007 and 2010

Change blindness experiment

Tool-using animals: Now with 100% more invertebrates!

NOW AVAILABLE MSDN: SharePoint Administrator's and Developer's Guide to Code Access Security