I was scheduled to speak @ the Richmond.NET User Group's December meeting on last Thursday. Around 40+ people showed up for the meeting including Kevin Hazzard and Justin Etheredge.

Decent crowd showed up (40+) and I had fun speaking about IIS 7.0 and its integration with ASP.NET. I am making the slides available on this blog; I hope that would help.

IIS 7.0 Architecture and Integration with ASP.NET [ Presentation ]

I just came to know about this. SharePoint Saturday is organizing a daylong conference style event on Saturday, January 10^th, 2009. There will be sessions on SharePoint and its related technologies.

The best part? It's FREE!

The following is what they have to say about it.

Join SharePoint architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for 'SharePoint Saturday', on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at the ATC in Virgina Beach, VA. SharePoint Saturday will be an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics. SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint!

I am going there! Are you?

If you live in or around Richmond and have been laid off, then it's your opportunity to mingle with peer developers, recruiters and company representatives. Greater Richmond Technology Council is organizing an event with the help of the local companies.

More information about the event can be found here.

Check out SQL Server 2008 White Papers. The following white papers are for developers.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft Data Platform Development

What's New for XML in SQL Server 2008

Managing Unstructured Data with SQL Server 2008

SQL Server 2008: Delivering Location Intelligence with Spatial Data

Recently Microsoft released couple of guides which basically target IT Professionals who are responsible for installing and managing infrastructure (web servers, Active Directory, Terminal Services, etc). Some of the technologies such as Active Directory, IIS 7.0, Terminal Services, etc are covered in those guides. Check them out @ the following URL Infrastructure Planning and Design.

If you are a Software Architect then I am sure there are times when you are asked for some recommendations, ideas, and suggestions about the hardware and overall system architecture which will run the applications that you architect. Since most of us are developing web applications these days, hence IIS is the backend technology that we should learn, explore and play with whenever we get a chance. One of the guides available @ the above URL is on IIS 7.0 and I think every Architect should read it in order to get some idea about the factors involved while taking decisions about the architecture for IIS 7.0 environment.

Updated technical libraries (in .chm format) for Office Servers (MOSS 2007, Performance Point Server 2007, Project Server 2007) are available from the following links. Please note that these are not the SDKs, rather these are the technical libraries which are located on the Technet Web Site.

MOSS 2007 Technical Library

Performance Point Server 2007 Technical Library

Project Server 2007 Technical Library

If you are like me then you prefer to download videos, pod casts, web casts, etc from such conferences, burn those on DVDs and refer to them time-to-time without referring back to the web site that initially hosted those files. The benefit, you ask? You got all the stuff and you are not dependent on anyone or anything in order to learn from those artifacts in your own time.

I normally use GetRight for my downloading needs and right now I am downloading PDC 2008 sessions using the same tool. So what would you do if you want to download all of the files from PDC 2008? One way is to go to each and every session on the PDC Sessions Web Site, right click on the download link and click Save As. There has to be a better solution.

I am making the GetRight PDC 2008 Sessions List available for you all to download all of the sessions. So no more right clicking on each session's download, no more renaming files from ABC123 to the actual session name, etc. I have also made sure that the file name also specifies if the file is high quality WMV (WMV HQ), or normal quality WMV (WMV), or if the file is for Zune (Zune). Everything is done for you.

Just install GetRight, import the GetRight PDC 2008 Sessions List and you are done!

Do let me know if I am missing any sessions; I will update the file accordingly.

We have just released one more article @ www.techconception.com. Check it out @ http://www.techconception.com/articles/2.aspx

Microsoft has released the new version of the ASP.NET Deployment Guide which is targeted for ASP.NET 3.5. This guide is meant to be used by the Hosting Providers but nothing is stopping us, the developers, from reading the intricacies of the ASP.NET deployment.

Check out the ASP.NET 3.5 Deployment Guide.

Back in 2005, Microsoft had released the similar guide for ASP.NET 2.0. I could not find that link on the MSDN web site so I have uploaded that document for you all to download. Check out ASP.NET 2.0 Deployment Guide.

Let me know if someone finds the link to the ASP.NET 2.0 guide and I will point the above link to that.

Microsoft has recently released the updated version of the WSS/SharePoint Hands on Labs and PPTs and Demos for Introductory SharePoint Developer Modules.

You can also download a WSS 3.0 SP1 VPC if you don't already have the development environment.

Following are some of the free SQL Server 2008 resources available from Microsoft. Check them out before they are gone!

eBook – Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Clinic – What's New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for Enterprise Data Platform

Clinic – What's New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for Business Intelligence

Clinic – What's New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for Database Development

Clinic – New Features of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

Or better yet book mark the SQL Server 2008 Learning Portal.

Today I installed SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition and following is my experience with the installation process.

Running the Setup.exe resulted in the new SQL Server Installation Center screen.

On the left-hand side of the screen is the list of categories; each of those has the options which are shown on the right-hand section of the screen. In order to install SQL Server, you would have to go to the Installation category which is shown below.

Clicking the New SQL Server stand-alone installation or add features to an existing installation link resulted in the following screen.

The next screen either let's you install an evaluation version if all you are doing is exploring SQL Server otherwise enter a valid product key to install the version that would not expire after 180 days.

Accept terms and conditions.

Clicking Next resulted in the following screen which displays the list of features which are needed by the setup. Clicking Install would install the setup support files.

After installing the setup support files, the setup checks for the following rules.

As you can see, two of the rules failed on my machine because my machine is a domain controller and has Windows Firewall enabled on it. The setup showed the following Warning dialog box upon clicking the Warning link next to each failed rule.

Check out the following article for more information about setting up the firewall for SQL Server to work properly http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc646023.aspx

Those warning did not stop me from installing SQL Server. Clicking the Next button took me to the Feature Selection screen which allows one to select the features that need to be installed.

