Yves Peneveyre's blog

2010-11-30T22:07:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, checking permissions on a SharePoint site is quite a hassle and I several times had permissions issues especially when working on an anonymous access enabled application (see one reference here) and you don't know where it is coming from.

I found a tool that can be very helpful in discovering the permission details for an item or a page.

See the article on the Rodney Viana's blog, and the tool download on Codeplex

2010-11-03T00:39:00.000-07:00

Title : Professional SharePoint 2010 Development

Authors : Tom Rizzo, Reza Alirezaei, Paul J. Swider, Scot Hillier, Jeff Fried, Kenneth Schaefer

Summary :
This book was the first one available talking about SharePoint 2010 development. Therefore, as it was available soon after the RTM version of SharePoint, we could expect that some points would not have been perfectly addressed.
Nevertheless, it covers almost the whole range of topics that a developer may face.
It starts by, of course, an introduction to the new platform, an overview of the developer tools and the list of enhancements for the IT Pros. After that, collaboration, social computing, search, ECM, through workflows and business intelligence are described. One of the last topic is about the promising SharePoint Online.

Book Review :
Very honestly, the whole introduction can be skipped. It means the first 4 chapters as they are too high level. I found them also too long.
After these chapters, it goes well in the details, with many examples besides code illustrating the notions explained. On the other side, and with the experience of the platform, I found two points where the book is not going enough in the subject. The first one, even if packaging and deployment is explained, after a bit along the book, this is no longer addressed and sometimes leave the reader at "how can I deploy this ?".
The second point is in regards to SharePoint Online which is not covered enough. Maybe because the platform was not ready, but this topic deserves to be more developed.
Overall, this book is a very good one and will be very useful for the developers.

2010-10-11T11:28:00.000-07:00

Great day !

Steve Balllmer announced today the availability of the first devices that will support Windows Phone 7. Among them, 4 HTC devices. I just need to make a choice now :-)

2010-09-09T03:01:00.000-07:00

The next Swiss SharePoint Club event will take place in Geneva, at the Cooperative Migros.

In the agenda, Business Intelligence, SharePoint Online, branding and web content management, and metadate with SharePoint 2010.

To have a detailed agenda, go on the Club SPS web site

2010-09-07T13:09:00.000-07:00

Title : Microsoft Visio 2010 - Business Process Diagramming and Validation

Author : David J. Parker

Summary :
Microsoft Visio 2010, Business Process Diagramming and Validation, written by the Visio MVP David Parker focuses on Visio 2010 and its use for validating diagrams. Moreover, the edition that is the subject of the book is the Premium one. The reason for that is because only the Premium Edition has the diagram validation feature.
It starts by a description of the new features of Visio 2010. It continues with the description of the Microsoft Visio Object Model and the Connectivity API used to run through the diagram, its shapes and their connections. After this, the necessary ShapeSheet is explained, before going through the validation API.
After all that theory, some practice with the development of a Visio Add-In in WPF to explore the ShapeSheets and the validation rules. This Add-in is then used in all the next chapters to create validation rules.
A complete chapter is dedicated to the publishing and packaging of Visio templates, including validation rules.

Book Review :
The book leads the reader from the beginning, exploring the Visio Object model to a completely packaged Visio template containing validation rules, which is very interesting and easy to follow. The explanations and examples are clear and illustrated with comprehensive piece of code. Especially, the packaging part that I found particularly well explained.
On the other side, some part of the book have big pieces of code, which is good because you don't have to be online to get the source code on a web site (even if the complete solution described in the book is available on a dedicated site). But, this makes sometimes these part more difficult to follow and a bit heavy.
Finally, a good book for developers and power users that want to start implementing diagram validation.

For the people that want a free sample chapter of the book (Understanding the Microsoft Visio Object Model), they can follow this link.

2010-07-24T07:30:00.000-07:00

Title : SharePoint 2010 for dummies

Author : Vanessa L. Williams

Summary :
This book places the readers at the place of a user or a power user of the SharePoint 2010 platform. It describes the functionnalities or feature of the lists, document libraries and goes through the different aspects of SharePoint 2010. But it does not stop at the end-user level and goes beyond, by explaining some tricks or some administrator functions.
Several advanced features are demonstrated, like the Excel Services, the Business Connectivity Services, just to name a few.

Book Review :
Ok, colleagues were wondering why I was reading such kind of book. That is true, if you want a developer or a complete guide to SharePoint 2010, pass your way, this book is definitely not for you. Anyway, when all the day-long you work either as a developer or working at the implementation of a SharePoint 2010 solution, there is a tendancy to forget the basics, or just how users are approaching the product. Not only that. It is the kind of book that your users or your clients will read most likely. It is always good to put yourself in their shoes and see SharePoint from their viewpoint, just to see how they understand the product.
For someone that has already some notions of SharePoint, this book is easy to go through. It has a good level for end-users and power users (not administrators !). Finally, it is interesting to see it as a starting point for other books going more deeper in SharePoint 2010 and definitely, a book that SharePoint users should have.

2010-07-21T01:46:00.000-07:00

You may not have notice, but this blog has been upgraded.

As it was running on an old version of the DasBlog engine, it was the time to upgrade to the version 2.3. It is now done and running...

2010-07-16T03:36:00.000-07:00

In SharePoint 2007 we had a problem when we wanted to create calculated columns using either the [Today] or [Me], respectively giving the current date and the current user. If you search on the web, a lot of pages are describing and talking about the workaround. The workaround is to create a "Today" or a "Me" column with the standard and default settings, writing the formula and then, finally, to delete the created columns.

I hoped that in SharePoint 2010, this was fixed. But when I created my first calculated column based on dates, here is what I got :

Exactly the same error we have in SharePoint 2007.

And.....exactly the same workaround. So, is it not considered as a bug or a problem for Microsoft ? Sure, there is a workaround, but it is quite annoying to create columns just to delete them right after. And, last but not least, when the formula has to be udpated, ensure that these columns are present otherwise, it will be impossible to save the new formula.

UPDATE

I got a correction from Ryan (see comment below) and indeed, the what-was-called-so-far-a-workaround in many pages on the web (and here also :-) ) is in fact not a viable solution. In fact, the column using this "trick" will only be updated and calculated when the item is updated. To see the confirmation of this, create a column with a formula like this : =IF([StartDate]>[Today],"Future","Started") with StartDate being a manually-set date and wait for that StartDate to be reached. If the item is not updated, the column will keep the "Future" label.

Anyway, the fact that it is not possible to have such functionality in SP2010 is a bit pity.

Thanks to Ryan for the correction

2010-06-25T03:29:00.000-07:00

When you implement a solution, you test it in different situation and depending on the results, of course, you correct the little mistakes that may be present. What I found very interesting so far in software development is the way to reproduce a behaviour following a given set of steps. For the same steps, you get the same result. That is also a way to qualify a bug or a defect, most of the times.
So, what is more frustrating when the problem or the bug happens randomly ?
However, that is what happened recently on a SharePoint 2007 web site during a roll-out.

The symptoms ?
Having activated the anonymous access, pages prompted the users for credentials and when no credentials were entered, a simple message "401 Unauthorized" was displayed. Now, on that same page, simply pressing F5 to refresh was loading and displaying the page correctly.

Checks ?
Checked that all the resources were accessible by anonymous users, being CSS, images, documents, etc. Some images were referenced using absolute URLs, but apart from that, nothing special.
Checked in the Windows Event Log, absolutely nothing related to this problem.
Checked the ULS, crawled megs of text files, several "excessive number of SPRequest" messages were present, but they were here before the roll-out as well. The only clue was some "Access denied" messages, but, no reference to a resource or no stack trace.
Checked also the web.config, everything was ok. And anyway, this is normally handled by SharePoint.
Checked the IIS Directory Security permissions, verifying the identity of the user used by the application pool, but here again, everything was normal.
Custom code doing a forbidden action ? After a complete removal of the three custom controls, the problem persisted, so, it was not that.
After hours and hours of investigation, I found one thing. The Master Page and Page Layouts gallery was not accessible anonymously, so I fixed this first, but still, the 401 issue was still here. Being in the library I decided to check the content of the master pages and the page layouts and found couple of "__designer" tags referencing resources. We indeed used the SharePoint Designer to apply some changes, but never had this problem before. But, to be sure and to definitely clean these files, every "__designer" tags have been removed and pages provisionned again.

The result ?
Everything was fine. So, for some reasons, the tags added by SharePoint Designer seem to cause access issues, but not all the times.
In this particular case, what was really annoying is that nothing can lead you to the solution or where the problem is located. A lot of people wrote about 401 random issues, caused by either a hotfix applied here or load-balancer problems there, but mine was still another one.
So, before spending hours or days looking for useless (in that specific situation) logs, check your master page or your page layouts and remove "__designer" tags. Check also that they are accessible anonymously.

2010-06-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

Title : Mastering Your Organization's Processes

Authors : John O'Connell, Jon Pyke, Roger Whitehead

Summary :
In another post I mentioned why BPM is important today for the companies. Mastering the processes and the change is primordial for the managers in an enterprise. This book explains what is a business processes and their management, then describes the different systems of an organization. It also defines the actors involved in business processes, such as the ones outside the organization, the people and other systems. Finally, it gives some strategies for BPM and also some guidance to choose a BPM product.

Review :
I found this book difficult to read, most likely because I am not in the targeted audience for this kind of book. For me, it was too high-level and too conceptual. It seems, for me, that to apply the concept, there will be a missing pieces between the book and the reality of the field. One great positive point : every chapter ends with a case study that is very well explained.

2010-06-05T15:31:00.000-07:00

Title : Business Process Change - A Manager's Guide to Improving, Redesigning, and Automating

Authors : Paul Harmon

Summary :
In the software industry, BPM or Business Process Management is present since the mid-90's. Even earlier according to different sources. But nothing is really new and nothing has really changed since Henry Ford in 1903 when he started Ford Motor to design and build a high-quality but easy to assemble car. What is done since ages in the manufactory industries tried to be applied to many other sectors.

Nowadays, having the best product on the market is not enough and companies have to constantly adapt themselves to changing parameters such as new competitors, suppliers, new technologies and so on. Today, it seems that the only way for a company to survive is its business processes and its ability to change them quickly (others would put the word "agile" here, but I keep myself making this shortcut).

The book starts by explaining the value chain and what is process management. A whole part is dedicated to the modelisation of the processes before going into BPM, including Six Sigma. In the middle of the book, some technologies are explored, such as XML and some ERP systems without forgetting UML.

Review :
Really good book, with excellent explanation. What I liked was also the level of details and the numerous examples and case studies. Nevertheless, if requires a little knowledge of what is BPM and is definitely not a technical book (I knew this before reading it, but it is more for clarification as most of the posts I do on this blog are technical). In addition, there are a lot of diagrams that help to understand the concepts explained throughout the book.

2010-06-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

In a first post, the process of setup a managed metadata store has been explained, and it is now time to use the enterprise term store in the different list and document libraries. This post will review the following steps :

Site Column creation
Site Content Type creation
Document Library creation
Metadata navigation setup

As a best practice, every time a custom column is needed, a new content type should be created, and this has not changed since WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. To create a content type with a managed keyword column, you first start by creating a site column.
In your site, go into the Site Actions menu and select Site Settings. Under the Galleries section, select Site Columns to display all the existing columns that have been defined (see below).

(Click for a larger view)

Click the Create button leads you to the Create Column screen (see below).

(Click for a larger view)

At the end of the column type list, a new Managed Metadata type can be selected enabling you to select the needed term set to this column. The other settings are the same as in MOSS 2007, except the last one that proposes the selection of the term set. It is even possible to select a sub-set of the term set, by going deeper in the tree. Just above the term set selection box, it is also possible to look for a specific term. Finally, as for the other kinds of column types, you can select a default value from the term set tree that will be assigned to the column (see below).

(Click for a larger view)

Now, the column is ready to be used in a content type. Again, in the Site Actions menu, select Site Settings and then Site content types under the Galleries section (see below).

(Click for a larger view)

Click on the Create button sends you to the New Site Content Type screen (see below).

(Click for a larger view)

Just enter a name for the content type, a parent one and a group under which the content type should appear in the list. This screen has not changed since WSS 3.0 After the confirmation, click on the newly created content type in order to edit it (see below).

(Click for a larger view)

Under the Columns section, click the Add from existing site columns link. Remember the group in which the created column has been stored and select it in the Available columns and click the Add button. Once the column is in the Columns to add list, click OK to save the content type (see below).

(Click for a larger view)

The content type is now available for any document library or list.
Clicking on the Libraries link, all the document libraries for the site will be listed. To create a new one, click on the Create button, select Document Library under the Library group, enter a name and click the Create button (see below).

(Click for a larger view)

You will be redirected to the library. What you need to do now is to add the content type to the library. In the Ribbon, select the Library tab and click the Library Settings. In the Advanced Settings, you have to Allow management of content types and confirm the new setting to enable the addition of content types to the library (see below).

(Click for a larger view)

The Content Type to add to the library is the one you created few minutes ago. In the Library Settings, under the Content Types section, click Add from existing site content types. From the Available Site Content Types, click on the one you created and click the Add button (or directly double-click on the content type), then click the OK button (see below)

(Click for a larger view)

The new content type will be displayed under the Content Types section.
Now, if you want to restrict the available content types, it is possible to remove the unwanted ones from the list using the same configuration screen.
To be able to use the metadata for the navigation and the filtering in the different lists and libraries, the Metadata Navigation and Filtering site feature has to be activated. This can be done by going in the Site Actions menu, Site Settings then Manage Site Features under the Site Actions section (see below).

(Click for a larger view)

When you come back to your Library Settings, a new option named Metadata navigation settings will appear (see below).

