SharePoint.BG: Radi Atanassov

Architecting your SharePoint application–things you shouldn’t miss out on

2011-10-24T00:57:00+00:00

So a few people recommended I post my slides or content from my European SharePoint Conference session. I cover a list of considerations that makes a good reference for people undertaking the design of custom applications on SharePoint.

Usually in projects you would have people responsible for the design of the infrastructure and then a development team would dig into the technical design of the SharePoint application. They will try to answer how different components will be used to satisfy the requirements. Solution Architects explore various options for meeting each requirement and all these options and choices intertwine into a proposed design, maybe a model or a proof of concept, and hopefully a document. Projects that miss this communication are either chaotic, or extremely agile.

When doing architecture there is usually more than one possible way to achieve the same thing – the “right” one will depend on the situation and each of the things I’m pointing out here could be equally right or wrong. This is especially true for SharePoint. That is why “awareness” and the knowledge of SharePoint are one of the key requirements for an architect to be any good.

This list is not the ultimate list – it is just my summary of what always lands on my table. It is also not the base for a definitive Technical Design document (it’s a start!). Some items below didn’t get mentioned in my talk as time was limiting what I could include.

Front-end Planning

Page Model – How you plan to store you (ASPX) pages

Application Pages (_layouts)
ASPX files served from a Document Library
ASPX files in folders
Publishing Infrastructure – page layouts
Consider Web Part Pages vs. Wiki Pages

Form Strategy – Consider how you will capture data and what controls/interfaces you will use

Understand how SharePoint forms work and consider using SharePoint’s API’s
SharePoint InputControls are great but may be difficult to use and may have limitations
Consider exchanging data between forms. Plan Session and ViewState requirements
SharePoint Scenario Framework
Consider validation requirements and the UX on the validaiton
Also consider Silverlight and InfoPath forms as alternatives for capturing data

Client-Side Scripting – plan out any requirements for client-side JavaScript

If using validation, plan out your client-side scripting and the use of any frameworks
Will you use the Dialog Framework or any other popup/dialog framework/toolkit?
Consider the use of jQuery, Modernizr, Knockout

Page Components – define what controls, web parts or other components you will use to create the actual interfaces

Web Parts vs. User Controls
SharePoint Rendering Templates and the Form UI (_controltemplates)
Consider the styling/branding of your custom interfaces – you don’t want your developers to be designers (unless they really are)
Iframe – various solutions use Iframes to display external content or components hosted elsewhere (plan out authentication)
Consume HTML asynchronously – I have seen solutions that grab HTML from an ASHX or other services
InfoPath – always think about the User Experience when you deal with InfoPath

Resource Files – evaluate how you will use resource files and what components will require localisation

Code-behind resource files
ASPX resource files (14\Resources, AppGlobalResources)
Feature Resources
Localised Web Templates

Back-end Planning

SharePoint Data Model – define the storage of data

Consider:

How are you going to store data?
How will it scale?
How are you going to access it? (SP OM, External Data (BCS), Web Service calls)
How are you going to “replicate” it? (backup, archive, move/copy, log)
How are you going to store applicaiton settings (SP list, P&P Settings)

Visual Studio Solution Structure – How will you structure code and artefacts

Number of WSPs/Number of Features
Separation of code
Separation of SharePoint items
Namespaces and naming conventions
Source Control strategy

Design Patterns/Anti-Patterns – make your code maintainable and nice if it makes sense to do so

SharePoint Service Locator (P&P)
Façade/Adapter
Consider/plan your data access layer

Security Model – don’t think about it in production

AuthN:

Kerberos/NTLM (consider the requirement for Kerberos)
Claims (consider the effort to pull it off and any side-effects)
Plan the use of service accounts and access for/to external systems

AuthZ:

Use SP groups or AD groups?
Nested groups
Do you really need item-level security?

Exception Handling and Logging – define how to display/capture errors and how you log them

Consider how you will display errors to the user (don’t do lblMessage.Text = ex.ToString(); )
Define what needs to be logged and how
SharePoint Logger (P&P) gives you a good API for Diagnostic categories and areas

Deployment

Solution Deployment Frameworks – define how your developers will deploy

MSBuild
NAnt
100% PowerShell
CKS-Dev addin for Visual Studio 2010

Other Knobs and Dials – there are many other things that affect deployment

WSP lifecycle
Feature activation
Activate on Default
Deployment configuration
WSP additional DLL's
Force on Activate
Safe Controls
Web.config modifications
Web Part deployment
List re-creation
Feature Upgrade