I selected the features that I wanted to install and clicked on Next which took me to the following screen which allowed me to specify the SQL instance related values. I decided to install SQL Server 2008 as the named instance SQL2008.

Clicking Next checks for the disk space.

The next screen shows different SQL Server services which will be installed and allows one to change each service's Account Name and the Startup Type. I used the same account for all of the services and set the Startup Type to Manual because I did not want those services to start automatically; rather I would start those services myself whenever I need to play with SQL Server 2008.

The 2^nd tab let you change the database Collation which I left as is.

The next screen asks for the Authentication Mode and the SQL Server administrators. I chose Mixed Mode authentication and added two users as the SQL Server administrators.

I left the Data Directories tab unchanged and enabled the FILESTREAM feature.

The next screen was about setting up Reporting Services. I was presented with this screen because I chose to install the SQL Server Reporting Services. Since I have MOSS 2007 installed on the same machine, hence I chose the 2^nd option.

On the next screen I enabled both of the options. It is always good to help our friends in Redmond so that they could come up with improved applications.

The next screen checks a different set of installation rules.

The next screen shows a summary of all of the features selected and this is your last opportunity to go Back and change any options that you need to change.

Clicking Install started the installation process which took a long time to complete. All of the components were installed successfully.

Clicking Next took to the following screen! Finally the SQL Server 2008 is installed on my machine.

I ran the SQL Server Management Studio.

SQL Server Management Studio detected that I already have SQL Server 2005 running on the same machine, so it gave me an option to import the settings from SQL Server 2005. I chose No.

After that it gave me an option to add the SQL Server 2005 instance to the new version of the Management Studio and I chose Yes.

After starting the SQL Server 2008 service and login to the database, I was able to run the SQL Server Management Studio. Note that I have both the SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 instances listed in the new SQL Server Management Studio.

Now I can't wait to see what new developer features are offered by Microsoft in this version of SQL Server!

Following are some of the upcoming In Person MSDN/TechNet events in Virginia. Check them out. I am planning to attend the Richmond events.

Richmond

TechNet Events: Windows Vista, Windows Power Shell and Group Policy

MSDN Event - Visual Studio 2008, WPF and Vista Security

Reston

TechNet Events: Windows Vista, Windows Power Shell and Group Policy

MSDN Event - Visual Studio 2008, WPF and Vista Security

Roanoke

MSDN Mid-Atlantic Roadshow

Subscribe to the RSS Feed for the upcoming In Person events in Virginia.

I just got an email from Ted Pattison Group about the new article which is available on their web site. This article is about implementing branding in a Publishing Site. Could you guess the author without reading the article first? Of course, it is nobody else but the WCM Guru Andrew Connell.

Check it out @ Implementing a brand in a SharePoint Publishing Site

I have been using the Oracle Developer Tools for quite some time now but I admit I have not used those tools quite extensively. I think it's about time I should take those tools seriously.

Oracle has just published a developer's guide for the .NET developers who want to use the Oracle Developers tools for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. It's called Oracle Database 2 Day + .NET Developer's Guide. Download the PDF version here and browse the HTML version here.

I also found the following guides which I find very useful as an SQL Server developer.

Oracle Database 2 Day Developer's Guide - PDF Version - HTML Version

Oracle Database 2 Day DBA – PDF Version – HTML Version

For developers who have not worked with Oracle PL-SQL before, I would suggest to read the 2 Day Developer's Guide first to get some basic understanding about PL-SQL, its constructs, etc and then read the Oracle .NET Developer's Guide.

All of the Oracle 11g books can be found here.

For those who are still working with Oracle 10g, see the books here.

Microsoft has just released the F# CTP. The neat feature rolled up in this version is its integration with Visual Studio 2008!

Download the CTP from the following URL: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=61ad6924-93ad-48dc-8c67-60f7e7803d3c&DisplayLang=en

For those who are not familiar with F#, check out the F# Developer Center.

I came across this jewel last week. A must have for a MOSS developer. Following is the excerpt from the download page.

Learn how to build a business solution leveraging a broad range of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise capabilities. This white paper focuses on the real-world example of an application to help consulting companies track client engagements and business performance. But the insightful lessons learned and best practices will apply wherever your next SharePoint development project takes you.

Topics include Office SharePoint Designer 2007, workflows, Excel Services 2007 and the Enterprise Search API. Whether you are a SharePoint development guru or a Microsoft .NET developer evaluating the platform, this white paper has something for you.

Check it out @ Developing Custom Applications with SharePoint Server 2007

After a long time I am able to launch my own technical articles' web site @ http://www.techconception.com

I have just published the very first article so check it out here

Don't forget to leave your comments and/or suggestion on this blog about the web site.

I just received this email from a co-worker about the upcoming live event in Richmond VA. Check out the events web site @ http://www.msdnevents.com/ or register here for the event.

In a nut-shell, some of the new technologies such as WPF, ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services will be covered. The event is on Thursday September 18. The developer sessions are from 1:00 P.M. – 5:00 P.M.

I am not sure if I ever got to post about this but you can view the newly published content and subscribe to the RSS feed for the Microsoft Office Products (WSS, MOSS, Project Server 2007, Forms Server 2007, etc) @ the following URLs.

Newly Published Content

WSS 3.0

MOSS 2007

Office Forms Server 2007

Office Groove Server 2007

Performance Point Server 2007

Office Project Server 2007

RSS Feeds

WSS 3.0

MOSS 2007

Office Project Server 2007

WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 offer many OOTB site definitions for different types of sites. More specifically, the following are OOTB categories and the site definitions available under each category. Note that some of the site definitions are only available while creating site collections.