Click on the link and for both Configure Navigation Hierarchies and Configure Key Filters, select the column that will store the metadata (see below).

It is time now to upload a new document. Once the document is selected, the next screen will prompt for a file name and to associate a metadata (see below).

Clicking on the button on the right of the field allows to select the value directly from the taxonomy picker (see below).

Do this for several documents.
On the left of the document library, a panel where some filtering can be done based on the metadata or keywords is displayed, but it is also possible to select in the tree the items we are interested in. On the fly, the list of documents or items is filtered offering a nice way to find the material we are interested (see below).

In this post we saw how to apply the metadata to a content type then to a document library to enable us to filter the data more easily (see below).

(Click for a larger view)

The Managed Metadata Service is not only responsible of the management of the enterprise taxonomy, but it also provides the content type syndication, which is something that will be covered in another post, so, stay tuned....

Side note : This is the first time I used docs.com to edit and prepare a post with the combination of skydrive for the images. It was quite interesting, really amazing and useful. No need to store any file on a local drive, everything was online. Really great ! This post is then also available on docs.com : http://docs.com/15K0

2010-05-13T14:49:00.000-07:00

The 8th of May, Microsoft released a set of two Information Worker Demonstration Virtual Machines with the 2010 wave of Office products. It includes the following software :

Windows Server 2008 R2
SQL Server 2008 R2
Office Communication Server 2007 R2
Visual Studio 2010
SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition
Office Web Applications
FAST Search for SharePoint 2010
Project Server 2010
Office Professional Plus 2010
Visio 2010
Project 2010
Office Communicator 2007 R2

To download and for the instructions, it is here : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=751fa0d1-356c-4002-9c60-d539896c66ce&displaylang=en

2010-05-06T02:03:00.000-07:00

Microsoft revealed couple of weeks ago a new service called docs.com.

This service offers the possibility to share Office 2010 documents and integrate directly them in Facebook. In other words, it will add a new tab in your Facebook profile, named Docs, where you will have all your published documents.

It will be possible to either upload Office 2010 documents, or to use the web version of Office 2010 to create your documents and publish them, except that it will not allow concurrent edition of the files, like in the Office Web Apps of SharePoint 2010.

The question I have in mind then is : what about Skydrive ? I have a Skydrive account which enables me to share documents in my Microsoft Live ecosystem, so what brings docs.com that is not in Skydrive ? How will Microsoft position this new product ?

Currently, the product is still in Beta and I am sure that new amazing features will be added in the next weeks or months that will help the users answering the questions....

2010-05-04T01:50:00.000-07:00

Designing a SharePoint 2010 workflow in Visio 2010 is just great. You can put the shapes on the design surface, draw the transitions, and it is really interesting for people that need visualization of their workflows. Unfortunately, this is where it stops. Because there is no direct link between Visio and SharePoint (meaning that no information from SharePoint comes to Visio), it is not possible to set the conditions or roles or users to the shapes. In other words, you can put a decision shape, but you cannot set the condition itself.

This is why the Visio file has to be exported into a .vwi (Visio Workflow Interchange) and then imported into SharePoint Designer 2010. After that, you have to set the conditions and all the parameters to the different shapes that are part of the workflow. Ok, so far, so good. But, how can I take my workflow and import it somewhere else ? How could I reuse the workflow with the parameters ?

When you export a workflow from SPD, you cannot import it, even if it is not in the same site. The message specifies that “This workflow cannot be imported because it was created in SharePoint Designer for a different site, or the original workflow has been moved or deleted. To move a workflow between sites, use Save as Template (.wsp file) instead of a Visio workflow drawing.

I tried to see what is inside a .vwi file to check what was different between the original .vwi file and the one exported by SPD. To do this, it is possible to rename the .vwi file into .zip and to look inside the compressed folder. The main difference is that an additional file has been generated, named “workflow.xoml.rules”. Deleting this file will make this file importable again and, surprisingly, all the settings that were set in the SPD are still there.

Ok, I did it several times, in the same environment (AD), but I can imagine that it is not a “supported” way to move workflows, knowing that exporting a .wsp and deploying it is the recommended way…

2010-04-22T14:49:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome on stage Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 !!!

Since today, both products are available for MSDN subscribers, earlier than I expected to say the truth. At the time I am writing this post, I already started the download :-)

2010-04-20T00:32:00.000-07:00

Friday last week, the SharePoint Team announced a major milestone in the SharePoint 2010 release process. One day after the TechDays in Geneva, Microsoft has frozen the code of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, meaning that it gives a go to release the software to the vendors.

Shortly, the bits should be available on MSDN (probably by the end of this week), but the official launch will take place the 12th of May.

2010-04-09T04:34:00.000-07:00

Because I had to move my virtual machines to VMWare to enable the 64-bits guest operating systems to be installed (for SharePoint 2010), I encountered a very weird problem.

When using the NATed network, the guest OS was able to connect the Internet, but then, I had a separate network on my LAN and it was not very convenient. That is the reason why I switched them to "Bridge" on one of my NIC. The guest OS was receiving an IP address from the DHCP, was able to access the local resources (router, shared printers, etc) but impossible to go on the web.

When pinging an internet server, I received a "host unreachable" message and I tried things like "route print", setting a fixed IP, nothing solved the issue. And googling was not that successful as many people had more or less the same issues and their resolution did not help me.

In a final try, I launched a nslookup for www.google.com and got a "DNS request timed out", which was strange as the guest DNS settings were exactly the same as my Windows 7 host OS. That popped something in my mind and tried to ping google and then browse google using its IP address directly and......it worked !

The problem was then the name resolution that was not done for the guest OS. I was then able to refine my search on the web and found this : http://communities.vmware.com/message/1472066 . At the end of the thread, the solution was there "...it turned out that ShrewSoft VPN client was interfering with VMWare...". As I have Shrew VPN installed, I checked the status of this service : started.

The final word is that I stopped the "ShrewSoft DNS Proxy Deamon" and everything was working like a charm, at least on the VMWare machines side.

2010-04-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

Today, I had a problem I never had before with SharePoint 2010, being with the Beta or even the RC.

My Managed Metadata Server was running and a proxy created. To that proxy, I connected a site and everything seemed to work correctly. Until I created a site column of type Managed Metadata. In the place where normally you can select the term store to use for the column, there was a message saying "The required feature is not enabled for this column type", which was quite strange as I checked several times and all the needed features were activated.

As most of the times, my friend google :-) helped me. I found this post, not that new so it means that it is a know problem, not only on the RC.

Basically, according to this post, you have to activate a feature that has the ID 73EF14B1-13A9-416B-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C. But this feature is not present in the feature list from the user interface, so you have to run the stsadm command for your site.

This solved the problem, but I really wonder why it happened only this time....

2010-03-28T03:02:00.000-07:00

Customer experience at Cotecna : Intranet Setup with SharePoint 2007
As the company grew quite well from its beginning, the need for an intranet became stronger with the years. Today, Cotecna has now more than 1500 users spread in 100 offices looking for an intranet.
The initiative started by a survey in order to understand what the users were needing and two main topics came out : an intranet and having a standardization of the corporate brand in the intranet. From this, a wish list has been established.
Once the management had agreed of the project, and the functional architecture drawn, it is the IT team that decided to use SharePoint 2007. The problem was, at that time, that there was very few knowledge of SharePoint 2007 internally.
The first phase of the project, focused on the corporate intranet portal, was also to have a network performance assessment to be sure that the infrastructure was in place to welcome such intranet.
Then, a first version of the look and feel was designed
This led to a communication portal using publishing and a set of useful tools : quick links available on all the pages, a who’s who using the user profiles of SharePoint to look for colleagues by office or department and some basic online training for using the intranet.
After more or less 6 months, the corporate intranet portal was in place.
In a second phase, the goal was to develop the business sites and to improve the look and feel to apply on the blogs, forums and wikis as well.
Because of the few internal resources skilled with SharePoint, a lot of consultants were hired to speed-up the progress of the project.
To drive the project implementation, workshops and scoping sessions were organized to get a wish list on which people worked on for 3 years.
An important thing is to have a governance plan in order to measure if the intranet fits the needs of the users (“where we are”) and also to enforce the use of the out-of-the-box features rather than doing development being using Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer.
A strong management buy-in is also important.
Another key to success is a close collaboration with the IT.
In terms of permission rules, Cotecna is using two schemes : AD groups and SharePoint groups. The former is used for corporate sites, the latter for private sites.
The acceptance of the users were got by many “awareness trainings” to teach how to use SharePoint, how to store and update files and also saying and repeating that putting files in SharePoint is a lot more secure than in e-mails.
Since the launch of the intranet, a strong demand from the users has been raised and in such situation, several advices are given :
Not too much selling the SharePoint features. The risk is to say “yes” to everybody and then facing an implementation issue because in fact the feature cannot be implemented without potentially heavy customization (development)
Many requests from local offices were coming and even if the first answer would have been “yes”, at the end, in order to avoid the proliferation of unmanaged sites, “no” was answered
No my sites

Several difficulties encountered during the project :
The company does not have Office 2007
No SLA was set between the IT and the users
Trainings were given online rather than on-site (for cost reason)
IT governance must be established, but was not present at the time of implementation.
A technical team with the required SharePoint skills is being built internally.
The need to industrialize the provisioning of the sites is raising.
One of the conclusion is that the look and feel does really help users to adopt the intranet.
Currently, the intranet is only supporting English, but the corporate news are published in 3 languages (English, French and Spanish).

Product Overview by Ventek International : Enterprise Search with FAST ESP Sharepoint 2010
With the buying of FAST by Microsoft, Microsoft moved from the challengers to the leaders Gartner quadrant in terms of search solutions.
With the explosion of content on the internet and intranet, it appears that more tha 80% of the content is unstructured. It means that it is documents like word, excel or others.
And today, not finding the right information at the right time has a cost. Also because decisions made on inaccurate data can be problematic.
FAST comes in two flavors :
   FAST Search for Internet Business that has a release cycle of 12 to 18 months
   FAST Search for SharePoint that has the same release cycle as SharePoint (36 months).
But both have the same underlying search platform.
The SharePoint search uses the content and the profiles, but when installing FAST, all the content is sent directly to FAST for indexing.
FAST has the same APIs as SharePoint 2010.
In the index building process, several steps are added, compared to the SharePoint 2010 search :
   Language detection
   Lemmatizer, enabling translating plurals to singular
   Date and time normalizer
   Tokenizer
   Vectorizer for similarity search
Some of the advantages of FAST :
   Visual Best Bets
   Similar search
   The standard search refinement done by SharePoint 2010 is made from the first 50 documents resulting the search. FAST goes beyond this limit
   The web parts are open and public
   Supports a lot of different data sources, being for structured or unstructured content. Each source has its own security model.

Technology Overview by McNext : Migration path(es) from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010
Proposed migration lifecycle :
   Learn, read the documentation, be sure that everything is documented
   Prepare, plan the migration, make a list of the solutions to deploy, establish the in which order the farms will be upgraded. Plan hardware upgrade. Identify the customizations. Make the items upgradeable, into solutions. The worst case is when a customization has been done in SharePoint Designer.
   Test, first on content database similar to the final content to migrate. An example with several site collections and several GB of data. It will give timings and errors that may come later
   Implement, do the migration according to the plan
   Validate, check the logs and reports. See if there are orphaned items
Some common problems :
   Missing dependencies between web parts
   Lack of disk space

Only two upgrade methods available : In-place upgrade or database attach.
During the migration, the database should be in read-only and when the content is huge, a parallel migration can be done.
If there is a lot of development done using the SharePoint API, it will be more difficult to migrate.
There is no direct migration from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2010. This will probably provided by 3rd parties. Moreover, the ServicePack 2 has to be deployed in order to enable the migration.
With the SP2 comes the stsadm –o preupgradecheck command that generates a html report giving the potential issues to the migration.
It is not mandatory to upgrade the look and feel to the SharePoint 2010 upgrade, but once migrated, it is possible to see how it looks like before switching to SP2010. Nevertheless, once switched, no roll-back is possible.
Now, with SharePoint 2010, all the master pages are using <div> positioning and no more relying on <table>.
As the Shared Services Provider has disappeared with SP2010, there is a lot of changes in Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration namespace of the APIs.
Ad finally, XSL is used everywhere for the list views, rather than CAML.

Customer experience at HEIG-Vd : SharePoint Online, Master thesis initiatives – SharePoint Competency Center
The competency center has started in 2007 at HEIG-Vd and involves around 10 people.
Currently, two courses at the IICT department are given on SharePoint : “Introduction” and “Using and administration of SharePoint”
The infrastructure is composed of about 40 web applications (20 of them are plain out-of-the-box) for around 3000 users
The challenges are : fast growing organization and availability of the people is best-effort basis. Also, the accumulation of experience is one of the challenges.
In terms of technology, the different projects are using a mix of other technology than SharePoint : Typo 3, Dot Net Nuke, etc.
A Bachelor thesis on SharePoint online is running and one of the objectives was to estimate the cost of several content management infrastructure :
   MOSS 2007 => 537.— CHF / month + setup
   Alfresco => 395.— CHF / month + setup
   SharePoint Online => 152.-- CHF / month for 15 users

Product Overview by SQLi : SharePoint workflows with Nintex
Some advanced activities of Nintex :
   Delegation / Escalation
   Scheduled Workflows
   Enterprise Integration (LDAP, Web Services, BizTalk Server)
Nintex also offers the possibility of approving and rejecting a task just by putting keywords in the e-mail answer. Particularly useful when on the field and using a mobile.
Then, a little presentation of the different activities available in the Nintex toolbox and of Nintex Reporting 2008.

