Dan Keeling's Blog

SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 RTM

Daniel Keeling — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 05:37:02 GMT

I was at the SharePoint Saturday Speakers' dinner tonight, and Dan Attis (MVP) walked up and said "Did you hear, RTM was today... and so I ~~googled~~ binged it, http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/04/office-2010-sharepoint-2010-go-rtm.ars

Cannot wait to see what has actually been fixed, and what is still broken. I have had a couple conversations with Doug Ware about the first version not being up to par, but we will have to see if they had enough feedback to get things fixed.

I am speaking tomorrow at SPSATL, .Net Client Object Model, Twitter, and BCS Connector. Hope to get a recording of the demo (no live) uploaded a little after the presentation, and several posts coming along with the material.

Visual Studio 2010 released!

Daniel Keeling — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 01:16:08 GMT

Just got an email that it is officially released! http://mobile.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/Default.mspx make sure to register for the upcoming events in or near your city. Check it out - https://microsoft.crgevents.com/Register2010/Content/Event_Selection.aspx

SharePoint and Office 2010 release dates announced

Daniel Keeling — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:30:35 GMT

We have liftoff, well almost. We have the countdown at least! Sometime in April we will have a release candidate RC and sometime in May we will have RTM. See the MS blogs, http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2010/03/05/sharepoint-2010-office-2010-launch.aspx

Visual Studio 2010 RC Released

Daniel Keeling — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:45:39 GMT

Looks like a bunch of new downloads showed up on MSDN, SP2007 with SP2 baked in, Office 2007 with SP2 baked in, .Net 4 RC, and a couple more.

I ran off to download the updates, and noticed one thing…

“Please note: The Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 RC release does not support Silverlight 4 development. If you are developing a Silverlight 4 application you should continue to use Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.”

Just a note, if you are playing around or working with Silverlight 4, beware, and do not upgrade just yet.

Windows Server 2008 - NTP for a DC

Daniel Keeling — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:59:56 GMT

Apparently a DC in my office has the wrong time in bios, and since it is a PDC, it uses this time by default.

So how do we change this to use something like, oh NTP?

NTP is Network Time Protocol, a standard with a real following :)

http://www.pool.ntp.org/en/ is a good place to start looking for the time servers you might like to use, as well as some simple information on how to set times for both Linux and Windows servers. One drawback is that there is a change for Windows servers since 2003. Net Time /... is no longer used, instead there is a windows service managed by w32tm.

MS Link here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc784553(WS.10).aspx

And the good stuff...

For US users, you can use the following commands to make the changes:

w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:0.us.pool.ntp.org,1.us.pool.ntp.org,2.us.pool.ntp.org,3.us.pool.ntp.org /syncfromflags:MANUAL
w32tm /config /update

A few seconds later, my time is correct, and then the time on all the machines in my domain are also correct.

Hope this helps save you some time.

SharePoint 2010 - Page in approval process...

Daniel Keeling — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:55:30 GMT

Want to edit a page in the Beta2? Well if there is a workflow running.... I guess there is a tag that is supposed to be closed

This page is currently locked for editing because a workflow is running which will stop if the page is changed. Do you want to continue ?

Loading...', true);if (document.forms['aspnetForm']['MSOLayout_InDesignMode'] != null) document.forms['aspnetForm']['MSOLayout_InDesignMode'].value = 1;if (document.forms['aspnetForm']['MSOAuthoringConsole_FormContext'] != null) document.forms['aspnetForm']['MSOAuthoringConsole_FormContext'].value = 1;if (document.forms['aspnetForm']['MSOSPWebPartManager_DisplayModeName'] != null) document.forms['aspnetForm']['MSOSPWebPartManager_DisplayModeName'].value = 'Design';__doPostBack('ctl05','edit')" _fcksavedurl=" type=button _layouts images loadingcirclests16.gif?>Loading...', true);if (document.forms['aspnetForm']['MSOLayout_InDesignMode'] != null) document.forms['aspnetForm']['MSOLayout_InDesignMode'].value = 1;if (document.forms['aspnetForm']['MSOAuthoringConsole_FormContext'] != null) document.forms['aspnetForm']['MSOAuthoringConsole_FormContext'].value = 1;if (document.forms['aspnetForm']['MSOSPWebPartManager_DisplayModeName'] != null) document.forms['aspnetForm']['MSOSPWebPartManager_DisplayModeName'].value = 'Design';__doPostBack('ctl05','edit')" value="OK" />