• Collaboration
  • Team Site
  • Blank Site
  • Document Workspace
  • Wiki Site
  • Blog
  • Microsoft Office Project Workspace
• Meetings
  • Basic Meeting Workspace
  • Blank Meeting Workspace
  • Decision Meeting Workspace
  • Social Meeting Workspace
  • Multipage Meeting Workspace
• Enterprise
  • Document Center *
  • Records Center
  • Site Directory *
  • Report Center * *
  • Search Center with Tabs *
  • My Site Host
  • Search Center
• Publishing
  • Collaboration Portal *
  • Publishing Portal *
  • Publishing Site
  • Publishing Site with Workflow

* - Available while creating a site collection.

** - Available while creating a sub-site but resulted in an error. Created the same as a site-collection and it worked fine.

It's kind of difficult to remember the default look & feel of an OOTB site which requires one to create a "throw-away" site just to see the look & feel. I have done it many times! This morning I spent some time and created all of the sites on my development machine and have made the screen shots available.

Collaboration

Team Site

Blank Site

Document Workspace

Wiki Site

Blog

Microsoft Office Project Workspace

Meetings

Basic Meeting Workspace

Blank Meeting Workspace

Decision Meeting Workspace

Social Meeting Workspace

Multipage Meeting Workspace

Enterprise

Document Center

Records Center

Site Directory

Report Center

For some reason I got the following error while creating a sub-site of this type under a site-collection. Not sure what am I missing.

Creating the Report Center as a separate site collection worked like a charm!

Search Center with Tabs

My Site Host

Search Center

Publishing

Different Publishing site definitions are available depending on the context (as a site collection vs as a sub-site) in which the site is created.

While creating a site-collection, the following site definitions are available:

• Collaboration Portal
• Publishing Portal

While creating a sub-site under a site-collection, the following site definitions are available:

• Publishing Site
• Publishing Site with Workflow

Collaboration Portal

Publishing Portal

Publishing Site

Publishing Site with Workflow

WSS/MOSS deployment packages are nothing but the CAB files which are created by the MakeCAB tool. We have been using MakeCAB for creating the WSP file for our project and it works like a charm.

Today, I recreated the WSP package for the project we are working on and realized that instead of generating one of each of the output files (.inf, .rpt and .wsp file) it generated more than one .wsp files; all in all, I ended up having the following files in the output folder.

Figure 1. More than one .wsp files generated by MakCAB.

The folder named 681984000 was also created with another .wsp file in it which was around 1300 KB in size!

Before going further, let's see the output files generated by the MakeCAB. The MakeCAB generates different files but the two important files are setup.rpt and setup.inf.

The setup.rpt contains the information about the total files included in the cab files, how much data was compressed, time taken to compress the data, and so on. The following is the setup.rpt file which was created on my development machine.

Figure 2. setup.rpt generated by MakCAB.

The setup.inf file contains information about the disks and the cabinet files which were created and also contains the list of all of the files which were included in each cabinet file. See below.

Figure 3. setup.inf generated by MakCAB.

The above setup.inf specifies that there were two disks/cabinet files created. Similarly each and every file which was included in the cabinet file has the numbers like 1,1 and 2,2 prefixed to it. That specifies which disk/cabinet file contains that particular file! In this case, some of the files went into first cabinet file whereas the other files (including the manifest.xml) went into the second cabinet file.

So going back to my problem of having more than one .wsp files, in the past the same project generated one .wsp file! I was wondering why it generated more than one files this time around and even if it did, how more than one wsp files would play with WSS/MOSS.

I gave it a whirl anyways! Running the addsolution command against stsadm returned the following error. Obviously it was looking for the manifest.xml file in the root Project.wsp but it could not find manifest.xml in that file because the manifest.xml file was included in the second .wsp file which in turn was in the 68198400 folder! – This happened because MakeCAB places files on disks (and in cabinets) in the order they are specified in the directive file(s).

Figure 4. Adding the Project.wsp to MOSS failed!

I changed the Project.ddf file and listed the manifest.xml file @ the top of the list of files to make it go in the first .wsp file, re-created the WSP package again; again it generated more than one files (which was expected) but this time around the manifest.xml file was included in the root Project.wsp file! I ran the above stsadm command again to see how it works this time but it generated the same error even though the manifest.xml file was part of the root Project.wsp!

So that means WSS/MOSS don't play well with more than .wsp files!

What should we do? First we need to find out why MakeCAB was generating more than one file and then somehow make it to generate only one .wsp file with all of the project files in it.

CAB Directives

I dig around the makecab SDK and found the "Make Cab User Guide" which explained how to use the MakeCAB and most importantly how to customize its behavior. While reading through the user guide, I found the following statement in it: The MakeCAB defaults are configured for a floppy disk layout ….

That was it! It did not take me long to realize that the first of the two .wsp files generated by the MakeCAB was around 1.4 MB (See Figure 1 above), which is the maximum size supported by a floppy disk! That means while processing the .ddf file of the project, MakeCAB created the first .wsp file and when the size limit reached, it started to create the next file!

I had the answer to my first question. More than one file was generated because the output cabinet file size was more than the default size of 1.44 MB.

How to fix it? Read on.

The CAB files are driven by the "CAB Directives" which are listed @ the top of the .ddf file and which govern the behavior of MakeCAB. Since we did not use any specific CAB directive in our .ddf file except the CabinetNameTemplate and DiskDirectory1 that means the MakeCAB used default values for the other settings. Which CAB directive to change?

Some of the important CAB directives are listed below along with their purpose and the default value.

It was a no brainer once I read the above directives; I had to increase the MaxCabinetSize; since the default value of MaxCabinetSize is same as that of the MaxDiskSize, then I decided to change the MaxDiskSize directive instead and added the following line in the .ddf file of the project.