The next Swiss SharePoint Club event will take place in Zurich the 15th of June and will contain : SharePoint development with the Microsoft tools, a presentation on the newsletter creation, an eGov project at the Canton de Zurich and how to build business critical solutions with SharePoint.

2010-03-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

A recurrent request with SharePoint 2007 was how to assign metadata to documents or list items. In fact, apart from using lists of keywords as custom columns in content types, there was no out-of-the-box way to manage taxonomy at the enterprise level. Therefore, the keywords list had to be duplicated and even worse, synchronized to assure the consistence of the taxonomy. Moreover, there was no way to send Content Types across site collections.

With SharePoint 2010 comes the Managed Metadata Service Application that you can connect to your web application. Thus, it offers a central mean to manage your enterprise keywords and their hierarchy (taxonomy). Also note that the same service can be used to push or publish a content type to other site collection or even other farm, which is a great feature, but that will not be described in this blog post.

This first article about Managed Metadata Service will lead you through the steps to manage your enterprise taxonomy.

But, before we start, some glossary :

Term store : the location where the taxonomy resides or are stored. There is only one term store per Managed Metadata Service.
Term group : a group containing common purpose term sets. It is also a security container, meaning that, like site collections, you can set the permissions at that level.
Term set : a taxonomy
Term : a keyword
Tag : in opposition to a term that is taken from a closed list of keywords, a tag can be freely defined by any user.

Now, start by defining our taxonomy. In the Central Administration (CA), under the Application Management section, go into Manage Service Applications. Click on the Managed Metadata Service proxy representing a connection or an instance of your Managed Metadata Service to open the term store.

On the left pane, the term store is displayed and it is under the name of your connection (or proxy) that you will create the term group. The Search box allows searching a specific term in case you don’t remember where or in which taxonomy a term is filed.

In the right pane, it is possible to select the Managed Metadata Service connection you want to modify. You can also delegate the administration of the term store to others by declaring them in the Term Store Administrators box. If you have installed language packs on the server, you have the possibility to define which of the language the default one is. Just below the Default Language drop-down, you can select in which languages the Term Store will be available, knowing that if a term is not translated, the default language will be used.

On the Term Store in the left pane, click on New Group and name it Geo. At that level, it is possible to delegate the management of the group to other people that will be responsible for managing the contributors and the group itself. A contributor is therefore able to add, change or remove terms in a group. Of course, that newly created group can be deleted by clicking on Delete Group.

At this level, there are two choices. The first one is to import the taxonomy directly from a comma delimited file. Thus, when you click on the term store, the right pane has a section named Sample Import in which a link to a sample is provided. Opening that file, you will see that the format is really not difficult to understand and that there is no need to go in the SDK or on the web to discover and understand an obscure format. Indeed, at each line of the file the complete hierarchy of the term is described. So, when you click on a Term Group, you can import such file. If for reason or another, the same term appear at the same level of the taxonomy, a warning will be displayed, but the file will be imported anyway, importing only once that term.

The second choice to define the taxonomy is the one that is described now. Here, there is probably a question that is popping-up in your mind. How to export a taxonomy ? At the time of writing this post, the feature is not present in the UI and will probably not be implemented in the final release as well. For this, there is no other choice than using the API to get the terms from the store. This will be described in another post.

On the newly created term group, click New Term Set and name it Political. Groups or users can be set as term set administrators. An important setting is the Submission Policy that tells if users can add terms when tagging items or documents. In other words, if terms can automatically be added if a user types a keyword not present in the taxonomy.

On the Term Set, the following actions can be done :

Create Term : To create terms or term nodes. This will be used to create the whole hierarchy of the taxonomy.
Copy Term Set : Copying a term set will create a new term set with terms that will be reused, keeping the original terms in the source term set.
Reuse Terms : Allows to take another term (or term node) to reuse in the selected term set. Typically, reusing a term is used when a keyword can describe something that can be part of more than one hierarchy. For example, in a industrial company, an engine can be a product, but can also be a project. It means that it will be present in both product and project metadata hierarchy.
Move Term Set : Moves the term set from a term group to another one.
Delete Term Set : Self-explanatory, this will delete the entire Term Set.

In the right pane, you can see that another tab is present, named Custom Sort. By default, the terms will be sorted as they have been entered or as they appear in the tree. The problem is that sometimes, you prefer to change the order to promote some terms. Clicking on Custom Sort will propose two choices, the default one being the Use default sort order according to current language. The second option, Use custom sort order allows you define yourself the order in which the terms should appear.

From here, the goal is to enter several terms.

To make a term available for tagging items or document, the Available for Tagging must be checked. When language packs have been installed, it is possible to select the language you want to edit. In Other Labels, it is possible to add one synonym per line that will be associated to the term. It means a user can select a synonym in the list that will automatically translated into the base term. At the bottom of the right pane, the list of term store where the term is available is listed.

On a term, the following actions can be done :

Create Term : Same as for a term set, creates a new term
Copy Term : Creates a copy of the term and, contrary to the same term set action, this will not reuse the term, but really will copy it.
Reuse Term : Allows to select a source term to reuse under the selected term.
Merge Terms : Once a term is selected it merges it with the target term selected in the pop-up window. In other words, the term selected will be a synonym of the target term.
Deprecate Term : Makes the term no-longer available when tagging an item or a document. It is still there in the store, but, from a user point of view, it is like if it was deleted.
Move Term : Moves a term into another term
Delete Term : Completely deletes a term from the store
Copy Term with Children : Available only on node terms and creates a complete copy of the term with all the children and their hierarchy.

This closes this first blog post on the Managed Metadata Service. The next one will focus on how to use the taxonomy we defined in a web application or a site collection. But, before closing this blog post, there is another question that we should ask. How to use external data as metadata ? Currently, nothing is done for this, but we can guess that ISVs will make tools and connectors to allow this functionality in SharePoint 2010.

2010-03-07T12:05:00.000-08:00

The next Swiss SharePoint Club event will take place at the HEIG-Vd in Yverdon.

In the agenda, some customer experience at Cotecna, a presentation of the FAST ESP SharePoint 2010 and also a presentation on the migration from SP2007 to SP2010.

The complete agenda is available on the club sps web site.

2010-03-07T10:33:00.000-08:00

The launch date is known, it is going to be the 12th of May at 11am EST that Stephen Elop, from the Microsoft Business Division, will announce the launch of the 2010 version Office and SharePoint suite : http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx#fbid=D25IVliERtZ

So, 66 remaining days to wait....

2010-02-20T10:15:00.000-08:00

After my Wifi access problem, earlier in the day, I faced another little problem when I wanted to save a document from Office Word 2010 into a SharePoint 2010 document library :

(click for a larger view)

Apparently, this is not an error displayed only in this situation and it seems occuring independantly from the Office version or even the SharePoint version. In fact, it is also related to the way Windows Server 2008 R2 works locally. Remember, I am using my server as a workstation.

The only thing that has to be done is to add the "Desktop Experience" feature and it will work well.

Notice also that before installing this feature, I was also unable to create a "New Document" from a document library, the template was simply not downloaded to the Office client. This also has been fixed by the "Desktop Experience" feature

2010-02-20T10:05:00.000-08:00

When I started, few days ago, to prepare a demo about SharePoint 2010 metadata management, I would not have thought it would be that difficult to setup just the machine.

To be able to take the demo with me, I installed a laptop with Windows Server 2008 R2 and the necessary stuff and problems occured when I came nomad with it, using the wireless. Something that is not really rocket science, after all. The problem was that it was completely unable to connect any wireless network

What has to be known, nevertheless, is that on a Windows Server 2008 server box freshly installed, almost nothing is installed. Therefore, to enable to discovery and then to connect on an available WiFi, you have to add the "Wireless LAN Service" feature as it is showed in the picture below :

(Click the picture for a larger view)

So, after few minutes of installation, I was finally able to connect on the net.

2010-02-11T12:13:00.000-08:00

4 new certifications about SharePoint 2010 will come in June this year, completing the Microsoft offer and to align the cursus and certification path with the release of SP 2010.

Two of them will be for IT Professionals and related to the configuration and administration of the solution :

TS - Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring

PRO - SharePoint 2010, Administrator

The two others will be for the developers :

TS - Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development

PRO - Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications

2010-02-04T00:23:00.000-08:00

An introduction training is available on the Office Beta web site about the new SharePoint 2010 user interface. During the course, you will go have an look at the ribbon, how to work with lists and document libraries and also how to edit and create pages and sites.

The course is free and available here : http://officebeta.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/overview-RZ101806469.aspx?lc=en-us&section=1

2010-01-31T00:12:00.000-08:00

For those people that want to evaluate and try Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, Microsoft released last week the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration Virtual Machine.

It seems to be ready for Hyper-V and it encompasses in fact two virtual machines :

1.- A domain controller server with SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2010 and the Office Suite 2010

2.- A joined Windows Server 2008

As everything has a price, the download weight 13.5GB :-)

2010-01-27T07:24:00.000-08:00

Google is working on a new language named "Go" and they call it a "systems programming language". It is not the intent to make a review or to compare it with other existing language, far from that, but it worth having a look at that new language.
First, the syntax is similar to the languages that most of the people are used to. It is more or less the same as C or Java. A bit closer to C anyway for some reason described further in this post. One notable difference is that the type is defined after a variable name, for example.
One of the goal of the language is to simplify the code or to make it less verbose. But, as a tradeoff, it makes the code reading more difficult, or maybe it is just a matter of getting used to the syntax. For example, there is only one keyword for the loops : for
A thing I find nice is the possibility for a function to return more than one value and therefore they introduced multiple return functions.
The other features of the language are summarized here :
Anonymous functions
Slices; a part of an 0-based array
Maps; other word for dictionary
Object orientation using structures; which makes it closer to C than Java and in my opinion not the best thing the language could have
Interfaces
No inheritance; Instead of supporting object inheritance, the creators of the language prefer to use composition of structs
Real-Time flavour; My ADA background reveals to the surface when I see the constructs of Go to support multitasking. What I liked a lot in ADA was the possibility to write methods that were callable from other tasks and how easy it was to create a multi-task program. With Go, it seems that simple. You define a method and rather than calling it normally, you prefix it with the keyword "go" :

go MyParallelTask;

Communication in a multi-task program can also be a challenge, being just to exchange information or data or just to synchronize two tasks. With Go, you need to instantiate a channel and use arrows (channelname <- value and variablename := <- channelname) to send to or received data from the channel. That channel can be synchronous or in other words blocking enabling the synchronization between two tasks or can by asynchronous (under certain limits given by the buffer size of the channel).

On the side of what is not in Go, we have :
Generics or templates
Exceptions

For those two points, the Go team has not yet decided if they would add these features for the reasons that can be read here : http://golang.org/doc/go_lang_faq.html#generics

In conclusion, it is too early to say if this language will succeed and gain many market shares in the programming world. It will mainly depend on the built-in libraries and the platform that will support it. Less important for such system languages is the interoperability features and how a Go program will be able to communicate with the external world. Another success factor is the developer community. Today, Go is only available for Linux or Mac OS X and probably some tools or IDEs would be needed in the future, but not sure because as it is mentioned a number of times, the aim of the language is system programming language and therefore not playing in the same field as C# and other high-level languages.

2010-01-19T23:44:00.000-08:00

Title : Essential SharePoint 2007 - Delivering High-Impact Collaboration

Authors : Scott Jamison, Mauro Cardarelli, Susan Hanley

Summary :
Deploying SharePoint and leaving it to the users and not monitoring it is the best way for failure. This is known and true also for non-SharePoint projects. But what really lacks with SharePoint is how to demonstrate the management what could bring SharePoint in an organization and how to improve the SharePoint infrastructure during its life. In other words, when deploying SharePoint, governance is one of the important keys to success.
This books not only describes the SharePoint functionalities but also gives some guidance to better know your organization and how to solve its collaboration problems and is the first SharePoint book I read that is talking about "information architecture". It describes the different 2003 to 2007 migration options, what are the possible backup, restore and disaster recovery scenarios. Then it goes through Records Management, workflows, Search and finally Business Intelligence, providing plenty of step-by-step examples and screenshots

Onthe other side, I had the chance to attend the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas session of Scott and Susan that was very interesting and a source of inspiration to make a SharePoint deployment a success not only from a provider point of view, but also a success for the users.

Review :
This book is not for developer or technical people, but more for people that need to sell SharePoint as a collaboration platform. For me, it is not for end-users as well. We can feel that the book is not relying only on the functional expertise of SharePoint but also on the way information workers are working with IT and their habits. Excellent examples can be taken to put in front the business value or the benefits of the platform. Finally, I think this book is a good starter for talking about SharePoint governance.

2010-01-16T08:38:00.000-08:00

Title : Foundations of BizTalk Server 2006

Author : Daniel Woolston

Summary :
BizTalk Server 2006 was until last year, the latest version of the middleware product from Microsoft. Since, the new version, BizTalk Server 2009, has been released. Despite BizTalk Server 2006 is not the first or second version of the product, it really needs documentation on how to use and develop on this platform as it is absolutely difficult or impossible to start on such product like this.
The book is structured around the different component or pieces of BizTalk : Messaging, Schemas, Maps, Ports, Orchestrations. It covers all the aspects of the product even tackling the application deployment.
It is full of useful screenshots and the explanations are clear enough even if you don't have the software at hand.

Review :
Working with BizTalk since couple of years, I found the book quite basic. Ok, the title contains "Foundations", so don't expect advanced explanation but rather take it as a first look at BizTalk. A good example is to read it before an intermediate or advanced training. At the end, it gives an excellent overview of what can be done and how can specific problems can be solved with BizTalk Server 2006. Another good point is that it is not a big pad to read and can be absorbed in a week-end :-)

2010-01-16T08:35:00.000-08:00

Title : SharePoint 2007 User's Guide: Learning Microsoft's Collaboration and Productivity Platform

Author : Seth Bates, Tony Smith

Summary :
This book described the different functionality of SharePoint 2007 from a users and power users point of view. Therefore, this book is not technical and is not showing any code.
First, the notion of sites, lists and document libraries are described with a lot of screenshots. Then, the book is going through workflows, policies and the different way of page personalization, finishing by two case studies or solutions solving document management and project collaboration in few steps.