Site Templates – reusable functionality that admins or end users could provision

Site Definitions
Web Templates

Continuous Integration and Testing

Plan and define the CI/Build process
Always consider how you will upgrade the solution
Define the unit testing and mocking requirements (Pex & Moles, TypeMock)
Funcitonal UI Testing (Selenium, Coded UI, Telerik Test Suite)
Always sync with the test team and what they do/how they will test your solution

To close off the talk I finished off with a few tips:

Build applications in such a way that makes you feel proud of what you have built. Doctors feel good when they help people, architects feel good when their creation is built, lawyers are happy when they get paid – there is no reason why SharePoint developers and architects shouldn’t feel good about what they do if they do it well.
Motivate your team to do good work – As an architect you are most likely a role model. Do your best to motivate your team members to be champions and get good stuff out there. Reward them for good efforts.
Change your job if your boss/architect/team leader/project manager is pressuring you to do crap work with no process around it, no scope, no clarity, no design, etc. Your SharePoint career is way to short for you to be doing crap work in crap teams. Only you could make that change.
Apply development practices and architecture to SharePoint solutions – many say that there is no real development in SharePoint. It’s true that there is a lot of “other stuff” in SharePoint projects, but for the development part – make it count.

Here is my slide deck: SharePoint Solution Architecture – Radi Atanassov

During my talk I showed bits of a solution I use to POC various SharePoint components. I use it to explain and demonstrate things to students, forums and colleagues. I call it Community.SharePoint and as soon as it has a few other key components I will post it on CodePlex.

Here is the version I used at the European SharePoint Conference: Community.SharePoint-EUSPC

Hope this helps someone!

European SharePoint Conference is over!

2011-10-24T00:56:00+00:00

Now that the conference is over I can finally take a moment and rest before the week starts. #EuropeanSP was a great adventure full of learnings, laughs, new contacts, new opportunities, plenty of fun and drinks. I got to meet many SharePoint heroes whom I haven’t met before and managed to exchange some cool gossip. Conferences like these really demonstrate how much SharePoint has grown not only as a product with features, but as a product with a community, a following, a resource gap and a HUGE market.

My talk was targeted towards SharePoint solution architects and developers who get to design their custom applications. My main driver for picking this topic was questions I get in the fashion of “How do you design your solutions?” or “What do you do when people throw you a set of requirements?”. I was very happy with the turnout and I got really good feedback from some people.

I will be writing a new blog post with the content, code and slides.

My Session at the #EuropeanSP Conference

2011-10-17T18:23:00+00:00

I’m at the Estrel hotel in Berlin on the tutorial day of European SharePoint Conference. Most people will be arriving today – you can definitely feel the SharePoint vibe in the air. The Estrel Convention is absolutely HUGE, walking around this place is a calorie-burning experience!

I’m engaged in a few activites:

Wednesday 19th October 15:00 – Ask the Expert Session – IT Decision Makers
Thursday 20th October 11:15 – Ask the Expert Session – Developers
Thursday 20th October 14:00 – Advanced Solution Architecture & Development – my talk for this conference.

Please come and say hello!

I’m presenting a SharePoint Conference Webinar in 4 hours!

2011-09-08T14:13:00+00:00

I just wanted to post up info on a webinar I am delivering as part of the European SharePoint Conference program.

I will be talking about SharePoint Architecture, what it is, who are the “architects”, what their challenges are, how they make decisions and how their decisions impact the progress of a project.

Join me here:

Thursday 8th September, 11am CET

SharePoint Solution Architecture - Introduction and Fundamentals Presented by Radi Atanassov, MCM -SharePoint 2010, MVP, MCT, OneBit Consulting, Bulgaria

Register Now >>

Custom WCF Services and setting Reader Quotas in SharePoint 2010

2011-08-28T16:55:00+00:00

I’ve been working quite a bit with custom WCF services in SharePoint 2010 and have found there’s quite a bit to it. The part that worries me is that there is a ton of information out there that is not always best for enterprise scenarios, like setting the site in IIS to anonymous just to get service calls working.

Anyway… I was trying to figure out why the reader quota settings weren’t getting applied to our services. We had the following debug code:

SPWebService contentService = SPWebService.ContentService;
 
contentService.ClientRequestServiceSettings.MaxReceivedMessageSize = -1;
 
SPWcfServiceSettings wcfServiceSettings = new SPWcfServiceSettings();
wcfServiceSettings.ReaderQuotasMaxStringContentLength = Int32.MaxValue;
wcfServiceSettings.ReaderQuotasMaxArrayLength = Int32.MaxValue;
wcfServiceSettings.ReaderQuotasMaxBytesPerRead = Int32.MaxValue;
wcfServiceSettings.MaxReceivedMessageSize = Int32.MaxValue;
wcfServiceSettings.MaxBufferSize = Int32.MaxValue;
wcfServiceSettings.ReaderQuotasMaxDepth = Int32.MaxValue;
wcfServiceSettings.ReaderQuotasMaxNameTableCharCount = Int32.MaxValue;
wcfServiceSettings.ReceiveTimeout = TimeSpan.MaxValue;
 
contentService.WcfServiceSettings["MyService.svc"] = wcfServiceSettings;
 
contentService.Update(true);

This was placed in a feature scoped at the web application level, and the WSP was deploying to /ISAPI/CustomWcf/MyService.svc”. We we’re using SharePoint’s MultipleBaseAddressBasicHttpBindingServiceHostFactory factory, and if you are you don’t need to set anonymous in IIS. This factory applies your security settings as they are on the web application.

