July 2006 - Posts

SharePoint Services - Getting Started

Anyone who regularly reads this blog has probably noticed that I have recently been posting a lot of 'Getting Started' articles; WPF, Biztalk and now SharePoint. The reason for this is that I have accepted a new position with a company in the financial industry in London, which requires me to brush up on some technologies.
 
Today's posting is about Microsoft SharePoint Services, the foundation for the other SharePoint products... I think. Actually I am reasonably sure, but in my opinion Microsoft is not doing the best job in explaining this product to the development community. Nevertheless, enterprises are starting to implement SharePoint at quite a large scale if I need to believe the number of job openings for SharePoint Developers.
 

 
A full explanation of SharePoint is out of the scope of this posting, in stead I will focus on installing the core SharePoint Services and linking to one or two resources to get started.
 
The first step is to read the SharePoint Admin guide on the Microsoft website. Even when your plan is to 'just' be a developer it is wise to know what is going on under the covers, what the installation possibilities are and how to plan for performance and scalability.
 
The next step is to download the free SharePoint Services with integrated SP2 and read the readme file. The previously mentioned Admin Guide, you did read it right, explains that you can either perform a default installation that installs WMSDE or perform a custom install and use SQL 2000. Having read the Admin Guide I decided to perform a custom install as it is not possible to administer WMSDE remotely, not even using the standard MSDE tricks. If you don't care about remote SQL Administration then I strongly recommend to perform a default installation as that is extremely simple.
 
After installation, the admin website did not work for me. I got several errors including '401 2148074254' indicating a security problem. I disabled Windows Integrated Authentication for the site in IIS and enabled Basic Authentication. This solved the problem well enough for a development system, but if this happens on a production server I would recommend a more structural solution.
 
One final problem I ran into was related to the custom installation I performed. When manually generating a Virtual Server and application pool I got a '1057' error, something about 'SPTimer'. The solution was to use a fully qualified user name \userName.
 
Once setup is completed you can either go to the administrator pages using 'Start / Administrative Tools / SharePoint Central Administration' or navigate to the SharePoint site you just set up.
 
That is all for now. I will discuss creating SharePoint Web Parts in a next posting.
 
posted Saturday, July 29, 2006 10:59 AM by jritmeijer with 0 Comments

Sysinternals swallows the red pill

Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, founders of Sysinternals and Winternals, developers of possibly the most useful free and commercial utilities for Windows, have finally shamed Microsoft into buying them.
 

 
Congratulations to both, it is my understanding that although some of the free utilities may be rebranded, they will remain free.
 
posted Tuesday, July 18, 2006 5:35 PM by jritmeijer with 0 Comments

IIS 7 - Excellent Channel 9 video

When Windows Vista will be released, a new version of Internet Information Server (IIS) version 7 will be released as well. One of the major new features on offer is that the entire service has been modularised to allow it to be extended in both C++ as well as the .net Framework.
 

 
Channel 9 has an excellent video outlining these changes as well as a couple of simple but powerful demos. A new IIS.NET website has been released as well. Visit it to learn more and play with the system using a remote virtual lab.
 
posted Tuesday, July 18, 2006 5:33 PM by jritmeijer with 1 Comments

Biztalk 2006 - Day 2 - Getting started... a bit more

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Reading the whitepaper described in Day 1 of this series of articles provides a good high level overview of the capabilities of Biztalk Server 2006. However, more information, and maybe an example or two, is required in order to fully understand how the product works and what its real capabilities and limitations are.
 
To get this insight, without diving head first into a full blown Biztalk installation process, Microsoft have developed an on-line clinic named First Look: Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 for Developers. This 3 hour clinic discusses all the major modules and provides screen casts showing how to use the product. Although I find Microsoft's clinic environment somewhat confusing it is worth your time if you are truly interested
 
I am a bit worried about the statement that is made a couple of times during the clinic: After redeploying it is often a good idea to stop and start the Biztalk host. ...Often?.... Not very specific, is it.
 
Although I'll reserve my final judgment unti Il have used this version a bit more it seems that Biztalk is still in a bit of an identity crisis. Some tools run in the MMC, some in Visual Studio while others run as stand alone applications. No major disaster, just not very nice.
 
The next step is to deploy Biztalk 2006 in a Win2K3 VMWare box. My main system is running XP, which can run most of the Biztalk modules, just not Sharepoint for which Win2K3 is required.
 
To be continued....
posted Wednesday, July 12, 2006 6:16 AM by jritmeijer with 13 Comments

Biztalk 2006 - Day 1 - Getting started

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No application is an island. Whether we like it or not, tying systems together has become the norm. Yet connecting software is about more than just exchanging bytes. As organizations move toward a service-oriented world, the real goal—creating effective business processes that unite separate systems into a coherent whole—comes within reach... According to the first paragraph of Microsoft's whitepaper Understanding Biztalk 2006.
 
So, in addition to starting a new series of articles about Windows Presentation Foundation, I am also starting a series about Biztalk Server 2006.
 
Ever since I first saw it introduced during a TechEd 2000 session in Florida, I thought it was an interesting product with great potential. However, it was clearly not quite there yet. The last time I did anything serious with Biztalk was for a POS integration project using an extremely buggy beta version of the 2004 version, which was such a bad experience that I rewrote the functionality as a Windows Service, which was good enough for that particular project.
 

 
However, other than Windows Media Centre, most version 1.0 or 2.0 Microsoft products are rarely any good. Microsoft does not give up easily and with version 2006 it finally seems that they have created a great and mature product.
 
Over the next few weeks I will author a number of articles about how to get started with Biztalk 2006. As always, we start with the basics:
  1. Login to MSDN - you are a subscriber, right - and download Biztalk 2006 in your favourite language. It is a 450MB download.
     
  2. Read the previously mentioned Understanding Biztalk 2006 whitepaper. It is 33 pages and a good read.
     
  3. Before installing Biztalk on your own system, follow a 30 minutes Virtual Lab for a high level overview. This lab is hosted on a server at Microsoft and does not require you to install anything other than a simple ActiveX control.
 That is all for today, if you are very eager you can get started on other Virtual Labs.
 
posted Wednesday, July 05, 2006 2:04 PM by jritmeijer with 21 Comments

Resolving slow Windows shutdown problems

Although my computer is not suffering too much from this, I have had problems in the past with Windows needing minutes rather than seconds to shut down. I know for a fact that some of my friends are suffering from this problem.
 
It is easy to blame Windows, but the problem is actually caused by applications running on top of the OS that are not behaving properly.
 
But there is hope, IntelliAdmin is reporting about a free Microsoft application that runs in the background and deals with cleaning up the mess that applications leave behind.
 

 
posted Tuesday, July 04, 2006 12:32 PM by jritmeijer with 31 Comments