.Set MaxDiskSize=CDROM

This time around the output of the MakeCAB was only one .wsp file with all of the project files inside it. See below – note the size of the .wsp file; it is more than 1.4 MB which means it contains all of the project files.

Figure 5. Only one .wsp file generated by MakeCAB after changing the .ddf file

There is couple of new Visual Studio 2008 Virtual Labs available @ Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Virtual Labs

MSDN Virtual Lab: Visual Studio 2008 - Developing an Outlook Add-In

MSDN Virtual Lab: Visual Studio 2008 - Integrating Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation

MSDN Virtual Lab: Visual Studio 2008 - Developing a WPF Application

MSDN Virtual Lab: Visual Studio 2008 - Developing a .Net Compact Framework 3.5 Application

MSDN Virtual Lab: Visual Studio 2008 - Lighting up MFC Application

MSDN Virtual Lab: Using LINQ to SQL with the .Net Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008

MSDN Virtual Lab: Visual Basic 9 and LINQ

MSDN Virtual Lab: Building AJAX/JSON Services using WCF

MSDN Virtual Lab: Syndication using Windows Communications Foundation

MSDN Virtual Lab: Silverlight Monster Factory- Using a XAML Template

Last night I spoke @ the Richmond .NET User Group meeting. The topic was Advanced ASP.NET Concepts and Tips/Tricks. A decent number of people showed up (around 40+) and I sure had fun delivering the presentation. I hope the attendees also had fun and were able to grasp some of the concepts and techniques that I shared with them.

After the presentation I received the email addresses of around 16 people who wanted me to email them the copy of the presentation and the code. I will do that tonight and I am also making the presentation and the code available for download from the following links.

Advanced ASP.NET Concepts and Tips/Tricks [ Presentation ] [ Code ]

As described in this post, I was scheduled to speak @ the Richmond Code Camp 2008.1 on last Saturday.

Oh boy, that was fun. Decent crowd showed up for the code camp; around 15-20 people attended my session on "WSS and SharePoint for Developers". Presentation went smooth, no hiccups except the quality of the projector in my room L The projector was of a poor quality and attendees of the session complained about it. Setting aside the projector related problem, ECPI has been a great host for such events; kudos to them for providing their facility and for making sure everything goes smooth.

Following is the link to the presentation download.

WSS and SharePoint For Developers [ Presentation ]

During the key note, Andy Leonard announced that he is leaving VA and going to Atlanta GA. That's for sure is a great loss for the developer community in Richmond and surrounding area. He is a fine architect, author, speaker and one of the few good people around us. I wish Andy and his family best of luck in their future endeavors. Andy and the family, God bless you.

In the end, big thanks and appreciations for Kevin Israel, Andy Leonard, Darrell Norton, Robin Edwards, Susan Lennon and the team for making this code camp one more success. Guys, you rock!

I will be speaking @ the May meeting of the Richmond .NET User Group. The topic is Advanced ASP.NET Concepts and Tips/Tricks.

You might be wondering why I chose this topic. Well, let me bring you in context. I have been interviewing .NET candidates for quite some time now. My personal experience from those interviews is that most of the developers lack the knowledge of some of the powerful ASP.NET concepts. So I decided to share some of my knowledge and personal experience with those technologies.

I am sure it is going to be fun. So stop by.

Information about the event is as follows.

Thursday, May 1, 2008, 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM

Social Time starts at 6:00!

Location: Markel Plaza

4600 Cox Road

Glen Allen, VA 23060

As we all know by now that the Office 2007 products use the "Office Open XML Format" as the default format for the files' content. The following resources would be handy if you ever need to create/manipulate the Office 2007 files in Visual Studio.

Open XML Format SDK

The SDK contains the documentation and the classes for creating/maintaining the Open XML files.

2007 Office System Sample: Open XML File Format Code Snippets for Visual Studio 2005

The name says it all!

2007 Office System Document: Open XML Developer Map

The poster that contains the visual schemas for the Word documents, the Excel spread sheets, and the Power Point presentations.

2007 Office System: XML Schema Reference

The reference documentation for the 2007 Office System XML schemas.

Open XML Developer

Read/learn about the Open XML Formats.

XML in Office Developer Portal

The following articles are a great resource for learning about how to manipulate the Open XML files using code.

Building Server-Side Document Generation Solutions Using the Open XML Object Model (Part 1 of 2)

Building Server-Side Document Generation Solutions Using the Open XML Object Model (Part 2 of 2)

Manipulating Word 2007 Files with the Open XML Object Model (Part 1 of 3)

Manipulating Word 2007 Files with the Open XML Object Model (Part 2 of 3)

Manipulating Word 2007 Files with the Open XML Object Model (Part 3 of 3)

Manipulating Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 Files with the Open XML Object Model (Part 1 of 2)

Manipulating Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 Files with the Open XML Object Model (Part 2 of 2)

I had done some Outlook/Exchange programming back in the days of COM and OLE automation but never got a chance to do the similar kind of coding in .NET. I came across the following resources while searching on how to program against Outlook in Visual Studio. I am sure there are many other resources available but this is what I have so far.

Articles

What's New for Developers in Outlook 2007 (Part 1 of 2)

What's New for Developers in Outlook 2007 (Part 2 of 2)

Customizing the Ribbon in Outlook 2007

Creating an Outlook Task Add-in Solution with Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office

General and Add-in Samples / Hands-on Labs

Outlook 2007 Sample: Visual Studio 2005 Templates

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Sample: Outlook Samples

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Training: Outlook Hands-on Labs

Add-Ins

Outlook 2007 Sample: Ribbon Extensibility Add-In

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Sample: Outlook Tasks Add-in Sample

Outlook 2007 Add-Ins: RulesAddin, TravelAgencyAddin, and PrepareMeAddin

Outlook 2007 Sample: What's New Add-Ins

Outlook 2007 Sample: Ribbon Extensibility Add-In

Outlook 2007 Add-In: Form Region Add-In

Snippets

Outlook Add-in Snippets for Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office

2007 Office System Sample: Visual Studio Code Snippets for the Office Fluent UI

Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Sample: Outlook Snippets

Root of all evils

Office Developer Center

Outlook Developer Portal

While exploring options for integrating BizTalk and SharePoint, I stumbled upon the following BizTalk Server 2006 related posters! For sure, a picture is worth a thousand words.