So why weren’t our WCF Service settings getting applied? If you check out this MSDN article, it doesn’t actually tell you what I figured out:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff599489.aspx

The problem is that “MyService.svc” should actually be lower case: “myservice.svc”. It sounds silly, but that is what worked for me. The /CustomWcf/ folder part should be excluded.

If anyone is doing the same, here are a few tips on how such deployment strategy could be improved:

The feature should really be at a farm level if it is modifying settings on the Content Service. There is one per farm.
Feature Deactivation code should call contentService.WcfServiceSettings.Remove("myservice.svc");
You SHOULD NOT just use Int32.MaxValue, but actually figure out your maximums and what exact properties you should apply them on. In my example I’m obviously trying to get a sample to work.
Make sure your deactivation doesn’t break any other solution if you are resetting with this line: contentService.ClientRequestServiceSettings.MaxReceivedMessageSize = 0;

Hope this helps!

“Activate on Default” confusion and features scoped at Web Application level

2011-07-23T11:59:00+00:00

When creating SharePoint features in Visual Studio 2010, one of the settings that defaults to True is “Activate on Default”.

There is a lot of confusion as to what this setting actually does:

It ONLY applies to features scoped at Farm and Web Application levels. You can still modify it for other features, but it doesn’t do anything.
Any feature (Farm or WebApplication) with that setting set to True will automatically activate when you deploy the WSP solution, no matter which way you deploy it (Install-SPSolution, stsasm.exe, Central Administration)

This setting is not related to the deployment configuration settings in Visual Studio 2010:

These features will still activate, even if VS’s deployment configuration is set to “No Activation”.

Where can this be an inconvenience?

When you create features that deploy Timer Jobs at the Web Application level, you really want to have “Activate on Default” set to False. Otherwise, your feature will be activated on ALL web applications. I did some tests and found out that even if your WSP Solution is not global and is deployed to a specific Web Application, your feature will still get activated. Dangerous, you really want your Timer Jobs to be running where they are meant to run, i.e. don’t deploy Timer Jobs to Central Administration unless you really need to.

If you are ever trying to find out why your Timer Jobs are “attached” to all web applications, this might be why.

I’m a SharePoint Server MVP!!!

2011-07-03T05:30:00+00:00

It was near the end of my working day, I was just about to do code reviews and catch-ups with my team, when I got the email:

“Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2011 Microsoft® MVP Award!”

My excitement is warranted – it is my first time. I feel honoured and would like to thank everyone who contributed towards my nomination and my eventual award.

I am grateful for all the people who inspire, challenge, listen, support, influence and motivate me to do my work. To me this award is really about you.

Just like the Master award, and like every other achievement, its not an end, but a start to new goals and targets. Becoming a SharePoint MCM was a real achievement, but it was more a beginning to new paths – people expect you to know, do the right thing, always solve the problems, give the right advice. Being a Master means you always have to be up-to-date, always know what's new, always aim to provide the best possible architecture and solution to customers, write the best code even, you must know what buttons to push and what levers to pull, and if you don’t know you must know where to get the answers. To me, becoming an MVP is similar – there’s a community out there and MVP’s support it. They develop it and inspire individuals. I’ve been “crowned” an MVP - now it’s my job to make the great community greater.

Fun with HTTP Handlers, Security Validations, FormDigest, AllowUnsafeUpdates, jQuery, AJAX and POST parameters in SharePoint

2011-04-24T05:47:00+00:00

Ever seen this error message?

System.Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The security validation for this page is invalid. Click Back in your Web browser, refresh the page, and try your operation again.

It is usually related to a missing SharePoint FormDigest control, or updates to the DB on an HTTP GET request. You might hear people saying you should set AllowUnsafeUpdates to true, but in the case of a POST request that is not the best thing you could do. The best resource that you could ever read on the topic is written a while back (in 2008!) by a good friend of mine and ex colleague - Hristo Pavlov. These two posts are your best starting point if you want to understand what these items are for and how they achieve their purpose.