Review :
Definitely, this book is not for techies or advanced users. Nevertheless, as the book is really user oriented, you can learn some functionalities that are less exposed or used but nevertheless very useful. It means that if people know already SharePoint or working with the product on a daily basis, it can be read quickly.
The two solutions presented at the end of the book are very good examples of how to address typical collaboration problems quickly and providing a high value without going into an expensive development project.

2010-01-05T10:20:00.000-08:00

The next meeting of the Swiss SharePoint Club will take place in Basel. The topics will be around workflows and projects management.

For more information and registration, it is here : http://clubsps.wordpress.com/

2009-12-03T00:17:00.000-08:00

Since a bit of time now, the Azure Platform pricing has been released by Microsoft. It has the merit of being published, but sounds difficult to estimate what is needed when starting a project or the implementation of a solution. Hopefully, this will become clearer with the time and usage...

On the other side, MSDN susbcribers have some benefits we can see here.

Start date : 1st of January and available in Switzerland !

2009-11-28T14:47:00.000-08:00

If you encounter the "Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport..." error when you want to display the properties of a SharePoint 2010 Application Service (like the "Managed Metadata Service"), it is likely that it is a known issue of the WCF framework.

Microsoft has just published few days ago the hotfix KB976462 available on the connect site that solves the issue and enables the edition of the Application Services properties.

2009-11-20T07:38:00.000-08:00

After the PowerShell issue, the HotFix KB971831 available here has to be applied in order to enable the SharePoint 2010 setup to perform....

Next...

2009-11-20T07:14:00.000-08:00

When installing SharePoint 2010 Beta, an error will occur during the pre-requisites install. Indeed, PowerShell V2 CTP3 will be unable to install because a previous version is already installed.

So, in the setup of SharePoint 2010 Beta setup check-list, add : remove PowerShell V1 (Server Manager => Features => Remove Features and click Next to start the wizard)

2009-11-10T23:52:00.000-08:00

For its 14th meeting, the Swiss SharePoint Club made it really well. According to the president, more than 150 people are attending the event, the achievement of 3 months of organization.
The keynote is done by Nicolette Du Toit, SharePoint Product Manager for Switzerland, who has a nice surprise for all the attendees : a pass to get access to all the presentations of the SharePoint Conference 2009. She also announces the setup of a community website around SharePoint : http://www.sharepointcommunity.ch/. It should be live around January 2010. Then, she gives the availability dates for the SharePoint 2010 public beta :
18th of November for everyone
16th of November for the MSDN and TechNet subscribers

The event has been split in 6 different presentation of about 20 minutes. As some of the information were already give during the SPC09 event, only the first three presentations are summarized with the occasion to precise or add other informatio.

Search :
With the acquisition of FAST 18 month ago, Microsoft stays now in the upper right of the Gartner magic quadrant. One of the things FAST adds to SharePoint is the ability to extract the keywords from the content and proposing them to the user in the search refinements bar on the left of the window. In a search result, as an example, PPTX preview will be available without having to download and open the file. On the other side, a user can specify keywords for which he wants to appear in the people search result.

Communities :
This presentation was explaining that people needed more than just wikis, blogs, people search and mysites. They now want to have access to pictures, videos, the person’s hobbies, interests or other job information. This is what offers SharePoint 2010 among a lot of other things.
A feature I missed in the previous post is that now, in a document library, it is possible to select more than one files and to do a multiple check-in / check-out

Composites :
Demo on creating lists with the new SharePoint Designer. By the way, SharePoint Designer 2007 will not be able to connect a SharePoint 2010 server and vice-and-versa. The demo also showed the creation of an InfoPath form with validation rules. The interesting thing is the possibility, with SharePoint workspace, to take these forms offline with the validation rules. Also, during the definition of a workflow, the designer supports the “Intellisense”, proposing activities starting with the characters already typed in the activity name field.

2009-11-09T09:06:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, for its 14th meeting, the Swiss SharePoint Club will unveil the new SharePoint 2010 to people of the french part of Switzerland. This event is sponsored by Microsoft Suisse

Different talks about Search, Sites, Communities and the other functional areas described here will be presented.

See you there !

2009-11-08T09:03:00.000-08:00

The SharePoint Conference 2009 was full of interesting and promising information around the next version of SharePoint : SharePoint 2010. During the 4 days of the conference, it was possible to see the new SharePoint in action, see demos or even talk to people who experienced the new features of the product.

The conference started with a keynote introduced by Tom Rizzo, SharePoint Senior Director at Microsoft who provided already a number of impressive coming features and some funny facts about the conference :

The SharePoint conference was sold out several weeks before.

More than 7400 attendees present in Vegas

7.5 miles of cable only for the WiFi

Just before handing over to Steve Ballmer, a video sharing testimonials about the implementation of SharePoint 2010 has been shown to us.

Surprisingly, when Steve Ballmer came on stage, it was not the tornado we used to see in other conferences, but it is true that I did not have the chance to see him in recent shows. Nevertheless, it seems it was THE SharePoint conference he had to do – it was the very first SP conference for him.

First, the famous 6 part diagram showing the main SharePoint areas has been changed and….stayed the same. Indeed, the color has changed, from a multi-coloured one to a blue one and the words have been adapted, but the meaning behind is, in my opinion, the same :

The center part, Platform Services has been renamed Sites

Collaboration is now Communities

Portal moved to Compositions

Business Intelligence replaced by Insights

Content Management simplified by Content

Search has been kept Search

The only part that disappeared is Business Forms from the 2007 diagram

Starting from here, in this post, it is not a transcription of the keynote only, but rather a summary or a compilation of the sessions I attended.

Windows SharePoint Services gives place to SharePoint Foundation. As its predecessor, the foundation is the building block for SharePoint 2010 and will be free. The first public beta version of the product will be available mid-November, with a final release expected the first half of 2010.

New or Improved functionalities

Sites

In SharePoint 2007, creating sites or team workspaces was already very efficient, enabling people to work on documents together or to share knowledge in a convenient way.

With SharePoint 2010, it is going to be pushed to the next level, by reducing the post-backs to the server and using extensively AJAX, avoiding the full page refresh.

First, in terms of user interface and Microsoft Office integration, SharePoint 2010 adopted the ribbon providing a seamless experience between the Microsoft Office clients and the web. The ribbon, which is extensible, presents the most relevant actions to the user making him even more efficient during his work. The next version of SharePoint will also support a multilingual not only at the user interface level, but also enabling the users to configure fields of lists to support multiple languages.

Microsoft has also improved the support of standards, such as WCAG, XHTML, REST and so on.

With Groove, it was possible for a user to take his documents offline from a library, to work on them in a plane or any disconnected place and then synchronizing them with the repository. The new version of that client is now called SharePoint Workspace 2010 and enables not only to take documents offline, but also an entire site content or lists.

Communities

Microsoft has taken example of what has been doing outside, on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking platform. Of course, Microsoft does not want corporate data on Facebook, far from that. In order to bring the social networking within the enterprise, they improved the mySite feature a lot, bringing status update to the user profile, social tagging also called folksonomies, bookmark sharing or even the NoteBoard which is more or less the equivalent of the Facebook’s wall.

For each activities published by a user, it will be possible to rate it, sending your interest to his work and influencing the ranking of the activities in the search result.

Blogs were introduced in SP2007 for users, but now, it is also possible to have team blogs where all team members can post information to give visibility to their activities

Content

On the content management side, a lot of new features are arriving. The very first one that needs to mention is something that was expected since the web 2.0 came around. Metadata and taxonomies. Metadata and taxonomies will be defined centrally and could be extended in the different sites and could be assigned to any kind of documents. Here, a distinction has to be made between the taxonomies and the folksonomies. The first one is a closed list of value for a given metadata whereas the second one is more related to tagging and defined by the different users in their own context.

Based on the metadata assigned to a document upload time, it will be possible to SharePoint to store directly the document in a specific library or even in a folder automatically. This will help the user in selecting the correct location for his upload.

With the notion of document set, it will be possible to link documents, sharing the same metadata or linking them to a workflow. In certain cases, it could replace the folders. It will also be possible to define a home page to document sets.

In terms of record management, a nice feature I was looking for in 2007 is the document locking when it has been identified as a record or an official document.

Search

A big step has been done on the search. With the strategic acquisition of FAST, Microsoft offers now an enterprise-class search engine. Nevertheless, when such power will be not needed, Microsoft offers the entry-level search engine with its Search Server 2010 Express and with SharePoint 2010 another improved search engine.

When the search result will be displayed, it will be proposed to refine the results for a more precise search or find more relevant information. To better support the people looking for information they don’t know how to spell, SharePoint introduces the phonetic search, especially while searching for people.

Insights

With SharePoint 2010 we will see the merge of Performance Point with SharePoint to better support the need for dashboards and scorecards. At the same time, while Excel services proven its usefulness and efficiency, Microsoft has integrated Visio in SharePoint 2010 and now proposing Visio Services allowing the rendering of Visio diagrams within the browser.

Composites

Probably the best achievement in this area is the disappearance of the BDC (Business Data Catalog). Ok, not really...it has been replaced by the BCS (Business Connectivity Services) offering what the BDC was missing : the ability to update the remote data sources.

In parallel to Visio Services, SharePoint 2010 arrives with Access Services to allow users to develop their Access application within Access and then publish it into SharePoint, offering it to others users that will interact with the application from within the web browser.

IT staff dislike custom code in SharePoint. It kills the performance of the whole farm, it needs maintenance, it requires people to deploy and monitor, to summarize it costs a lot. In order to enable site collection administrators to deploy custom code, SharePoint 2010 brings the sandbox which enables the farm administrators to set thresholds for the CPU usage, memory and other resources. Of course, sandboxed applications will have some limitations as they will not be allowed to get access to farm level objects for example.

For IT Pros

Of course, the new SharePoint comes with some performance enhancement and several demos I saw were quite impressive. One of them showed more than 1 million of document in a library being filtered by a metadata in less than a second. Awesome ! At the same time, it is again emphasized that the first performance killer with SharePoint is the customization.

Upgrading from 2007 for 2010 was also an important point that most of the people at the conference wanted to hear about. First, and it is not a surprise, 2007 and 2010 will not be interoperable. Then, several tools will be available to help the upgrade to 2010. One of them is the upgrade checker to get information of what is upgradeable. For a visual upgrade, a preview of the user interface, available from the Site Actions menu, will enable the administrator to see what the user interface will look like.

The important thing during a deployment is that the server will need an internet connection in order to be able to download the pre-requisites automatically.

To help administrators to troubleshoot or monitor their SharePoint farms, SharePoint 2010 will provide several reports giving, for example, the slowest page of the sites. These reports will be based on a dedicated database which will use an open schema to allow extensions and custom reports. On the pages, there will be a button available for administrators or developers to get access to the diagnostic page with the timings of the page.

For Developers

What will probably make the developers and even more the IT people, is that SharePoint 2010 will run on a Windows Vista or Windows 7 machine. No need then to have a dedicated Windows Server. But, it will require a 64-bit machine.

Then, the template gallery will contain all the possible SharePoint artifacts, from the list through, event receivers, BCS designer or feature designer to avoid the developer to write XML manually. From the server explorer, it will be possible to browse the different objects of the site.

For the testing, Visual Studio 2010 will be smart enough to detect if the solution to deploy has already been deployed before and will retract it if necessary.

2009-10-27T04:20:00.000-07:00

While I was in Vegas, I could not resist getting a Zune. I was quite used to my Ipod, but I needed a player with the possibility of viewing wmv videos without needing to convert the format. Yes, what a pain to convert wmv with a tool and getting a video with sound totally desynchronized ! Seems that the Ipod format is a specialist in such annoying behavior.

So, just a stop at Fry's to get the 16GB Zune HD and enjoy :-)

The screen is great with a excellent quality, and the navigation as simple as on my Ipod.

That is unfortunate that it is not sold in Europe, but this will probably be the case soon and the consequence is that Marketplace is not available for me and the name of the radio stations are the ones coming from the US. Oh, and it also needs the power adapter and converter but not a problem if you charge it on the USB...

Definitely my new mp3 player...

2009-10-17T15:19:00.000-07:00

While packing my stuff for LV, I just saw that the SPC09 keynote will be streamed live, on the conference web site.

You can also follow or join the discussion on twitter : http://twitter.com/search?q=-RT%20spconf+OR%20%23SPC09#search?q=-RT%20spconf%20OR%20%23SPC09

2009-10-05T23:27:00.000-07:00

The Dell Latitude D600 is quite old now, but I wanted to give it a chance to be recycled in a W7 machine.

After the installation of the OS that went well, I had several problems with the wirelesss network adapter and the graphic card. Checking on the Dell web site, no Windows 7 or Windows Vista drivers for such hardware. Finally, installing the Windows XP ones made it and except the fact that today I don't have the Aero themes working (needs a WDDM driver) everything seems working well.

Notice that the performances are very good for a pretty old laptop.

2009-09-26T10:08:00.000-07:00

Just received the confirmation that I will be attending the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas :

In the meantime, for those who cannot attend, there are already some information from MS about the new version of SharePoint. Not a lot, but it is a start....