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Database Infrastructure Poster

Microsoft BizTalk Server Operations Guide

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Capabilities Poster

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Runtime Architecture Poster

I also came across the BizTalk Server 2006 Tutorials and the BizTalk Server 2006 Installation and Upgrade Guides

I was able to get my blog listed @ the official Richmond Code Camp web site J see below.

Thanks to Kevin Israel and Susan Lennon for making it happen.

I will be speaking @ the upcoming Richmond Code Camp on April 12, 2008. The topic is "SharePoint for Developers" and I am going to share couple of development options available to a .NET developer for extending SharePoint. I will also share couple of tips and tricks that I have learned while working with WSS/MOSS and would also have two cool demos. :)

You can see the tentative schedule for the sessions here

Microsoft has just released the .NET 3.5 Enhancement Training Kit which includes the presentations, hands-on-labs, and demos for one to learn .NET 3.5 technologies such as ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, ADO.NET Data Services and ADO.NET Entity Framework.

Also check out my previous post about Windows Server 2008 Developer Story for more .NET 3.5 related material.

Use the following resources for training your organization's business users and/or Information workers on SharePoint and SharePoint Designer. Note that these are not the hard-core developer training resources but these can be a good start for a developer to start learning about the general concepts of SharePoint and how to perform certain tasks in SharePoint.

The very first resource is the training that comes in two flavors; the Standalone Edition, which can be installed directly on the end user's machine and the Portal Edition which can be installed on a common MOSS site which is accessible by all of the end users.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training (Standalone Edition)

Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training (Portal Edition)

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Training (Standalone Edition)

Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Training (Portal Edition)

Apart from the above training, check out the training for more advanced business users @ SharePoint Designer 2007 Business Administrator Training and the Six-Part Series for getting the most out of the SharePoint Designer.

Road maps

Since WSS/SharePoint is huge and has so many areas for one to learn, hence it would be good to have some kind of guided learning approach (or focused training) where one particular area of SharePoint is targeted, learned and explored in detail and then move on to the next area.

Microsoft has done a good job coming up with the road maps for such training. Following are some of the road maps that I found; there could be more, but I am not sure.

Roadmap to using SharePoint Server 2007

Roadmap for creating and managing sites

Roadmap for creating and configuring libraries

Roadmap for creating and customizing Web Part Pages

Roadmap for giving users access to sites and site content

Roadmap for managing navigation

The following articles provide some of the important concepts and training that a power user should have or better yet have your end users go through the training material located @ Help for SharePoint Server 2007

Understand groups and permissions on a site

Enable anonymous access

Give users access to a site

Manage permission levels

Introduction to sites, workspaces, and pages

Manage sites and site collections

Work with site content and structure

I needed to refresh some of the TCP/IP and DNS related concepts; while searching for some information, I came across the following guide on the TechNet web site.

TCP/IP Fundamentals for Windows

Ever wondered about the new HTML specification which is still being worked on and how does it differ from the current HTML spec? I came across the following while looking into the same.

HTML 5 differences from HTML 4

HTML 5 Specification is still in draft.

Ever wondered how to manage the requirements for a software system? I did! I found the following white paper about the Visual Studio Team System while searching for some tools for managing software requirements. I think it's about time I should start looking into these features of the Team System.

Requirements Management with Visual Studio Team System White Paper

While you are @ it, also download the MSF for Agile Software Development Process Template v4.2.

I just came across this.

A must have for the developers. With the plethora of technologies coming out from Redmond, it has become really difficult to keep track and get your hands on all of those technologies. This guide describes some of the new technologies and how those technologies can be used to come up with a solution. Some of the technologies discussed in this guide include the following:

• IIS Manager and IIS Modules
• WCF
• WWF
• How different technologies can be used to create the connected applications
• Federation-Aware Applications
  • ADFS
  • AD LDS
  • AzMan
• MMC and PowerShell
• And much more

Borrowed from the Microsoft downloads page.

The Windows Server 2008 Developer Story introduces users to new features of the Windows Server 2008 operating system by providing a cohesive story about how the features fit together to make a compelling platform for developers. The Developer Story topics explain how to take advantage of a new feature or solve a problem using the new Windows technologies. The topics include conceptual information for context and technical specifications for practical application of each scenario.

Windows Server 2008 Developer Story Home Page

Windows Server 2008 Developer Story Help File

Subscribe to RSS

Windows Server 2008 Developer Story MSDN Articles

Read away!

Woow, Microsoft is giving away free software to students from selected countries! As of this writing this blog post, students from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium are eligible for this offer but Microsoft will be adding more countries to the list, so stay tuned.

Read more @ What is DreamSpark?

Download the Excel Services Step by Step Guides from the following URL: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263430.aspx

Following guides are available for your reading pleasure.

Setting up the Server - Step 1: Creating a Trusted Location with Excel Services

Setting up the Server - Step 2: Configuring Single Sign-On for Excel Services

Setting up the Server - Step 3: Creating a Trusted Data Connection Library with Excel Services

Building a Report Based on Cube Functions for Excel Web Access

Protecting Workbook Intellectual Property (IP) with View Item Rights

Using OLAP Formulas, Conditional Formatting, and Charts

Building an OLAP PivotTable Report with Excel Services

Building a Relational PivotTable Report with Excel Services

Building a Report with a Chart for Excel Web Access Based on Cube Functions

Creating a Multi-Report Summary Page of Reseller Sales Data

See this demo to learn how to enable Excel services and data connections for a SharePoint team site.

