Dom Cosgrove Blog

My college Adnan Ahmed recently attended the SharePoint Connections Conference in Amsterdam. He highly recommended the conference and said that the content was invaluable. He kindly passed on the links to the slides from the presentations and the videos, so I thought I would share them.

I have to say that the quality of the videos and the content is excellent. I’m personally off to the SharePoint 2010 Evolution Conference in London next month and I hope that they will be providing similar post conference material. It is impossible to attend all the sessions and these videos provide a great way to view the content at leisure after the conference. Last year I was slightly disappointed that there was no video material for the SharePoint Best Practice Conference in London.

Videos:

http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/SharePoint-Connections-2010-Amsterdam/

Slides:

http://www.devconnections.com/Updates/Amsterdam_Jan2010/

It’s almost here! Arpan Shah SharePoint Director announced that SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 will be Release To Manufacture (RTM) in April 2010 with an official launch date of the 12th May 2010.

The announcement can be found on the  SharePoint Team Blog: SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010 Launch.

You can use the following syntax to get the fully qualified URL to a Form for a SharePoint List / Library.

SPList list = SPContext.Current.List;

SPListItem item = list[0];

item.Web.Url + "/" + item.ParentList.Forms[PAGETYPE.PAGE_DISPLAYFORM].Url + "?ID=" + item.ID

PAGETYPE is an enumeration of the SharePoint Forms:

Visual Studio 2005 for Software Testers (VSST) allows you to create custom Counter Sets, which are a set of performance counters that can be applied to a computer in the test farm. VSST comes with some Counter Sets out-of-the-box (OOTB) for the Load Test, Controller and Agent amongst others:

Invariably when creating performance tests, you’ll develop them on a computer, which is not in the SharePoint Server Farm. This computer will most probably not have a number of the performance counters that you want to monitor. For instance SharePoint uses the w3wp (IIS) worker process, which unless you have IIS installed on your local machine, you will not be able to add the counters. To add the counters you need to specify a computer that has the counters that you require.

Typically I create a counter set for each of the server roles in the farm. This allows me to monitor different counters for different roles. For instance the Web Front End (WFE) servers counters are very different to the Back End SQL server. Joel Oleson has publish a good list of counters that the SharePoint Performance Team use.

Creating Custom Counter Set
1. Open or create a new Load Test in VSST;
2. Right mouse click on the Counter Set node and select Add Custom Counter Set;

3. In the properties pane give the newly created Counter Set a useful name e.g. SharePoint WFE, SharePoint DB, SharePoint Search e.t.c
4. Right mouse click the newly created Counter Set and select Add Counters;

5. Enter the name of the computer that you are going to collect the counters from e.g. SharePoint WFE or SQL Database server. The List of Performance Categories will be refreshed for the categories available on that server. If you select Process for instance, the list of instances will be different for the WFE and the DB servers. Select the required counters.

Note:
If you work in an environment where least privileges are employed you may not have sufficient right to add performance counters from a remote computer. You may encounter a message such as “Cant read performance counter categories for computer xxx”.

To be able to access the performance counters you need your system administrators to add you (or the account you are running the test under) to the following server roles:

• Performance Log Users – Members of this group have remote access to schedule logging of performance counters on this computer
• Performance Monitor Users – Members of this group have remote access to monitor this computer

Using Custom Counter Set
1. Open the Load Test where you created your custom counter set;
2. Right mouse click on Counter Set Mappings and Select Manage Counter Sets…;

3. In the Manage Counter Sets dialog box select Add Computer. Select the newly created Custom Counter Set and click OK;
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References:

• How to configure Stress Test Project For MOSS 2007 using VS2008 Team Suite for System Testers
• Working with Load Tests

Issue

When copying files to the GAC I occasionaly get the following message in the Visual Studio OutPut window on my development VPC:

Failure adding assembly to the cache: Access denied. You might not have administrative credentials to perform this task. Contact your system administrator for assistance.

Also I cannot see any assemblies in the GAC through Windows Explorer, while it is this state.