2009-01-15T01:21:00.000-08:00

Summary :
F# is a new language that is coming in the pipe of Microsoft for the Visual Studio platform. It aims to tackle the functional programming paradigm eventhough it is possible to use the imperative or object oriented programming.
Robert Pickering starts his book by explaining the basics of F#, how to get and how to use the tools. Then, the book describes the F# syntax to be used in the three language paradigm, functional programming, imperative programming and finally object oriented programming. Among other things, the notion of type inference is presented. Once the syntax is presented, the book describes the way to develop web, windows or even WPF applications using the .NET framework. Data access is also addressed using the current technologies available, such as ADO.NET or LINQ. Then, a quick look at DSLs, compilation and code generation is given, presenting the lex and yacc tools coming with the language. Finally, a full chapter is dedicated to the interoperability between .NET and F#, because even if F# is based on the CLI, the language introduces several types that are not available in the other .NET languages (C# or VB.NET).

Review :
Discovering a new language is really interesting and with F#, it is the occasion to see a new paragigm, functional programming. In really short, with F#, everything is a value, even a function. It means that you can use a function as a function parameter. The concept of type inference is also very attracting. The book is very easy to understand and a lot of little examples are explained in details, making the reading very fast. The first half of the book is dedicated to the language itself. The second half is more on using the .NET framework and I would say that it is the less interesting of the book. Indeed, during the first part, you have came across various examples using types and classes of the framework and user interface development being web or windows, or data access meaning that the second part does not bring a lot a information. Once you know these topics from the .NET documentation or from another book and once you have read how to access the .NET BCL from F#, then this part is pretty straightforward and not really useful. Moreover, the examples used to depict the topics are more explaining how to use the BCL classes than the language itself. Nevertheless, the last parts discussing the interoperability and the possibility of generating DSLs are more interesting.
My final words are that it is a very intersting book if you want to see another land (functional programming). Unfortunately, on my bookshelf, I also have "Expert F#" that I just opened to see what is inside and I saw that it takes the explanations and descriptions of the language from the beginning. If I had knew that before, maybe I would have bought this one instead. So, if the goal is just to scratch the surface of F#, "Foundations of F#" is the best suited, otherwise, if the goal is to go really deeper in the topic, then prefer "Expert F#" (a review of that one will be posted).

2009-01-09T07:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the Microsoft's CEO Steve Balmer announced the public availibility of the first beta release of Windows 7. I had a chance to have a quick look at it and the first impression I had was : "it's fast. And ?".

Stop kidding, but if you don't like the Aero style user interface, be prepared to be a bit overloaded. They have put one more layer of Aero and the new glassy toolbar simplifies the application navigation by replacing the multiple application icon by only one and allowing the user to see a preview of the running application when hovering the mouse on the icon.

I played few minutes with it, using minesweeper as well :-) and I like pretty well the user interface, the rapidity and also the fact that it did not crash during the hour I tested it.

A nice little feature is the possibility to display the desktop by just moving the mouse. On the other side, Microsoft says connecting home devices will be really easier than before (home computer). That are only few features that will be in Windows 7. This new version of Windows will probably be released earlier than originally expected in order to try to make people forget about the Windows Vista flop.

Sounds promising...

2009-01-06T02:15:00.000-08:00

Back to business from some vacations...
First of all, I would like to wish a happy new year and all the best to the readers.

As it is the case every year, people are trying to take resolutions for the new year and I am afraid that I am one of them.
Regarding this blog, I have a couple of points I would like to address this year.

The very first one is to make some cleanup in the blog, such as clearing the spam in the trackbacks and reorganizing the categories.
Then, I would like to upgrade to the last version of the engine, v2.2, released last october.
One goal I would like to achieve this year is to be more active and posting more regularly. Once a week for example. This is going to be quite challenging, I know that already, because the goal is to produce content but not only for the sake of writing stuff.
Finally, and this is something pending since few years now (since I left LooKware in fact), the main web site really needs to be put online. On this side, some work needs to be done to find the right look and feel and also to write the content.

Quite a lot on the plate, and I hope that at the end of 2009, most (all) of the points will be addressed.

2008-11-21T14:48:00.000-08:00

Today, we can extract 7 major trends in the software development process. First, the search becoming a lot more important. Indeed, searching for files, emails and finding a way to organize the information is now crucial. It is the same when we write code. Then, a new user-experience is coming, using new paradigm in the way the development tools are proposed (Rich User Interface). In terms of agility, there is a need for Intellisense and Quick Info. More and more, the develompent is done in a declarative way that allows the develompent tool to do all the plumbing for us. The three remaining trends are the support for legacy code, the Cloud that influence the next steps to adapt Visual Studio, and the concurrency.
During her first demo, Karen Liu showed us the new functionnalities of the QuickSearch that now works accross languages (C#, VB.NET, etc) for types. It offers also a "search as I type" functionnality. It can also be used to search for a file.
With Visual Studio 2010, when selecting a symbol, all references to it are highlighted. But it is done only for the one that have the same signature or type. The user interface, written in WPF, can easily be extended and Karen showed us how all references to a symbol present in a file can be displayed in the margin of Visual Studio.
Adding unit tests is simpler and handled directly by the user interface with an automatic generation of the classes. The Intellisense has now a "filter as you type" feature that speeds up the code writing.
Arriving on a running project can be difficult. Even more when a lot of code is present. The calls dependency is a new feature that allows the developer to see what the code is calling, and which part of the code is calling the one selected.
Another great feature is the historical debugger. Imagine that the runtime hits a breakpoint, it is now possible to come back in the code and to execute step by step the program. In other words, it is a kind of replay. The Functions and Diagnostics Event allows to see what are the events that occured and also the exceptions raised, being caught or not. It is also possible now to record the execution of a program in order to send this to someone to reproduce the scenario.
This session was the last of a great TechEd. Not a lot of things were announced, but the content was interesting and technically advanced for some of them.
Next year, the TechEd will take place in Berlin between the 2nd and the 6th of November 2009 at the Messe Berlin (Germany). Hope to see you there.

2008-11-21T14:47:00.000-08:00

Udi Dahan explains us that today, a lot of books on patterns and practices are existing on the market. But reading them and knowing them by heart does not help if we don't design the application with flexibility in mind. He takes the examples of the Visitor and the Strategy patterns that could easily be overused by architects leading to a collaps of the application structure. The goal here is not the have an absolute flexibility, but to have flexibility where it makes sense and where it is needed. The same phenomenon occured with the use of hooks.
So, Mr. Dahan tells us that we should make the roles explicit and by implementing them with interfaces. Before, when we had an entity that needed to be validated, we implemented a .Validate() method in the entity. That made sense, because only that entity was able to know how to validate itself. But, what happends if in the entity, another one is linked that, in turns, need to be validated. It could be fine if the call sequence was always the same. If it is not, then the trouble comes. Then, the goal is to identify the roles and to make them as interfaces. So, in the case of a validator, an entity templated ("<T entity>") interface should be created and a specific entity validator implementing this interface should be implemented as well, so that a Service Locator can return such entity that will be called for validation.
It is also possible to use that same pattern to differentiate the roles that can be applied to a same entity. Mr. Dahan uses that same pattern to implement message handler.

2008-11-21T14:45:00.000-08:00

The story of Metropolis has been running since a while now and the goal of Metropolis was to draw a parallel between Cities, Transportation, Manufacturing and Applications.
Pat Helland compares IT Shops with Cities, Manufactured Goods with Structured Data and Operations, Retail with Business Processes and Factories and Buildings with Applications. He starts by telling that initially, buildings contained people and stuff, but evolved into a model where bringing in and out stuff and people in addition to connecting them became more and more important. The same with applications where traditionnaly, they were built to interface with people, containing data and performing operations. This is changing in the sense that it integrates more the personal view of work. Moreover, the dissemination of the knowledge increases and the tendancy to directly perform cooperative operations increases as well.
Pat makes the distinction between three kind of buildings and applications : High Road, Low Road and No Road.
On the building side, we can disringuish a High Road one by its facilities to evolve little by little gaining character. They receive investment and they will be adding new extensions or wings. It is the same with High Road Applications, that are typically Line-of-Business applications, requiring a very high availability. We can also call them packaged applications.
The Low Road buildings have a lower cost, but they have no-style and a high turnover. Most often, its inexpensive constructions. On the other side, they are highly adaptable. For applications, we can compare this model to application built by end users, without the need of the IT department. And if the application is no more useful, it can be thrown away. Typically, Excel spreadsheets, Access databases or even SharePoint are considered as Low Road applications by Pat Helland.
Then, it is presented the shearing layers for buildings, such as Stuff, Space Plan, Building Infrastructure, Skin, Structure and Site. Everyone of these layers have their own lifetime, from 60 years for the structure to 5 years for the Space Plan. Again, the same parallel can be done for applications.
The goal, and the conclusion of the presentation, is to leverage the middleware and to build applications for reuse, in order to reduce their costs. This can be done by asking two questions : Who Makes Money ? and Who Saves Money ?
In terms of application component reuse, today, there is not yet a market place. On the Middleware side, the vendors make money and the users save money at the condition that they have to work on a SOA Middleware. For service reuse, it is non-existent today. Moreover, there is a need to standarize on schemas, contracts and branding. Finally, applications are evolving to become services and they should be designed for change.

2008-11-21T14:43:00.000-08:00

Basically, S+S is about externalizing services like we have done with the power. Instead of having every home producing power, we have now plants that are producting it, and home connecting to the grid to get what they need. It is more or less the same with the Cloud. Someone is hosting the resources for you, no need to care about scalability, failover and so on, letting you concentrate on the development of your application. This allows also to publish your own services into the Cloud, making them available for others. A parallel can be done with the transport systems :
A car corresponds to the on-premises infrastructure. But it has a maintenance cost and needs to be fixed or patched.
Car renting is better and is like hosting.
On its side, the train is equivalent to the Cloud. No need to care about the maintenance at all, but, the downside is that you can not change the schedule or where it goes.
So, when looking for the Cloud, it is looking for availability, scaling, but you have no control on it. It also means that the Cloud is not the silver bullet and is not for everything.
To manage the identity, the .NET Services (one of the Cloud services) relies on external authorities. The enterprise defines the identities and roles and build a trust relationship with an external authority that will be trust by the Cloud. It means also that .NET Services needs to support several technologies.
It leads to, at least, two challenges : to focus on the use of SOA, and on resources decentralization.
To support the ID management, Cloud is using tools such as claims, tokens and Security Token Services.
Finally, to control the identities on .NET Services, there is a MMC to manage them.

2008-11-17T12:50:00.000-08:00

Mike Flasco starts by executing an application that downloads the slides from the cloud.....
The goal of the presentation is to explain what are the Data Services proposed by Microsoft in the Cloud. With Data Services, not only the entities are stored, but also the relationships as links. Moreover, it directly supports the paging or direct query.
The HTTP verb controls the operations done on the data : GET for SELECT, POST for INSERT and DELETE for....DELETE.
It means that every resources is accessible through a URI.
to setup a model in Data Services you need :
1.- Create the data model in Visual Studio, generating a edmx file
2.- Create a .svc service inheriting from DataService<DataModel>
3.- Setting the access rights
4.- Call the service => That's it !
Entity exposition can be set per entity (read only, read/write, all)
In order to support row level security, it is possible to implement interceptors that are executed before the GET, PUT, etc.
When doing a LINQ request, under the cover, it sends a URI request to the Data Services and the same thing happens then we use the object model.

2008-11-17T12:48:00.000-08:00

Search Server 2008 is a new brand for SharePoint Server 2007 for Search.
Among other things, it has a simplified install, an enhanced administration interface, new federation capabilities, some performance and stability enhancements and does not have document limits.
Search Server 2008 coms in two version : Search Server 2008, which allows a distributed topology and licensed per server, and Search Server 2008 Express for a single server install only, which is free. In terms of features, there is no difference at all.
Michal Gideoni explains when we need to customize the Search. Basically, every time the user interface needs to be modified, the custmozation can be put inplace, and starts with a demo on how to create a new search tab.
To customize the user interface, most of the modifications can be done through the modification of the XSLT generating the HTML, but it is important to know than the Search Web Parts are sealed so not inheritable.
The search supports two types of queries : based on keywords or using
SQL statements. But both of them are using the same flow.
The Search Query web service is useful for remote applications or is accessible from the Office Research Pane and allows the two methods for queries.
The federation is a way to get the search results from other search engine. It sends the query to them, received the result and transforms it to format the output. The Federation Web Part can only be connected to a simple federated search location defined in MOSS and supports synchronous or asynchronous rendering.
Currently, the Federation Web Part supports two types of locations : OpenSearch 1.0/1.1 that must return XML results or even simpler ATOM or RSS/RDF feeds, and Local Search Index. In case OpenSearch is not available or the result is not in XML, it is possible to implement a custom connector that will wrap the result and generate the XML needed by the web part. To do that, it is needed to :
1.- Create an aspx page that take a parametrized URL
2.- Connect to the federated search engine and generate an RSS feed
3.- In the Federation Web Part, connects to that aspx page.

2008-11-17T12:47:00.000-08:00

Todays, applications are facing mainly three challenges : distributed work, code coordination leading to complexity, and, finally, the management and the tracking of these applications is not trivial.
The goal of a WF program is to coordinate work, but the problem with such applications it that it needs a hosting process to run. According to Jon Flanders, the hosting code is taking most of the development time. Moreover, this hosting process code is not the most interesting one to write.
The aim of Dublin is to be the host process by choice of WF applications and this platform is coming with two main applications : Visual Studio Designed using WPF, and an improved version of Visual Studio Debugger. Whereas with the .NET framework 3.5 two execution models are available, State Machine and Sequential, WF 4.0 comes with a third one : Flowchart. This execution model allows to design workflows with branches, loop that are more complex that with sequential workflows.
Another problem with 3.5 is that parallel activities were not running in separated threads, meaning that a pseudo parallelism was in place. WF4.0 introduces a true parallelism and the runtime is able to coordinate multiple activities at the same time.
A little comment from Jon says that code activity should not be used, because it hides the purpose of the workflow whereas a goal of a workflow should be understandable by looking at the design itself.
WF 4.0 introduces compensation through a dedicated activity (Compensable Activity) and also two types of correlation : context based or content based (like BizTalk). The former one is only working in Request-Response scenario. The latest, on its side, one-way communication can also be used.
Finally, Dublin supports tracking and configuration through dedicated consoles applications.