Last week end I found out the following videos and white papers about SharePoint configurations and operations. Check them out @ Advanced lectures and white papers

It is a good practice to enable SSL on your web sites for security reasons. But there are times when you might not want to secure everything under an IIS Web Site because SSL carries with it some over-head that should be avoided.

Think about an ecommerce web site, such as www.amazon.com where there could be thousands of simultaneous users @ one point in time hitting the servers. One would want to conserve the processing cycles and use those cycles for serving the content instead of encrypting/decrypting SSL packets for the pages that really don't need SSL.

Also realize that a web site serves not only the dynamic content but also the static content such as CSS, JavaScript, images, etc. Using SSL for these types of files would be overkill for most, if not all, of the applications.

So what do we do? Well, enable SSL only on the resources (or pages) that require it. Following are some of the examples of the pages on which you would want to enable SSL:

• Create / Maintain Account
• Login
• Change or Reset Password
• Any other page that submits the sensitive data

Most of the developers don't know that it is possible to enable SSL on an individual file! What does that mean? That means you can keep a mix of http:// and https:// pages under your IIS Web Site (or Virtual directory for that matter).

The following list of steps walks you through the process of enabling SSL on a page in IIS 6.0. The sample project used in the walkthrough can be found here.

The following walkthrough also assumes that you have setup SSL on IIS server. See the following articles for more information about how to setup SSL on IIS.

• http://www.isapilabs.com/support/ssl-install/install.htm
• http://www.dabcc.com/miab/miab30/Implementation-Phase-15.-2.-How-to-Enable-SSL-on-an-IIS-Web-Server-MIAB-3.aspx

There is couple of subtle-points that needs to be made, hence follow along the steps and pay special attention to the URLs and the behavior of the application.

Extract the attached zip file and create a virtual directory under IIS Web Site that has the SSL certificate installed on it.

The virtual directory on my machine looks like the following:

SSL not required on the IIS Web Site

Launch Inetmgr, right-click on the web site on which the SSL certificate has been imported, select Properties, go to the Directory Security tab and click on Edit button under the Secure communications sections.

This will take you to the following dialog-box which displays the SSL status of the web site. Notice that the Require secure channel (SSL) box is not checked.

Don't make any changes and dismiss all of the dialog-boxes. At this point in time, the IIS web site has the SSL certificate installed on it. No other changes to the configuration of the files have been made.

Browse files without configuring anything on the server

Browse both the Secure.aspx and NotSecure.aspx pages over HTTP. Both of the pages should run fine and you should see the following screens.

Now browse both of the files over HTTPS. On my machine I had setup HTTPS on port 8443, hence I had to specify that port in the URL. But if you have configured SSL on the standard port (which is 443), you don't have to specify the port in your URL.

So browsing pages over the secure connection yields the following output. (Disregard the Certificate Error message next to the URL – this is happening because the site URL specified in the certificate is different from the URL that I am using to browse the pages.)

Conclusion

As you can see, we have successfully browsed both of the pages over HTTP and HTTPS.

What does that mean?

That means:

• Importing the SSL certificate on an IIS web site allows that web site's resources to be invoked over SSL, but this does not enforce the use of SSL.
• The determination of whether or not to use SSL is made by the client (by using either the http:// or https:// prefix in the URL) and the server happily serves the content. The server does not have a say whether or not to use SSL.
• The same file could be browsed using both the http:// and https:// in the URL.
• It has not been demonstrated but checking the Require secure channel (SSL) check-box on the web-site itself would force all of the resources under that web site to be invoked over SSL which may not be a desirable behavior. You can check that box for the web-site and browse both of the pages over HTTP and HTTPS; this time around, you would not be able to browse pages over HTTP and would get an error from the server.

Require SSL for Secure.aspx page

This is not what we want! We want Secure.aspx page to use SSL all the time. We would have to forcefully require SSL for that page.

Select your virtual directory in Inetmgr, right click on the Secure.aspx page and select Properties. This will launch the Properties dialog-box for that file. On that dialog-box, click on the File Security tab and look @ the Secure communications section @ the bottom. This should look like the following:

Click on the Edit button and it will show you the following screen that you can use to enable SSL for that page.

Check the Require secure channel (SSL) box and click on OK. Don't change anything else on that dialog box. By doing that, we are forcing that SSL must be used while accessing the Secure.aspx page. Let's browse the Secure.aspx page over both the HTTP and HTTPS protocols.

Browsing the page over HTTP results in the HTTP error 403.4

As you can see, the web server has refused to serve the content because the client did not request content over HTTPS! Note that the similar request from the client to view the Secure.aspx page over HTTP had succeeded earlier because we had not forcefully required SSL for that page at that time, but after requiring SSL, the page can only be viewed securely.

Browsing the same page over HTTPS results in the following:

Conclusion

• We can force SSL for the selected resources on the server. This need not be forced at the web-site level. All we need to do is import an SSL certificate on the website and then require SSL for those selected resources.
• By the same token, we can require SSL for everything that lives under a virtual directory or folder for that matter.

So this should clarify some of the issues surrounding the concept of enabling SSL on selected resources.

Resources

Microsoft also recommends using SSL on selected pages. See the following for more information.

Improving ASP.NET Performance (read "Only Use SSL for Pages That Require It" section)

Checklist: ASP.NET Performance (Read "Security Considerations" section)

SSL Capacity Planning (read "Understanding SSL Performance" section)

Ensure that Secure Content is Served Over HTTPS Only

Information about working with Certificates in IIS 6.0

HOWTO: Use IIsWebFile to fine grain control IIS behavior

SSL Diagnostic Tool - This is a nifty tool for debugging SSL related issues.

