The first Italian SharePoint community is online!

Igor announced the launch of the first SharePoint community in Italy. These are great news for are SharePointer in my country. I wish them good luck for this new project!

patrick

SPOC 2010 – Day 3

Hi all,

the last day of the SharePoint and Office conference was the most intense day of all. After two days of session my head was not able to consume a lot of information. However, the last day was not only the most demanding, but also the most interesting one. The sessions that I followed were:

IT403 – I segreti della authenticazione SharePoint: da NTML a Claim Based Authentication, passando per i misteri di Kerberos: the first session of the day begun with an overivew of NTML, the double hop problem, Kerberos and claim based authentication. Claim based authentication seems to be the way to go in the future. It was interesting to hear about this concept and how to configure it in SharePoint 2010.

IT401: SharePoint 2010 storage from a DBA point of view: Best practices: whoa… this session was heavy. Gianluca Hotz talked about storage optimizations in SharePoint 2007 and 2010 from the first to the last byte. Thumbs up for the speaker’s preparation and the content of his presentation.

DEV403: Advanced Web Part Development in SharePoint 2010: After 5 years of web part development I was not thinking to get new information from Jan Tielens in this session. The concepts during the presentation were not new to me. Fortunately, I was wrong. After a while, Jan presented the new visual web part development. I already heard about it, but had not the time to check this promising new feature. This technique speeds up the development tremendously! Unfortunately, currently there is no solution to migrate your custom web parts to the visual web parts automatically. You have to do it by hand. However, I think that this is the way to go and will post something about it soon.

After all, the SharePoint and Office conference was well done. I’m sure to participate in the next SharePoint conferences in the future.

Best regards,

Patrick

Windows 7: Auto mount your VHD Disks at startup

Hi all,

Windows 7 provides some nice features including the possibility to create and attach VHD disks natively. This is a great way to organize differently your data and move it back and forth from one system to the other by solely copying your VHD file.

Unfortunately, every time you restart your machine, you loose all VHD attachments that you created before and you have to mount them manually. Martin, created a great post and explains there how to create a script that does the job for you. In this post I’m going to explain how we can automate this task with PowerShell.

In my case, I want that all VHD disks that I have in one of my directories are automatically attached on every startup. Therefore, I followed Martin’s instructions and got everything working nicely. The only drawback of this solution is the manual adding of each single VHD entry I created. That means that every time I delete or add a new disk, I have to modify the script that was created. In most cases this is not an issue, however, I wanted a more immediate and dynamic solution.

Because of that, I created a PowerShell script that takes all .vhd files in the directory it resides and attaches them by using diskpart. At the end, I only automated the step of the manual script definition in Martin’s post. The PowerShell code snipped that does the trick is described below:

foreach ($file in dir *.vhd) { 
    $command= @" 
        select vdisk file=$file 
        attach vdisk 
    "@ 
    $command | diskpart  
}

The logic is simple: loop over all files with *.vhd extension and execute the command in diskpart. Last but not least, you have to save this function in your .vhd folder and call it in your startup folder. I solved it by creating a .bat file that calls the PowerShell function like that:

powershell.exe ./AttachVHD.ps1

Every time you add a VHD disk in the directory the script resides, the script attaches automatically this disk to your system.

Note: you need administrative privileges on your machine if you are calling this file. If you don’t have them, follow Martin’s blog for creating a scheduled task.

 

Hope this helps,

Patrick

Cannot make a cache safe URL for “styles/core”, file not found. Please verify that the file exists under the layouts directory.

Hi to everyone,

in the last weeks we re-installed our SharePoint 2007 development server. This development machine helps us during the customizations of our SharePoint 2007 applications. The applications run with different language packs. In our case with English, German and Italian.

After the installation we begun to test our applications. We started an application that uses “German” templates and we got an lovely ASP.NET exception:

Cannot make a cache safe URL for “styles/core”, file not found. Please verify that the file exists under the layouts directory.

I’m loving those yellow rectangle. Especially when I don’t really know what the hell went wrong. We checked the installation of the customized application and the version of SharePoint. At first glance, everything seemed to be as it should be.

After some checks we found out with the help of the logs that we forgot one important step during our installation. During the installation of the development machine, we forgot to install the language packs in German and Italian. Naturally, SharePoint tried to look for a given file and did not find it. At the end we solved by installing the language packs and their Service Packs.

Hope this helps to anybody else

Patrick

SPOC 2010 – Day 2

Hi to everyone,

the SharePoint and Office Conference 2010 became more interesting from day to day. In the second day, everything started with the keynote from Microsoft. The most impressing part of this keynote was the presentation of the work done at Ferrari. Everyone loves fast and nice cars :). To sum up, the day continued for me with following sessions:

OTH301 – PowerShell: Administration and Development: this was a semi-introductory session about PowerShell and SharePoint 2010.