2008-11-17T12:46:00.000-08:00

This general session was about how to reduce cost and carbon by sharing the infrastructure. Pat Helland also showed how the new Microsoft DataCenter will be build in Chicago and the new concept of containers for the servers. This datacenter will contain 100000 servers compartimented in 50 separated containers.

2008-11-17T12:43:00.000-08:00

Ishai Sagi starts by explaining what is a Field Type.
A custom field is needed when custom validation, custom controls, accessing a data sources or new properties are needed. For example, to create a phone field.
The downside is that a custom field does not inherit everything from the parent field. Moreover, it does not integrate with Office. In other words, it is not displayed in the Office fields bar. In the datasheet view, the custom controls are read-only and they are not included when you export a list to Excel. Finally, a complex data structure may be hard to integrate into filters, grouping, search and querying.
Every custom field is composed by three components : and XML definition file, a class library and a field class.
Among the three most common overrides there are : DefaultValue to dynamically assign a default value based on the user context for example, GetValidateString that returns the value that will be stored in SharePoint, and finally, FieldRenderingControl for a custom User Interface.
After two demos showing how to create a simple custom field and the second showing a data validation custom field, Ishai advises that when developing a custom field, we should always think that it could be used as a site column.
The Rendering Pattern allows to define how a custom control is rendered. It does not require any compiled code and, instead, is defined in a XML definition file.

2008-11-14T14:35:00.000-08:00

This interactive session held by Andrew Connell was mostly about the SharePoint development. There are two possible ways to develop with SharePoint : Customization, which is about changing columns and content types, but also modifying the pages in the SharePoint Designed. Then, there is Development using features along with code. The problem is how to reconcile the two ? Some content is in the content database, some other is in the source control. And, unfortunately, it is difficult to move the modification from one environment to the other. What needs to be known is that as long a file is not customized, it is taken on the file system, from the templates. What Andrew proposes is to do only development. Of course, doing this can be tedious, especially when dealing with features, because there is no designed and a lot of CAML to write. Moreover, provisioning files requires double development. On the other side, the developers stay in Visual Studio, it is easy to package the changes and fully leverage the existing source control.
To make the developer's job easier, there are couple of goods. First, it is possible to add IntelliSense to Visual Studio when writing CAML, via the Visual Studio XML Schema Cache. Then, when developing content types and site columns, do it using the browser and SharePoint Designer to finally extract the assets using PowerShell and the STSADM custom commands in order to "featurize" everything. Of course, the WSP building process should be automatized.

2008-11-14T14:34:00.000-08:00

This presentation, held by Bjorn Erik Olsrod from FAST, starts by explaining that the FAST ESP Web Part, able to interact with the FAST Search engine, is available for free on CodePlex and start with a first demo showing how to use it.
How this works is pretty simple. The browser sends the request to SharePoint which will query the FAST ESP. In return, the engine sends the result in XML back to the FAST ESP WebPart in XML. This XML is finally transformed to HTML using an XSLT and displayed to the user. If the user wants to change the way the results are displayed, s/he can modify the XSLT and Bjorn shows how to do it and displaying the thumbnails of the documents. He also integrates a Silverlight control showing the images documents.
In some situations, some logic might be necessary to display the result. The problem with the XSLT transformation, as it runs on the server, is that it cannot know the client context. To solve this problem, the XSLT is modified to transform the XML received from the FAST ESP to an XML encapsulated inside the HTML. Then, the final HTML displayed to the user is transformed by a Javascript. The demo showed at this time was able to adapt the amount of information displayed to the user based on the size of the browser window.
An even complex scenario is to implement a "search as you type" scenario. To do that, it is possible to implement a page stored in a SharePoint document library that will act as a web service. This service will receive the AJAX calls from the browser and will send back the result to the browser.

2008-11-14T14:29:00.000-08:00

<Disclaimer>This is personal notes of what I retained during the session. This can be incomplete, partially right or wrong. It is just part of the notes I took and what retained my attention. Nothing prevents the user to get more information on their favorite web site.</Disclaimer>
OpenXML is an ISO Standard.
It offers the key benefit of not needing the Office applications to work and generate Office document. Before, the main problem with the Office Applications Object Model was that as soon as a dialog was poped-up, the application was stuck. Moreover, someone was needed to restart the server every X hours. In other words, it was not stable, and was not designed for a server scenario. An important point regarding the security is that if a .docx file contains macros, it will not be opened by Word. Now, with OpenXML, it is a lot faster, it works on a client and on a server as well, and there is no need for Office. Eric White showed that generating a Word document with the old technique was taking 1 second per document, while generating hundred documents with OpenXML took just few seconds.
OpenXML is LINQ friendly, allowing the objects to be queriable by LINQ, but OpenXML is not a replacement for the Office Applications Object Model. Today, there is no layout or calculation support and no file conversion.
The SDK is based on the .NET 3.5 and uses the System.IO.Packaging. Moreover, it comes with different tools :
1.- OpenXMLDiff, to compare two XML documents
2.- Class Explorer to find relations between XML markups and classes
3.- Document Reflector that generates OpenXML code based on an existing document.
In his last demo, Eric shows us how to generate a Word document and directly saving it in the SharePoint document library.

2008-11-12T17:02:00.000-08:00

Andrew Connell, MOSS MVP, starts by exposing some of the actual problems we can encounter when deploying a MOSS publishing site. First, when browsing such site, IE displays a warning message saying that the Name ActiveX must be trusted and installed on the client machine in order to see the web site, which is really not ideal. For that, there is a workaround explained in the MS KB 931509.
The second problem is how to minimize the page payload due, mainly to the table layout used in SharePoint. A first recommendation would be to use a CSS based design. It will be even more efficient because the CSS files are cached. Then, enabling the HTTP compression reduces by 71% the amount of data transfered. And finally, on a standard SharePoint page, Andrew showed us that 26% of the payload is used to transfer the core.js file (54K), which is used only for the Site Actions menu. The branding and content consumes more or less 45% of the payload, while the other scripts and CSS files 29%. The problem is that core.js is not used for internet facing applications, but if it is suppressed, we are in a non MS supported scenario. So, rather than putting core.js at the top of the master page, it is better to load it asynchronously. To do that, it is necessary to implement the OnInit event in a custom control that will download the core.js on the client side only if the access is anonymous. Then, at the bottom of the master page, an IFrame is placed with the load of the core.js file.
One of the biggest issue with custom control development is that they don't work with the WSS_Minimal security policy. So, there are two choices : increase trust to WSS_Medium or event Full, or to increase the trust of the custom components in the CAS.
Moreover, the /pages/forms/allitems.aspx is, by default, accessible to all users, which is not really good for publishing sites. The problem comes from the fact that the access is granted by the "Limited Access". To solve this problem, the ViewFromPagesLockdown feature that removes this right needs to be activated or reactivated if needed.
Page Output Cache is not activated by default. Enabling it will allow the generated HTML to be stored in RAM. Specific profiles can be created to apply to specific sites.
Object Cache allows to store objects coming from the database in RAM. The amount of memory is configuratble (default to 100MB). To check the effectiveness of the object cache it is possible to use the ASP.NET 2 Performance Counter Cache Hit Ratio. If it is less than 90%, increase the configured memory.
Disk Based Cache is used to save roundtrips to the database for content with a consequence that content will be stored on the WFEs disk. It is configured in the web.config file, unders the <BlocCache> element.
On the topology side, it is strongly recommended to use different environment for authoring and for production and also to use the Web Content Management content deployment features to migrate content from one environment to the other. In order to optimize the environments, set the authoring environments rights to read/write while in production, set it to read-only.

2008-11-12T16:59:00.000-08:00

Roy Osherove is also one of my favorite speaker....and, once again, while waiting for the start of his presentation, he plays guitar (Nirvana, for example), which is a good for a wake up session :-)
He starts by establishing the current unit testing market. One of his conclusion is that even NUnit has the biggest market share, there are better frameworks out there, such as Selenium, Watir, Watin, Pex and others. The problem is not the frameworks, but how to simulate or fake external systems (mock), or how to do thread testing. For example, Chess, which will be release with Visual Studio 2010, will allow to do thread testing (race condition, deadlock, etc).
Project White, on its side, is a user interface testing framework, but to test a user interface, anyway, it implies people full time dedicated to such tasks. No need to say that test maintenance is also a problem. Imagine that a method signature changes, the corresponding tests must also be changed.
Another issue to the unit testing adoption is the learning curve for frameworks. Indeed, it is already hard to sell unit testing, but if people need a lot of time to write their first unit tests, it does not bring any help.
On the IoC and Containers, some frameworks are coming, such as Ninject, Castle Windsor, Unity. The trend is also to use IoC to wrap legacy code.
On the design side, the trends are : Domain Driven Design, Design for testability, and Test Driven Design in opposition to "classic" OO encapsulation or BDUF (Big Design Up Front).
For Isolation Frameworks, Stubs, Typemock and Rhino Mocks are raising, while Mocks over specification, Nmock and Easy Mock are failing. Remember, mocks are used to fake a system or an interface, but, nevertheless, most of the mocks framework force to use a specific design.
With this number of framework, the ideal would be to have a merge between the testing frameworks and the isolation frameworks, but it is going to be difficult. Unit testing framework have no faking capabilities while Mocks frameworks have no running capabilities.
Finally, Roy explains that the main reason why Test Driven Development fails is because of a push-back from the community : how to explain that many lines of code need to be written for the tests, before writing the code itself ?

2008-11-12T16:57:00.000-08:00

In this presentation, Aaron Skonnard starts by making the difference between an ESB and an Internet Service Bus. The former provides Messaging Fabric, Service Registry, Naming and Access Control accross the enterprise departments and allows interoperability and connectivity between the applications.
Internet Service Bus does the same thing, but, in the Cloud.
During his first demo, Aaron starts a console application registering and publishing into the Cloud a service running on his own laptop. It was then possible to the attendess to access a feed representing the service proposed located on the laptop.
Anyway, there are several challenges : IPv4 first, making an IP address shortage that is present. Another challenge is that machines are behind firewalls and using NAT. And, last but not least, there are a lot of bad guys out there. All of these challenges make that it is really difficult to have a bidirectionnal connectivity.
Some solutions exist, such as Dynamic DNS, UPnP, or even port opening in firewalls. This last option is never well accepted by IT Professionals with good reasons.
Basically, we can see the Service Bus as an enabler to bring the Cloud into the enterprise (integration).
Then, Aaron focuses on three services offered by the Service Bus : Naming, Registry and Messaing Fabric.
On the Naming side, a solution name is linked to a customer and a set of service. It offers a hierarchical naming which offers the possibility to browse to a particular service. Basically, we have addresse like scheme://servicebus.windows.net/solution/name/name . But, this could even be scheme://solution.servicebus.windows.net/name/name with, maybe afterwards, the possibility to extend the URI on both ends.
Registry is a layer over the naming system. It offers a programmatic access for discovery and publishing into the Cloud. In other words, when a service is shutdown, the endpoint disappears from the registry. It is possible to access the registry using a simple internet browser. Indeed, the registry is exposed as nested ATOM feeds.
The Messaging Fabric uses the programming model of WCF and provides a family of bindings that corresponds to the WCF bindings.

2008-11-12T16:56:00.000-08:00

Hadi Hariri started by explaining that the ASP.NET MVC framework is based on the routing mechanism that has been part of the ASP.NET frameword itself since the beginning, meaning that it is available for webforms development as well. The only thing is that the ASP.NET MVC framework relies on the MvcHttpHandler class. Basically, routing are declared in the Global.asax file ordered from the more restrictive routing first to the generic one. Like we do for exception catching, meaning that if the most generic routing is declared first, this will be the only one that will be used. Routing can use constraints, such as regular expression or even on custom classes, implementing the Match method. Then, during the first demo, Hadi shows us hot to define routes using constraints and how to debug such routing. One of his advice is to always test routing. Indeed, most of the issues are coming from wrong route declaration.
On the Controllers side, the MvcHttpHandler instanciates a ControllerFactory which in turn instantiates the right controller using reflection. Reflection can be a performance killer, but in this case, the controllers are stored in the ControllerTypeCache, avoiding to make the use of the reflection everytime. Following this explanation, a demo using the Unity IoC container is showed.
Actions find the right method, bind parameters and execute the actions. Filter pipeline can be used : IAuthorizationFilter calls IActionFilter which in turn calls IResultFilter. On its side, HttpAuth delegates the authentication to another class.
About the view engine, its only role is to look for a view. It is not of its responsability to render the result.
When using the ASP.NET MVC framework, standard ASP.NET user controls can be used, but only in read-only.

2008-11-11T15:06:00.000-08:00

The MVC pattern development for ASP.NET comes from the observation of several problems. First, the viewstate problem that drastically increase the payload of a page, and the difficulty to test a user interface due to the fact that the business logic is tightly coupled with the user interface.
That is why, among other drivers, the MVC pattern has been developed on top of the existing ASP.NET framework.
Basically, three roles are taking place in the pattern : the controller which is only responsible of collectng the user inputs, the model that is responsible to represent the underlying data and implements the business logic, and the view which has the only responsability of rendering the user interface.
This means that we are moving from a statefull web, using the webforms, towards a stateless model.
The MVC pattern has the advantage of being an alternative to the webforms, being testable and also extensible. Its components can also be replaced by your custom ones.
In Visual Studio, when a MVC Web application is created, it automatically asks if a unit testing project should be created. It is also possible to select the testing framework. On the project folder structure, folders are automatically created to store the views, the models and the controllers separately.