I had a discussion with one of the developers about using SSL on web sites that use host headers. My practical experience with using SSL on such web sites had been successful in the past and my understanding is that it is possible to use SSL for such web sites but that developer thought otherwise.

I had used the following resources in the past for achieving that. I hope that clarifies the confusion about using SSL for the web sites that use host headers.

Configuring SSL Host Headers

Creating Multiple Sites Using Host Header Names (IIS 6.0)

I came across Software +Services Blueprints (aka S+S Blueprints) which is a good initiative from Microsoft. As the name implies, the blue prints consist of the guidance and sample implementations that have been developed using those guidance.

The most exciting S+S Blueprint is the one for SharePoint and can be found @ http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/; as of writing this post, the full blue print source code was not available, but you can still download code for the six artifacts shown on the home page.

Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.SoftwarePlusServicesBlueprints for general information about S+S Blueprint.

Last night I came across the following web site (http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/Default.aspx) which has a lot of Visual Studio Extensions available on it.

Like everyone else, I am a fan of "Free" software, so I went through all of the available add-ins and compiled the following list of "free but value-able" add-ins; check them out.

ASPX Edit Helper – very helpful tool if you are like me and code HTML code by hand.

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=b477bcc0-c68a-4435-9fd2-66ac32f83901

DotNetNuke WebControls Control Suite – consists of custom web controls such as Tree View, Menu, etc.

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=9908f00b-eea8-412f-88c2-b9386d82d604

Automating WPF Databinding with Visual Studio 2008

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=f141a456-4bdf-4cfa-a24f-7da99ef26152

CodeKeep – lets you store and search the code snippets.

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=69db6577-c031-4f53-8fb8-e553301353ca

ComponentOne IntelliSpell Community Edition – spell checking in Visual Studio!

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=40474c7c-f887-48cb-ba07-c098ff7b86da

Flat Solution Explorer – shows a non-hierarchical view of the solution items.

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=1f8a03d0-afa7-4588-b9dc-09adb381b224

HyperAddin – adding hyperlinks in your source code

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=49b1c42b-424b-44ce-9bb1-22b4ec91e577

PInvoke.net – creates the signatures of the Windows API.

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=9ca9d544-05d2-487b-ab49-31851483c1cc

PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 – adds some really useful commands in the Visual Studio UI.

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=df3f0c30-3d37-4e06-9ef8-3bff3508be31

Resource Refactoring Tool – extracts the literal strings from your source and moves those into resource files.

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=6ebe98b6-c344-4929-857c-6afebf51f4af

SharePoint SmartTemplates for Visual Studio 2008

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=7db7a141-2939-4cee-b62c-97732d3e2522

SlickEdit Gadgets for Visual Studio 2008

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=0253125f-285f-4490-ab2a-0f96011f20a6

SourceCode Outliner Powertoy – ever wanted to see the types and members of your code in tree format? This puppy provides just that!

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=bea9ed59-8857-4032-9666-9af1c1a33969

StickyNotes – sticky notes for your project and project items!

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=d467cd03-8393-4172-a25a-7a586577f4fb

XSLT Profiler Add-in – if you work with XSLT files, then you got to have it.

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=a6a4ab2b-89aa-45ab-bbbf-3e84ce44af82

GhostDoc – for .NET documentation

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=46a20578-f0d5-4b1e-b55d-f001a6345748

Web Service Software Factory Modeling Edition – create web services that follow the standard architecture and design patterns.

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=a2930549-4a26-4cd8-bc0d-5d12a74e5841

WCF Designer – the name says it all.

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=a21f8e20-1787-4d22-a5ef-8e8371d2e6f5

DB Connection Visualizer – pretty slick! Run SQL code while debugging

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=dc336e26-4617-4bcd-8fb4-5071c9ea030f

Visual Studio Tip of the Day Browser

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=9974a567-2d61-4eeb-9b92-bae86cc45210

VSWindowManager

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=cbf3965c-1286-4f16-8bc7-050ddf2c594a

NUnit integration in Visual Studio 2005

http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=cd382d01-524c-49fa-9cf8-a6d9ca3d3f25

I have been exploring WSS and MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2008 and have been using the following resource extensively for the installation and troubleshooting.

Check it out @ Windows Server 2008 Resource Center for SharePoint Products and Technologies

Microsoft has included the SP1 changes to the WSS and MOSS SDKs and the same can be downloaded from the following URLs:

WSS SDK

MOSS SDK

I was installing WSS 3.0 on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition and got the following error.

Figure 1.

Clearly WSS 3.0 has issues with Windows Server 2008! Clicking on "Check for solutions online" displays the following screen.

Figure 2.

Clicking "Check online for a solution" takes to the following really helpful (sarcastic) screen.

Figure 3.

At this point I thought I can't install WSS, or MOSS for that matter, on Windows Server 2008! I tried again and this time around I paid more attention to the screens shown.

By default, the bottom portion of the screen shown in Figure 2 is hidden and I missed the detailed error information shown in the bottom portion of the screen. On the second screen, I clicked on "View problem details" and saw the detailed error information, as shown below.

The error description read:

You must install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with the most recent service pack. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 without service packs has a known compatibility issue with this version of Windows.

I downloaded and installed the newly released Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with SP1 installation instead and it worked like a charm.

Note that you have to download the complete installation of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 1, instead of downloading only the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 (SP1) which is intended to be installed on existing WSS 3.0 installations.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to install Windows Server 2008 on a VM. I thought I will list down the steps that I went through to install the next version on Windows server. The installation is pretty straight forward and I did not face any issues @ all.