SS001 – Sponsor Green Team – SharePoint 2010 Migration Strategies: Green Team presented with Metalogix a really nice and straightforward tool for SharePoint migration. It was impressive to see how easy it was to migrate one content from MOSS 2007 with SharePoint 2010. And this… only by dragging and dropping one site from left to right. Really cool. Metalogix provides different migration paths to SharePoint. I think this product is a must see for every SharePointer. At the end of this session each participant got a security vest that you wear on the street with a nice slogan at the back: “Update in progress…”.

DAT302: Programmare i Business Connectivity Services: this demo showed how the BDC evolved to the new Business Connectivity Services. I must admit, i loved the BDC integration although it was only a read only solution for the search integration. However, the BCS push the whole story ten levels further. Probably, I’m going to write something about the BCS in the next days.

OFF306: Client Side Technologies in SharePoint 2010: I did not followed lately the power of the Client Side Technologies of SharePoint 2010. After the demo of Jan Tielens from U2U I changed completely my mind. This is a great way to provide web 2.0 experience on SharePoint to our customers.

OFF301 – SharePoint & Office System Client Usability: Tips, Tricks & Notes from the field:  Alessandro Appiani took a nice presentation about the typical “issues” a user may encounter when using SharePoint. One of the biggest aims in this presentation was to remove almost completely the logon window on a intranet and extranet scenario without the use of any single sign on solution.

The day did not end so fast. After the last technical session there was the official presentation of the first Italian SharePoint community. This is a really interesting project that tries to kick-off this new community in our country. I’m really excited about this idea and think that I’m going to support them to build up this community.

Last but not least, the SharePint party started. This party was a good opportunity for me to get in touch with some professionals such as Jan Tielens, Igor Macori and Claudio Brotto. And Jan, don’t worry… we are going to buy a new GPS system :).

Best regards,

Patrick

SPOC 2010 – Day 1

Hi,

SPOC is not a misspelled character of the enterprise saga. It is the SharePoint and Office Conference 2010 in Milan. My first impression? It was a really intense day with interesting topics and nice demos of the new capabilities of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. Fortunately, this is not the first time I’m travelling for work to Milan, but…, I don’t know why… I’m always forgetting the endless traffic jams during the rush hours. Unfortunately, it seems that Milan is in a 24/7 rush hour. However, somehow I managed to be on schedule for the registration at 9 am. The sessions I covered this day were:

• OFF304 – Introduzione a Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010: D. Colombo and M. Cornelli gave a general overview of the exciting new capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint Workspace (it’s the old Groove client).  To sum up, this tool can be used to take offline complete SharePoint sites. You can work on the different downloaded items and synchronize again when you go back online. This opens new interesting scenarios for collaboration in the business. I will cover this topic further in the next days.
• DEV305 – Data provisioning con SharePoint 2010 e Visual Studio 2010: This session was covered by Giuseppe Marchi. He showed the new ways of developing and maintaining SharePoint site templates and features with SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010. With the help of Visual Studio 2010, you are really fast in creating such kind of solutions.
• SS002: Sponsor AvePoint – Intelligent SharePoint Architecture and Storage Optimization Strategies: This was one of the four sponsored sessions telling about third party products. In my case I watched the session of AvePoint. AvePoint provides a nice data protection, administration, migration and reporting tool for SharePoint solutions. Their tool seems pretty complete. If you are interested in a good disaster recovery solution, I think you should take this tool into consideration.
• DEV301 – REST services: integrare SharePoint in applicazioni desktop o web based: This session was one of my daily favorites. Marco Castellani showed the new REST-Service architecture provided in SharePoint and how easy it is to consume data from SharePoint 2010 using them. I think I will write something about this topic in the next days.
• DEV302 – Aggiornare soluzioni MOSS2007 a SharePoint 2010: this session described the strategies for upgrading your SharePoint 2007 solutions to 2010. Was interesting to see how easy is the upgrade process. However, I can tell you more when I’m going to upgrade my SharePoint 2007 solutions to 2010.
• CSC303 – Creare soluzioni di Office Business Application con SharePoint 2010 e Office 2010: The Microsoft Office evangelist Pietro Brambati showed the development steps needed to build a Outlook Add-in with Visual Studio 2010. In about 40 minutes, he was able to build up a nice application that permitted data entry and retrieval from a SQL database. He used the Entity Framework, REST-Services and the Office 2010 solution templates. I want to write also in this case something about this topic. Seems to be pretty cool and straightforward.

After so many sessions I was really tired. I was thinking, man… now take your car and go to the hotel that is only 2 km distant and jump in your bed. Unfortunately, I forgot that I was in Milan… traffic jam :).