2008-11-11T15:04:00.000-08:00

In this interactive session, Stef Shoffren tried to explain us how to develop, deploy and debug a SharePoint timer job.
SharePoint allows three different scenarios for timer jobs : batch data loading, scheduled tasks and one-off job executed accross the farm such as an IIS restart or a configuration change.
What should not be using this kind of job, typically, it sending e-mails to users, which should be handled by the SharePoint notification service, unless a company policy disallow this.
First, a timer job is implemented by inheriting from the SPJobDefinition class and overriding the Execute method. It is running using the system accounts which makes it the possibility to execute tasks on all the server farms. The problem is that IT Professionnals don't see Timer jobs with a good eye and see them as a threat because of the priviledges given to the system account.
To store the configuration, there are basically three ways :
1.- A property bag populated when defining the timer job
2.- Settings in the OWSTimer.exe.config
3.- External store such as a SQL database or a SharePoint list, which is the preferred way.
On the logging side, we can distinguish three ways :
1.- Using ULS, the out-of-the-box SharePoint Logging system. According to the audience, it is a real pain to put in setup
2.- Windows EventLog
3.- Enterprise Library Logging
In any of these choice, the logging must be part of the design of the timer job.
To test and debug a timer job, it is necessary to attach the OWSTimer process, which requires the admin rights
In order to deploy a timer job, we can see three means :
1.- Using a feature and a feature receiver
2.- Using an msi Windows Installer
3.- Using a custom executable that must be run from the central administration server.

Note for myself : look for WSPBuilder and WSSDW on codeplex to load data into SharePoint

2008-11-11T15:02:00.000-08:00

As usual, David Chappell gave us a great presentation, as he is able to vulgarize a complex topic such as workflows and technologies that are around. He is also able to take advantage of the space that is at his disposal, making him a great presenter.
David starts by explaining that workflows, services and models are just abstractions for Workflow foundations, Dublin and Oslo.
Basically, Dublin is an extension to the Windows Server infrastructure to run and manage wCF applications and especially the ones that are using WF. It means that WCF and WF can be used independently or together.
On the other side, Oslo is focusing on the modelisation only.
But, what is WF ?
First, WF is not easy at all to use.
On the positive side, it is useful for scalable and long-running applications, such as applications that call services or that are based on user entry.
A WF must support parallel activities, meaning that a multi-thread applications should be written.
On the down side, there is no standard host process to run WF applications.
The next generation of WF aims to make the WF applications development easier.
To achieve this goal, a new designed with more activities and better runtime performance will be released. Along with that, a new workflow type, flowchart, will be available to the developer. Currently, only 2 workflow types are available : sequential, which is estimated as too simple, and the state machine which is, on this side, too complicated.
Dublin will be the default hosting process for WCF applications using WF by excellence. It will offer a persistence service to store the service state, management tools, auto start capabilities allowing to start a service without waiting a first message to start, a restart on failed service mechanism, message forwarding based on content based routing and finally, tracking features.
So, then, what is the difference between BizTalk and Dublin ?
While Dublin is focused on WCF applications containing business logic, BizTalk on its side, is focused on EAI and B2B applications, exposing applications via services. BizTalk is more for integrating applications. On the other side, Dublin will be part of the Windows Server infrastructure, making it a "free" product as opposite to BizTalk which is a paid product.
What are models ?

They are descriptive, sometimes executales, and can be linked together.
So, Oslo is a general-purpose modeling platform and is composed of a SQL Server repository to store schemas and instances, a modeling language called "M" and a modeling tool called Visual Studio "Quadrant".
This platform can be used to model the environment or a set of hardware or machine on which de application can be deployed.
M is, in turn, composed of two languages : MSchema, to describe schemas, contracts and messages that generates T-SQL statements, and MGrammar used to define textual DSLs. Olso offers also tools for creating parsers for MGrammar defined DSLs. Moreover, MSchema is itself defined by MGrammar.
On the side of VS Quadrant, this will be an application in which no code will be developed, but only models. It will be based on the same user interface model as Office 2007, using a contextual ribbon depending on the current model view.
The schema repository, as it will be stored in a SQL Server database, will be accessible by any tools able to interface with SQL Server.
Finally, WF4.0 will be available with .NET4 and Visual Studio 2010 and Dublin will be first available as a separate web download.

2008-11-10T14:43:00.001-08:00

2008-11-10T14:43:00.000-08:00

2008-11-10T14:41:00.000-08:00

<Disclaimer>This is personal notes of what I retained during the session. This can be incomplete, partially right or wrong. It is just part of the notes I took and what retained my attention. Nothing prevents the user to get more information on their favorite web site.</Disclaimer>
While waiting for the keynote, the VJs Loomis & Jones performed their show using visual effets and music with quite a success. This was a good way to make us waiting for the keynote to start.
The keynote started with a little speech of Pierre Lautaud, Microsoft Western Europe VP, who introduced the very first speaker of the TechEd : Jason Zander, General Manager of the Visual Studio team at Microsoft.
He started by telling that while at the PDC the focus was on the Azur and Cloud computing announcements, the TechEd would focus on Visual Studio and their language. At the same time, Jason and Microsoft announce Visual Studio 2010. The next version of VS is based on 4 pillars :
What the code is doing ?
Testing
Office business application
C++ empowerment
Regarding the first pillar, Jason argues that today teams are moving very fast. They have to produce more code in less time (budget) while their members are leaving and joining. Microsoft released VS 2008 to help us, but 2010 will give us even more possibilities to achieve these targets. As an example, with vS 2010 it is possible to extract the dependency diagram of assemblies or the sequence diagram in UML 2.1.1. These diagrams, by the mean of add-ins, can be embedded in the source code editor window in VS. Along this first demo, he shows us that VS 2010 is now written using WPF.
By selecting a part of a code, it is possible to see the history of that code part (who modified what and when).
While writing code during one of his demo, he showed us that the code snippet has been improved and that it is just sufficient to type "table" in an .aspx page to get the full HTML code for that table appearing. Amazing !
Oh, and, by the way..... the underscore in Visual Basic can be omitted ! Isn't that nice ?

The problem with testing is that the testers say "It does not work" while on the other side, the developer says "It works on my machine, you're wrong". The issue is the reproducability of the bugs. Microsoft is working on a new application with the codename "Camano" which is more or less a testing center. It is then possible for the testers to follow a scenario, checking for the success of the tests and, when encountering a bug, to submit it to Team Foundation Server. Along with the bug, the stack trace of the current situation, the machine configuration but also a video in the WMV format is posted in TFS allowing the developer to reproduce the problem and also to see the manipulation of the tester. Great !
With the Lab Mangement, through TFA, it is possible now to define virtual machine templates that can be deployed and used by the testers.

Jason demostrated also that a new server explorer has been added to VS : the SharePoint explorer, with some deep features support, such as the WSP or event handlers. What I am just wondering here is if it is not the end of the SharePoint designed. Why still having this application whereas all of its features will be in VS 2010 (WYSIWYG edtion, list, doc lib, etc) ?

On the packaging side, it will be possible to define transformation for the configuration files, such as web.config. It will allows the developer to avoid having a tracing flag active on the production servers.

On the C++ support, some new features are announced, such as the MFC ribbon and the multicore extensions.

Finally, the support of multi touch is implemented, coming from the Microsoft Surface developments.

2008-11-09T13:49:00.000-08:00

Here we are.

I arrived early this morning in Barcelona to take a day to visit a little bit the city.
Of course, I went to the famous Sagrada Familia where a lot of tourists (like me) had the same idea. The option of walking from my hotel to that place was, after all, not a very good option. Indeed, even if the city is pretty nice to visit by foot and even if it is still a european city, the scales are not the same as the one we have in our little Switzerland.
Tomorrow, start of a big week with the usual keynote and then directly to the point with a breakout session on F#.
Stay tuned !

2008-09-29T13:01:00.000-07:00

The Microsoft TechEd 2008 will take place between the 3rd and 7th of November for the IT Professionals and from the 10th through the 14th of November for the developers.

I am waiting to be there enthusiastically, so if want to meet there, feel free to drop me a comment or contact me through the http://techedemeaconnectdev.leveragesoftware.com website.

2008-09-26T03:17:00.000-07:00

I think everybody, in the developer and architecture world, knows who is Mr. Ivar Jacobson. One of the founder of RUP and author of numerous famous books on methodologies and UML. I am not the biggest fan of UML, but the thing we can agree on is that, at least, UML is a basis to communicate ideas to people that are not only technical.

Jacobson was in Zurich to explain his latest thoughts on how to build software quickly and at low cost.

He started by talking about a fact we cannot ignore. Indeed, in the last decades, we have seen different trends and waves in the software development. In the 80's, the trend was Object Oriented Programming. Everybody wanted to do OOP. En of 90's, it was CMMI and XP. And today, it's Agile and Scrum. From this history, we can extract mainly two things : the basements are the same, but with new words. At the end, we are recycling ideas under brand new names. The second, according to him, is that most of the CMMI level 5 companies are now just filling papers and quality of deliverables didn't improved that much. By the way, it reminds me the trend of ISO 9001 certifications. What is the status today ? I don't see companies marketing on this anymore…

Another point is that people really hate processes and they don't read processes book. Because it is too long, too complicated and not suited for their day-to-day work. Again, Jacobson says that during conferences he did in the big off-shore software companies, we he asked who was liking processes, only few raised their hand. But, when he asked who hated processes, more than 60 to 70% of the people raised the hand.

So, Jacobson says that it is time to turn into practices. And what is a practice ?

First, a practice has a beginning and an end and is something that is currently used. Moreover, a practice should focus on essential things. Jacobson identified three practice groups :

Peer practices that includes, for example, Use Cases Driven Development and Project Management "à la Scrum".

Extension Practices, such as Use Cases for SOA

And Cross-Cutting Practices that implies workshops and pair programming.

Then, the first goal is to extract a kernel practice which is a kind of metamodel that can be applied to every practices.

Once the practices have been identified, you don't have to apply them to every projects throughout the enterprise, but rather take a subset of the practices that suit the current need.

Finally, what I found fun is the concretization of these practices. How they are materialized. Jacobson showed the audience a set of (pocket) cards on which the practice is presented. This way allows easily manipulating and consulting them. For each kind of card, few pages (from 2 to 3) of guidelines to drive the card into practice with, maybe, links to other informations.

The final word is that rather than having a huge and heavy process that will never be used or implemented correctly, using best practices is more agile. And the fact that it has a concrete side makes it even more interesting. On the other side, we can see and feel that Jacobson is a really good speaker and he is quite used to this exercise.

For more information, visit the following links :

http://www.esswork.com

http://www.ivarjacobson.com

2008-07-04T04:32:00.000-07:00

Last Monday I recorded the third podcast for my company and I did a little intervention at the end of it. That is quite a change between recording and being in front of the microphone. Even if you know what to say, there is always something that goes wrong, a bad intonation or too much of "hum", "euh" and so on.

What is also not easy at all, even if you know that you don't have a direct audience in front of you, is not to be stressed and to express clearly your ideas. One time it is too fast, the second there is not enough rhythm or you simply say something incorrectly.

At the end, and according to our very good interviewer, the best is not only to have a good preparation of the interview, but also to script the answers as well. When it is done, it worth to repeat several times the text in order to be fluent during the recording, reading it as if it was in a conversation. Not easy, especially if you are not doing it in your native language…

Finally, after 3 hours of recording, everything was in the box and will be available, after some editing, on the website.

2008-06-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

I am selling some electronic equiment that are part of my previous life when I was still doing audio and digital electronic. The fact that I am not using these device any more since more than.......lot of years made me selling them.

So, here is a list of the electronic instrument I am selling :

Oscilloscope Iwatsu SS-5720 => 150 CHF (more information, in french : http://www.anibis.ch/n/1815752)

Multi-Function Instrument (V/A/Ohm/F/Hz) Metex MS-9140 => 300 CHF (more information, in french : http://www.anibis.ch/n/1815743)

Function generator Leader LAG-120B => 100 CHF (more information, in french : http://www.anibis.ch/n/1815726)

Function generator Voltcraft FG-506 => 200 CHF (more information, in french : http://www.anibis.ch/n/1815721)

Feel free to contact me if you are interested in some or all of these devices.

2008-05-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

I have been needing a BPMN and a UML 2 stencil for Visio 2007, and, truth said, I think I found my happyness in the following stencils :

For UML 2, I found one at softwarestencils. There are plenty of different stencils, even for Visio 2007. It offers all the shapes, but for some of them, you need to change the properties of them to have them appearing on your design surface. So, for UML 2, go there.

Regarding BPMN, the one proposed by Tyner Blain is a goodfit and it seems, at a first glance, it fits all my current needs. It offers all the BPMN shapes, the only thing missing, maybe, are the swimlanes.

2008-05-17T04:37:00.000-07:00

Sizing correctly a virtual hard disk (VHD) during the creation of a virtual machine is not really easy. Well, it is possible to see big and to set the maximum size at 100GB, but I am not a great fan of always oversize an infrastructure.

So, it happened yesterday that my virtual machine hosting my SharePoint 2007 development environment was running out of disk space and the question on how to resize a vhd file came to my mind. My friend google gave me a lot of answers but none of them were working totally. Basically, you have several steps to follow :

To resize the VHD file

To expand the disk size within the guest operating system

For the first step, there are essentially two main choices : VHD Resizer, which is free and available on the vmTools web site, or VHD Utility from Xtralogic. I decided to go for the VHD Resizer tool and I was quite happy with that. The main reason was that I wanted to expand my VHD at the lowest price...(at the end, it costed me a bit...)