Background

When developing features for SharePoint, it is common practice to deploy only the Signed Assembly to the GAC, rather that re-deploying the whole SharePoint solution. Personally depending on the project I use one of two mechanisms:

WSPBuilder – Copy to GAC

WSPBuilder is my tool of choice for increasing productivity while developing SharePoint Solutions. One of the functions of WSPBuilder is Copy to GAC, which does exactly as the name suggest:

PostBuild Task
Some clients don’t allow WSPBuilder to be installed or they prefer a more custom project structure. In these cases I tend to use Project Post Build Tasks. You can use the Edit Post Build… function to add parameters to your post build command, as shown below. I tend to use the GACUtil command to copy the assembly to the GAC and the iisapp.vbs to recycle the application pool. A sample script is show below. This is required to ensure that the Just In Time (JIT) compilation occurs again.

"%programfiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\GacUtil.exe" /if "$(TargetPath)" /nologo
"%systemroot%\system32\iisapp.vbs" /a "SharePoint – 9000" /r

Resolution

Although I cannot actually explain what is causing this issue, I found that if you restart the Indexing Service through the Windows Services Management Console, the problem is resolved.

If anyone has an explanation as to why this occurs I would be grateful.

The very first SharePoint eMagazine!

The Global SharePoint User Group is having it’s first meeting on the 1st December 2009 @ 7pm ET. This will be the first virtualised SharePoint User Group, and will be presented via LiveMeeting.

If you can’t actually attend the user group meeting then they will be recorded so that you can watch them at your leisure.

They also have a survey to establish what topics / subject areas people want discussed. Make sure you take the time to complete this as this will be key to getting the right content out there.

http://www.gspug.org/

If you need to browse your SharePoint site or for that matter any site, hosted on your VPC while you are not connected to a network, read on. If you are not connected to a network the VPC does not get an IP address issued hence why you cannot browse hosted sites. The solution to this is the MS Loopback Adapter. The following shows you how to set up your loopback adapter.

Add Loopback adapter

1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel. Then click Add Hardware:
   
2. Select Yes, I have already connected the hardware:
   
3. From the list of devices select Add a new hardware device:
   
4. Select Install the hardware that I manually select from list (Advanced):
   
5. From the list of hardware types select Network Adapter:
   
6. From the list of Manufactures select Microsoft and from the list of Network Adapters select Microsoft Loopback Adapter:
   
7. Click Finish once the adapter is installed.
8. The Loopback Adapter will now appear in you list of Network Connections:
   

Configure Loopback Adapter

1. In the Network Connections right mouse click on the newly created Loopback Adapter and select Properties;
2. From the Properties select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and click Properties:
   
3. In the Properties add the IP address as follows:
    
4. Click OK to commit the changes.

Configure VPC Network Adapter

1. On Virtual PC (VPC) Console click Settings;
   
2. On the settings dialog box select Networking and then select Microsoft Loopback Adapter as the 1st Adapter. Click OK;
   
3. On the VPC click the Network icon in the task bar or navigate to the Network Connections through the control panel. The network icon may display a warning message “Limited or no connectivity”. Don’t worry about this at the moment;
   
4. On the Network Connections window, right mouse click on the Local Area Connection and click Properties;
   
5. On the TCP/IP settings for the Network adapter enter the following details. Click OK;
6. You will notice that the network icon on the desktop task bar no-longer displays the warning message;
7. On the VPC, launch the Command Prompt and type IPConfig you should see that the VPC now has the IP address, subnet and gateway that you just entered;
   
8. From the VPC Command prompt ping 192.168.5.10 to confirm connectivity to the host;
    
9. Ensure that you don’t have any network connectivity on your host computer, then from the Command Prompt ping the VPC 192.168.5.11 to confirm connectivity to the VPC;

Configure Host File

If your SharePoint (or website) uses Host Headers then you’ll need to edit your Host file:

1.   Open your Host file C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\host;
   
2. In the host file put the IP address of your VPC 192.168.5.11 and set the host in my case that is scratch;
    
3. You should now be able to browse your SharePoint (Web Site) hosted on a VPC even if you do not have connection to a network;
    

Today Microsoft TechNet has launched the Update Centre for Microsoft Office, Office Server and Related Products. This site will will consolidate all Service Packs, Public Updates and Cumulative updates for the Office Product suite in one location. Please note that this is not just for the Office Desktop products but also includes the server products i.e. SharePoint.

The site includes:

• Latest Updates;
• Updates in the last year;
• Update Resources;
• An RSS feed of the updates;

This will be a valuable resource for all system administrators and is something that has been long over due.

Office and SharePoint 2010 Betas are available for MSDN Subscribers:

• Office 2010 Beta 
• SharePoint 2010

Make sure you download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 that was released a couple of weeks ago, this will be the Developer Tool of choice.