I’m really excited to see the next sessions today and what exactly they will cover. I will tell you more in my next post.

Best regard

Patrick

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 & Microsoft Office 2010 Launch

Hi all,

the Microsoft SharePoint Product Group announced in this post the official launch date for SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010 for May 12th, 2010. The RTM will be available this April 2010.

Best regards

Patrick

Third Microsoft SharePoint & Office Conference in Milan - Italy

Hi to everyone,

finally we are approaching the Microsoft SharePoint & Office Conference 2010. It will be a really exciting experience for me and my colleague Martin. We will try to follow so many sessions as possible in these three days. Probably we will not be able to cover all sessions. However, I will try to get as much information as possible and post some interesting news about the topics covered there. You can check the tight agenda here.

See you there

Patrick

Clustered Environment: Forms authentication fails on machine switch. User has to login again.

Hi,

I already told you yesterday that we build up a clustered environment for a customer. This environment is intended for SharePoint applications and ASP.NET custom applications in general.

One of these applications uses forms authentication and cookies to generate the tickets between one and the other user request. At first glance, the application seemed to work as intended.

Our last test was to turn off one of the web frontends to see the behavior of the application. And now… damn. We are redirected to the login page. The forms authentication cookie expired before it should be. We tried again in the reverse order and got the same result.

After a while we recognized that we forgot an important setting for our web application in both web frontends. You have to specify the same machineKey on both sides. (In the last post I described another issue related the missing setting in a web farm). So, if you forget to do it, you encounter this and other issues. The forms authentication ticket is encrypted and decrypted by the machineKey settings of the app. These are unique for each server and app if you do not modify your web.config appropriately.

At the end the issue is solved immediately. You have only to setup your web.config files of your web applications correctly. You do it by adding a machineKey setting in the system.web node of your web.config.

We noticed that sometimes the forms authentication ticket expires even if you setup correctly the encryption and decryption key of the machine.config. After some trials we found out that you have to specify the decryption and encryption algorithm too. The default settings does not seem to work perfectly. This should do the job:

<machineKey decryption="3DES" decryptionKey="4DF974E5A87C91DD1F400907DC76DDE18822647590D4BD22" validation="3DES" validationKey="E1471284C8D65CC9D2414639F8E60430AAB56B109984B24868E8B9E672FC80F060EE69BE88395EB09D9B2D23FF6194152EE2A25F619F030E010DF783F68F45A3" />

We specified as algorithm in decryption and validation the TripleDes method. Please note that you have to specify your own keys. In my last post I explained how you can do it in IIS7. I put there an additional link for further explanations for those of you that are using IIS6.

If you want to dig deeper into this topic, you can visit this or that page.

Hope this helps

Patrick

Validation of viewstate MAC failed. If this application is hosted by a Web Farm or cluster, ensure that configuration specifies the same validationKey and validation algorithm

Hi,

recently we build a clustered environment for a customer. It was a lot of work at the beginning, but it was worth it.

However, if you are building a clustered environment for ASP.NET applications, you might get an error like this:

Validation of viewstate MAC failed. If this application is hosted by a Web Farm or cluster, ensure that <machineKey> configuration specifies the same validationKey and validation algorithm

This happens when you put down a node where a customer was served content. The customer makes a new request to the server and is redirected to the remaining node. Unfortunately, this node is not able to validate the Viewstate and goes in this exception. Pretty ugly in our case, he.

The issue is solved by specifying the same machine Key settings for the application you are hosting on both servers.

If you are using IIS7, you can define it easily in the machine key section of the web application. You can generate and configure the machine key setting for your application directly there. Use the example below as a reference:

Tip: on the right side of the above window, you are able to find a “generate key” button. This is helpful when you don’t want to specify for yourself the key

Note:  the machine key must be the same on all web frontends for your application!!

Not an IIS7 user? Don’t worry, you can specify these settings directly in your web.config file under the system.web note of your application. An example of such a setting is shown below:

<machineKey decryptionKey="71192E49A2C55CA5E64071C760E7E0AB9B1CB94ACF81E1F7" validationKey="F40710DFDAF283D15F88C8AC8EA6007156091A153E6045C6492AE8653664D356BE68C7CBE80E77C96B5BCF02DBD6C23F86E6807EE28A79DC42A82D6BC2D3E0B4" />

Note: it is recommended to specify different decryption and validation keys when you have more than one application on your web farm.

If you intend to dig deeper into the motivations and settings of the machine key node, you can check this URL.

Hope this helps

Best regards

Patrick

Getting Started with SharePoint 2010: Learning resources

Hi,

you get a general overview of SharePoint 2010 by watching the videos using this URL.

Have a nice day

Patrick