Resizing VHD files

Daniel Keeling — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:03:35 GMT

I run windows server 2008 R2 to enable Hyper-V and I run it off a VHD. As well I run Windows 7 x64 from another VHD. So I can boot into either environment depending on what I need. Also I can simply backup my machine in whole by just copying the VHD's to a backup drive. I backup my code with SVN, and host my own SVN server on a colo machine I have. That is backed up as well. So I am covered in case of problems. Well expect when I run out of hard drive space!

I actually ran out of hard drive space on host system when booting into Windows 7.

I have installed applications that I use everyday, and have hit my 30 GB max I set on my drive. I looked around and saw that there was a tool called VHDResizer, but I know there has to be an easier way, and well there is. As long as you have HyperV available.

Make a copy of the VHD first, just in case...

Open Hyper-V manager, select Edit disk, select the vhd you want to resize. Select expand, give it a new size. The tool will run, depending on whether it is fixed or expandable, it should not take too long.

After all that expansion is finished, open the Storage manager, and attach the VHD.

Open a command prompt, run diskpart

Then type in the following:

>list disk

locate the disk you want, say it is Disk 3...

>sel disk 3

This will select disk 3.

>list part

This displays the partitions

>sel part 1

Selects the partition

>expand

Expands the partition to the rest of the allocated space. It is important to note that the volume must be formatted NTFS for this operation to work.

Finally, simply reboot into Windows 7 (in my case) and the new storage is available.

Then, copy the new backup to a saved location and you are all set!

SharePoint 2010 Beta Released

Daniel Keeling — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:46:21 GMT

A co-worker pointed out to me today that MSDN has SP 2010 public beta ready for download.

Go get it and start playing with it.

I guess I am building a VM with it on there tonight!

CAML to select a user from a User or Group Lookup

Daniel Keeling — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:13:03 GMT

The thing with CAML to me, is that it is not well defined. There are potholes everywhere, and sketchy information online, even from MSDN.

I was trying to lookup a SPUser I have selected in another list. In the source list, I have a field with a lookup for user named Employee, the rest is like a Contancts list.

So normally, I break open U2U's CAML Query builder, build a query... but this is no good, the standard uses the display name?

Here is the query that was generated:

<Where>
      <Eq>
         <FieldRef Name='Employee' />
         <Value Type='User'>Daniel Keeling</Value>
      </Eq>
   </Where>

That looks fine right? Well for small environments sure, but what if there were two Daniel Keelings! (There is actually a music producer from England who shares my name :) )

Anyways, so there has to be another way to lookup the user, I mean I have the SPUser in code, I can get anything, email, ID, etc.

Well it just so happens that you CAN use ID.

Amend the Query to look like so:

<Where>
      <Eq>
         <FieldRef Name='Employee' LookupId='TRUE' />
         <Value Type='User'>UserId</Value>
      </Eq>
   </Where>

Then just wrap it into a SPQuery, replacing UserId with the SPUser.ID (int)... and now you are unique.

Hyper-V with Linux installed

Daniel Keeling — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:27:11 GMT

So one of my clients is using a product for social networking on Linux. Wait, why is a SharePoint developer working on a project like that to begin with? Well, the client wants to integrate the two, WSS to be specific, and their other product.

So after configuration of WSS and MOSS in a lab environment, the third party installed their product on a linux install.

Things are going very well, we have integration completed for the most part and we moved on to a provisioning tool.

Well if we want to create new site collections in SharePoint, that is no problem, what about creating sites on the other system? Yep, just have to call some web services. Only problem is that we do not have an install locally to dev / test against.

Well I have hyper-v running at my office, so why not just spin up a Suse install here and install the product?

Sure why not, Suse 11 install completes, but networking fails... turns out more than one processor assigned to a Suse VM caused networking to fail... I got an IP address, but could not ping anything. Everything return Destination Host Unreachable. To sum it up: Hyper-V Suse 11 needs to have only 1 processor and things work much nicer.