I booted my new VM using the Windows Server ISO file. The following screen was shown after starting the VM.

Choose the language, time/currency and input method.

Click Next to go to the following screen.

For some reason, clicking Install Now made me wait longer than usual, or maybe I am way too excited about using this puppy :)

Finally the following screen is shown which let me chose the OS that I wanted to install. As you can see there are different versions of this product; go to Windows Server 2008 - Overview of Editions to learn more about different versions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree and accept.

Clicking Next took to the following screen. Of course the Upgrade option was disabled because I was installing this OS on a clean VM.

Next screen gave me an opportunity to setup my partitions. I did not do anything here and just clicked on Next.

Clicking Next started the final process of copying/installing files.

During the installation, the machine was restarted and I missed the opportunity to capture that screen. Following screens are shown after the restart.

Completing installation …

After completing the installation, the VM was restarted again and the following screen was shown. I don't remember entering the Administrator password during the installation; that means this has changed from Windows Server 2003 where it used to ask for the Administrator password during the installation.

Clicking on OK took me to the following screen.

New and confirm password were provided and I was taken to the following screen after the password was changed successfully.

Clicking OK prepares my desktop and logs me into THE SERVER!

I really can't wait to explore this server, specially IIS 7.0 and its developer features.

Microsoft just released the beta version of a Visual Studio Add-In that would scan your code in order to detect the potential issue that can make your code vulnerable to "Cross-Site scripting" attacks.

Check out the tool here

Check out some background information and tips here to learn how to write code to avoid such attacks.

I just came back from the 4th Richmond Code Camp. It was great and I had a wonderful time!

One of the reasons I love Code Camps is that you get to know tons of latest and greatest stuff in a short period of time (couple of hours) that you would probably learn yourself in couple of days or may be weeks!

I attended couple of sessions and most of them were good. I would specially like to mention the session on Share Point by Joshua Carlisle. Josh is a wonderful guy; he is nothing but passionate about the Share Point and you can consider him a subject matter expert on that. Well done Josh, great presentation.

Andy Leonard, the local SSIS guru, and the RCC team did a commanding job arranging such an event. Thank you all and thanks to vendors for some awsome books, goodies, and food.

By the way, I got two books during sessions and the Flexible Keyboard in drawing @ the end of the day :)

For some reason the presentation link in my Presentation Experience post was broken. It has been updated now. You can download the presentation from the NOVA Code Camp web site.

While playing with LINQ to SQL, I faced a problem where generating a wrapper method for the Northwind.dbo.[Ten Most Expensive Products] stored procedure generated the method with a return type of int; It should have been ISingleResult<T> instead where T would be the type of the object which would contain a row returned from the procedure and ISingleResult<T> would of course be the enumerable object containing all of the rows returned by the procedure.

The following is the signature of the method generated by LINQ.

I had used a custom SQL Server user account northwind for generating the wrapper code; that user had the following rights on the Northwind database.

I searched on the Internet but could not find the solution to this problem, even on the MSDN LINQ forum located @ http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=123&SiteID=1

During diagnostics, I changed the connection string to use the system administrator id/password and regenerated the wrapper method just to see what happens; I was not surprised because this time around it generated the method signature as it should have been!

So that proved my suspicion that it has something to do with the security and the rights assigned to the user. Since the developers don't always have the admin rights on databases (may be some times on the development database, but that's pretty much it), hence the use of the system id/password is out of the equation.

Now the next task for me was to find out exactly what permissions are needed in order for the user account to be able to successfully generate the wrapper code.

Looking @ the database roles in SQL Server, the only other powerful role which could be assigned to the northwind user was db_owner!

Assigning that role to the user and regenerating the wrapper code for the procedure generates the correct code.

Looks like the user account for generating the database wrapper code in LINQ should be the db owner; having db_ddladmin role is not going to cut it.

I hope that helps.

Do let me know if that's not the case or you think otherwise.

It was a great speaking experience for me last Wednesday; I presented in front of the Richmond dot net community and I think it went well. T he topic was WCF and how it differs from the existing ASMX web services.

I could not make two demos work during the presentation. At that time I had no clue what went wrong! I just found out why those demos did not work :)

Actually I keep my technical stuff (files, presentations, books, etc) in a separate folder. So I created demos for the presentation and that folder existed under my technical stuff folder. IIS virtual directories were pointing to the folders underneath that and everything was working fine!

One day before the presentation, I copied the folder that had the actual presentation file to the temp folder on C drive. I did not realize but I had also copied the samples folder along with that to the temp folder. During the presentation, I opened up the Visual Studio 2005 project right from the temp folder (instead of opening it from the technical stuff folder), hence whatever code changes I made during the demo did not work because code was not getting updated in the folder that were mapped to IIS virtual directories!

I ran the ASP.NET compatibility mode demo and it worked as expected.

I got the following message when the mode was turned off:

And the following message when the mode was on (remember I was trying to return the HTTP headers?)

Anyways, I have attached the sample code with this post, so download it. Make sure to unzip the files to a folder, and create two virtual directories named Services and ASMXServices which should point to the respective projects.

I have also written some basic tips in the web.config file under the Services project.

The samples solution contains four projects:

Contracts – contains the service and data contracts (I have added a data contract also just to show how a simple data contract is defined)

Services – contains the actual WCF service implementation. It has two services; Calculator and ServerInfo.

ASMXServices – contains an ASMX web service, Config.asmx; I have used WCF attributes to expose this service as a WCF end point as well! This simple sample shows how you can expose your existing ASMX services as WCF services.

Client – contains the client code, proxies and the config file.

Any questions, comments? Let’s discuss those here.

WCF and ASMX Web Services Presentation and Samples.zip (4.02 MB)