What You Need To Know About AllowUnsafeUpdates (Part 1)

What You Need To Know About AllowUnsafeUpdates (Part 2)

Generally speaking, AllowUnsafeUpdates = true on POST shouldn’t be required at all. I was working with my team on an HTTP Handler living in the SharePoint Layouts folder and it was failing with the security validation exception. In a typical ASPX web page you would include the SharePoint FormDigest control and SharePoint will handle it from there onwards:

<SharePoint:FormDigest runat="server"/>

You will notice the output of this control is a hidden <input> like this one:

SharePoint will use this control (in particular the parameter __REQUESTDIGEST) and validate the “FormDigest”. You can explicitly call the SPUtility.ValidateFormDigest() helper method achieves the same. (See Hristo’s blog posts for more info on how it works). It basically takes the __REQUESTDIGEST value and validates it on the request object.

But in an HTTP Handler you don’t have the <SharePoint:FormDigest /> control as there is no ASPX. Developers can get the handler working by setting AllowUnsafeUpdates on the SPWeb object, but this should be avoided when it could (see Hristo’s post on why it is not good). If you are making a POST request, pass in the __REQUESTDIGEST and make sure you call the SPUtility.ValidateFormDigest() method before you do any DB updates.

If you want to call your handler asynchronously with AJAX, lets say with jQuery, this adds another level of complexity. You have to pass in the __REQUESTDIGEST parameter for SPUtility.ValidateFormDigest() to succeed. I personally found documentation on the $.ajax jQuery method quite poor, but here is a JavaScript example on how to use it and pass the __REQUESTDIGEST <input/> value:

function UploadFileAsync() {

var listId = $("input[id$='hdnListID']").val();

$.ajax({

type: "POST",

url: "/_layouts/Handlers/FileUpload.ashx?ListID=" + listId,

contentType: "application/x-www-form-urlencoded",

data: "__REQUESTDIGEST=" + $("#__REQUESTDIGEST").val(),

timeout: 30000,

success: function (response) {

alert(response);

error: function (x, t, m) {

if (t === "timeout") {

alert("got timeout");

}

else {

alert(t);

}

});

}

A few things are important and worth mentioning. In the “data” parameter I get the value of __REQUESTDIGEST and pass it in the POST request. (NOTE: you may want to improve the $(“#__RE..”) selector to get only input/hidden elements and be better performing). This will allow SPUtility.ValidateFormDigest() to pass successfully. If ever in doubt, open the request with Fiddler and validate the contents, you should see something like this:

The other important point is the contentType parameter. For me this did not work when set to “text/plain; charset=utf8”. I didn’t have enough time to figure out why, but “application/x-www-form-urlencoded” succeeded successfully.

Hope this helps!

Custom Upload Controls and the Maximum File Upload Size

2011-04-23T15:36:00+00:00

If you’re creating a custom page or control that uploads files from a users PC (or somewhere else) you may get this error if the file is too big:

System.Web.HttpException: Maximum request length exceeded.

This is an ASP.NET error before the request is being handled by SharePoint (you can follow the stack trace to understand it a bit more). The challenge developers are facing is handling the exception and producing a nice & customized error message to users. You can easily overcome the problem by modifying the web.config of the Web Application, but that is not good practice and you have to worry about reproducing the modification for scalability and backup/restore purposes.

In a typical custom solution there is a nice solution to this problem. If you use Application Pages (those ASPX files that live in {SharePoint Root}\Templates\Layouts) you can place a web.config in your solution folder within the Layouts folder. Your web.config will go in:

14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\CustomSolutionFolder\web.config

Here’s what you need in the web.config:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>

<system.web>

</system.web>

</location>

</configuration>

web.config’s are very flexible and the location element lets you apply your change exactly on the file that you need. This will work even if you are using an ASCX control located in the _CONTROLTEMPLATES folder. It is also a great approach as it can be packed into WSP’s and be part of an enterprise solution.

The number 2097151 is 2GB (boundary), the maximum SharePoint supported file size. It may be good to reduce this depending on your example.

The next point worth mentioning here is that the above setting alone won’t let you upload files over 50MB unless you configure the Web Application to allow it.

If the Web Application setting is below your file size you will get this exception:

Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The specified file is larger than the maximum supported file size.
NOTE: it has an ErrorCode of 2147024872

The good news is that you can handle the above exception with a simple Try…Catch, and that is all you need to facilitate a friendly, customized error message.

Hope this helps!

Microsoft Course 10174 in the spotlight on the Born To Learn blog

2011-04-19T17:02:00+00:00

I recently delivered 10174 on a few occasions, so I wrote a post for Microsoft Learning on the Born To Learn blog. I thought I might cross-post a link here:

Born To Learn - Training Spotlight

My next plans are to find whom to deliver 10231A to…