Regarding the second step, it was another story. On the web, there are a lot (and when I say "a lot", I really mean a lot) of tools, free or not, to manage partitions and disks. To give some examples, you have Partition Magic, gParted and Paragon Partition Manager to give only the few I tested. Then, you can also use diskpart or even vhdmount to manipulate the drives and expand them.

gParted is free and you can download a live CD in the ISO format that allows you to mount the drive directly from the Virtual PC application. Unfortunately, it did not work for me, Windows Server was not able to see the new disk size.

The same problem occurred with Partition Magic.

At last, I have given a try to Partition Manager 9.0 Server. It costs $299 and it is quite expensive, but when I realized that I had spent already more than half a day to solve this resizing problem, I rapidly decided to go with that tool. Then only problem I see with that kind of product is that you cannot really test if copying a hard disk (especially a Windows Server 2003 boot disk) works, because most of these tools (it was the case for PM 9.0) works only in simulation mode if you have only the trial version. So, spending 299 dollars without really knowing if it will fit the needs is a bit worrying.

Then, using PM 9.0, I copied my original hard disk to the target one, I resized the partition to take the whole disk and.......it worked perfectly. It took 1 hour to copy everything and to make the partition bootable for a 40GB disk. Windows Server 2003 was not only able to see the new disk capacity, but the disk was bootable.

Again, I would have preferred to do it using free tools, but with PM 9.0 Server (the server version is important here, because Windows Server 2003 is supported) I did it end-to-end with success.

2008-03-19T05:01:00.000-07:00

It is done !

I successfully passed the 70-631 exam and I am now MCTS on Sharepoint, more precisely "Configuring" SharePoint.

It was not so easy (that is why it is a certification) and it required a bit of work in order to be able to see the different aspects of the SharePoint configuration. MeasureUp helps, but when you are in front of the screen for the exam, you realize and you thank the experience you have with SharePoint...

But, it is done, and now, go for the next one...

2008-01-04T00:51:00.000-08:00

It took time ! Even last week, it was impossible for me to open a Skydrive account, receiving everytime the annoying "Skydrive is not open in your region" message.

Just few words to give you an idea of what is Skydrive. I don't want to make a direct parallel with a tool I like a lot – iFolder – but it offers more or less the same functionality : a remote storage of files available everywhere. It means that wherever you are, your files will be available from the computer you are using. It also offers a good alternative to USB keys for the transfers of files from one computer to the other opening the door to the versionning hell....

One of the main difference between iFolder and Skydrive is that the last one is only accessible through a web browser. At least, as far as I know, there is no desktop client.
Skydrive offers 1GB of storage and allows you to share folders and files with your friends or everyone. It also provides you a unique URL to access your file directly when you upload a file.

I guess it is just a beginning, because Skydrive is still in Beta, so….let see.

2007-12-19T06:13:00.000-08:00

I received a new laptop several months ago and I would say it saves me energy and time.

It is a HP-Compaq tc4400, and, as the model name says it, it is a TabletPC :

Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.0 GHz CPU
2MB RAM
120GB of Hard Disk

It is fun to see how I can be more efficient with a simple new laptop….Before, I was with my laptop and a pad to write things like meeting notes, important actions to take or whatever. But, associated with OneNote, I can do it in only one place. I can organize my notes as I want, take pictures and include them in the notes or, best of all, make a drawing and keeping it in a digital format before sending it in as a pdf file. Once the meeting is finished, I am already ready to send the minutes of the meeting.

The "bad" side, is that the screen is a bit little. But I can go around this by plugging an external monitor to it. And I can say that working on a 22 inches wide screen monitor is simply great. And also, what a surprise to see, when you open the package, starts the laptop and after having the "Please make a backup CD of your system" message on the screen that DVD drives do not come with the laptop and that it is an optional device. After a new order for that little piece of hardware, it is just a dream…

I took this opportunity to not install any development tool. Indeed, since the beginning of the year, I prefer to rebuild my development machine by copying and pasting the virtual hard drive and using it with Virtual PC rather than formatting my hard drive and re-installing the whole laptop. We learn lessons…. ! Even better : To use Virtual Server instead of Virtual PC, but that will be the topic of another post.

2007-11-01T15:36:00.000-07:00

I wanted to write this post long time ago, when I came back from my last vacations.

I wanted because I think it is time to share some impressions and a good address.

For the second time, I went to Saas-Almagell, a little town in the “Haut-Valais” from where the multiple world and Olympic ski champion Pirmin Zurbriggen come. It is near Saas-Fee. There, I went to his hotel. It is a wellness hotel like many of others you can find in the Alps or in Switzerland, and maybe not only where snow does not come as much as some years ago. Most of these hotels had to take a decision on how to keep their customers. I have absolutely nothing against this change and if it was the case for the Pirmin’s hotel, I would say they did it very well (they are celebrating the 40 years of the hotel).

Around the hotel, there are a lot of excursions you can do. You can go to see the Mattmark dam, or you can go to Saas-Fee, even by foot. Count 1 hour in such case, but it is a beautiful and pleasant journey. From Saas-Fee, you can also take a telecabine to go on the glacier.

They have several kind of accommodation, from the single room to the little apartment. Having tested first the apartment and then the room, both are of very good quality and quite big for the apartment. In the hotel, there is a spa and a pool with very nice warm water…. You have also the possibility to have an hair cut, to be massaged or going to a sauna, all of them being available within the hotel.

On the food side, it is excellent and sometimes a little bit too much in terms of quantity. You always have a starter, a soup, the main course and a dessert. And you really have enough to eat.

And, last but not least, the welcome is great. People are keen to make you happy and making you to keep a great souvenir of that place. Nowadays, that is not very often the case we should say….

So, if I can recommend a good place to go for your vacation, please visit the web site of the hotel.

2007-09-10T08:11:00.000-07:00

It is now since 1 year or so I bought a Qtek 9100 and at this period I configured it for the Wap and the Web but since this time, I completely lost the configuration. I never tried to connect to the internet with this device, except using the Wifi at home or at the office, the prices for internet mobile are still high here in Switzerland.

But last week I wanted to give it one more try but I was completely unable to connect either to internet or to the Swisscom Wap portal. After 30 minutes with the technical support, we finally found where was the problem for Internet, but not for the Wap. I found, here, why, just by chance. In fact, in the proxy settings, normally you should set the address to 192.168.210.001 according to the documentation. Unfortunately, it seems that the Qtek badly interprets the last three digits. Indeed, if you replace the 001 by just 1, miracle, it works.

2007-08-22T00:13:00.000-07:00

The last difficulty to migrate the website to asp.net 2.0 disappeared the last couple of days. Yes, that is done, I installed the version 2.0 of the blog engine, not without pain.

I first tried to upload all the files, overwriting the existing files on the web site. Unfortunately, when I opened the page, I received the "Server Unavailable" error. After few days of talk with the Brinkster support, I finally decided to completely remove all the files and upload the DasBlog files again. This worked fine, so I moved further by uploading my theme customizations and it suddenly stopped working.

The reason why, is that I used the Technorati search functionality which was the guilty. As this feature was not providing me many advantages, I simply removed this section in the them.

At the same time, I opened an account to feedburner, allowing me to add links to every posts, like del.icio.us or digg.

2007-08-21T05:02:00.000-07:00

Since the show number 60, it is no more possible to download directly the podcast from thepmpodcast.com, which is a podcast about Project Management. That could be surprising, but I am a little interested in PMing, without, nevertheless, wanting to be a project manager. So, Cornelius Fichtner decided to publish his podcast only by subscribing to the RSS feed.

Of course, there is still a way to play it directly in the web page using the Flash player, but it is far less convenient.

For me, it is a pity, because I do not have my aggregator every time with me (on the laptop, the tabletPC and the desktop) so when I just want to download a show, I just can't. And I think it is a feature that a podcast must have with some others like a torrent for example. Then the question is : Why limiting the possibility of downloading a podcast ? It may cause less downloads and limits the spread of this podcast, no ?

The perfect examples are podacasts coming from Pwop Production, publishing the .NET Rocks! show and the Hanselminutes one. That are the podcasts I listen to regularly, because of the content and the quality of the shows and they offer many, many ways to download them, along with some other goodies, like the transcripts.

2007-08-04T13:21:00.000-07:00

The coming weeks, I am going to have a look at the latest Beta of Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server and Microsoft has done all it was possible to make it easier (or almost).

First, they released Virtual PC hard drives (vhd) with all the software included. So, as I have the luck of having a MSDN subscription, I first downloaded the 9 parts of the VHD file. Yes ! A total of 4.2GB to download, taking the whole night to get it. But, once deflated, it takes more or less 13GB ! That's ok for me, on an external 420GB hard drive, I can afford it.

The only problem I had was that when I launched the VPC image, it simply failed, telling me that "The parent virtual hard disk has been deleted or has been moved from its previous location. Please select the new location of the parent virtual hard disk". That was strange, because, on the MSDN subscriptions site, there is no mention about a parent virtual hard disk. Or, at least, not enough visible for me.

To solve this little issue, it is better to download the VHD from the Microsoft download site. There, you have all the instructions you would need, and, the most important, where to download this parent virtual hard drive.

Link to the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 Team Foundaction Server download

2007-06-12T12:38:00.000-07:00

I am just posting something that may be interested to someone else struggling with the install of Reporting Services on multiple servers.

Imagine the following scenario : You install your database server, then you install a first instance of Reporting Services on the second server, and then, finally, you install a second instance of Reporting Services on yet another server.

If you do it like this, you are on the wrong way. There are lot of chances that you receive, when you will access the http://servername/rsreportmanager site, a RSReportServerNotActivated error on one of the two server. The problem is that report servers are paired with the database server in order to avoid, for example, other report servers accessing the same database and getting data they should not see.

For this purpose, a symmetrical key must be exchanged between the database and all the report servers in the farm. But, if you read the documentation, you will see that the only thing you have to do is to activate the report server. So, let's do it using the rsactivate command. But, bad luck, you receive an error saying the "Local NT Service account is not enabled". What you want to do then ? Looking for the activation of such account ? Changing the account with which the report server service is running ? Not at all. Rather than following the error message, delete the key and the association for this server by using the rskeymgmt -d command. Then, you have to configure the server using the rsconfig command and finally the rsactivate one.

Finally ?

Hum, well, not sure :-) Now, try to access the local report server website. It will work. Great ! But, try to access the report server website for one of the other server. You will certainly receive a "Bad data" error. If you have some experiences with .NET, "Bad Data" should give you a bit of information, leading you to some cryptographic error...Right ?

The final word of this story is the following : When you want to activate servers in a farm, first activate the local one, then activate the others remotely. As said in this documentation, you must execute the rsactivate command from the same server.

This took me a bit of time to understand this, but at the end it is pretty meaningfull why you have to do it this way and I hope I saved time to others

2007-05-30T23:27:00.000-07:00

Did you watch Minority Report ? Do you remember when Tom Cruise moves pictures and videos by taking them on the screen with his hands ?

It sounded really futurist at that time, but it was without counting on the hidden Microsoft projects. Yes, they did it, or almost.

The project is named Microsoft Surface and according to them, "it represents a bridge to the digital world".

Basically, it is a digital table (55 cm high, 55 cm by 105 cm) that allows you to manipulate digital informations, such as watching pictures and videos, planning your trip in the city, etc. The different demos on the website are quite impressive.

And it is really amazing to see that the project originally started in 2001 by Stevie Bathiche and Andy Wilson and being unveiled only two days ago.

The project is not supposed to be available at retail stores until end of 2007 and I think it will be costly... But in the meantime, and if you are in New York, you should be able to see it at the Sheraton Hotel, or also during the SIGGRAPH Conference in San Diego.

2007-05-28T13:46:00.000-07:00

During several months, I was completely unable to cross-post from my main blog on peneveyre.com to my account at blogspot.com.

I have never investigated why this was impossible, but the fact is that, now, it is working.

Cool !

2007-05-28T10:50:00.000-07:00

Preparing a presentation about AJAX and a comparison between the Microsoft world and the other (basically the rest of the world...), I went to an issue I did not expect, because I thought it would be more automatic.

When you add a ScriptManager and an UpdatePanel to a web page, the first times you will run the application, there are chances that the "'Sys' is undefined" Javascript error occurs. Not only the Javascript error is shown, but when you click on, let say a button in your UpdatePanel, this will post the page back to the server, updating the whole page.

This is because in the HTML code, the Sys.Application.Initialze function is called close to the end of the code. The problem is that the resource files containing the Javascript code are coming and downloaded from the server using a .axd file (ScriptResource.axd, more precisely).

To fix this issue, the line below has to be added in the web.config file under the <httpHandlers> section :

2007-05-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

I was a bit busy during the last few weeks, that is why I did not post as much as I would.

Busy, because my assignments were changed, from a customized human workflow application to a MS CRM 3.0 application and doing some mobile development. Other technologies, other challenges, in other words, fun !

But I'm back, and I hope to post more frequently on this blog.

2007-01-22T12:36:00.000-08:00

The 12^th of February will take place the Microsoft European SharePoint 2007 in Berlin, at the Estrel Convention Center. It was tough to get a hotel room, because it seems that a lot of people are going there, either for the conference or for hundred other reasons. Yes, even the 1125 rooms of the Estrel Hotel were already booked when I registered.

It is going to be a great event, only about SharePoint 2007. During these three days, they will talk about the portal side of the product, how to administer SharePoint and, of course, the development around SharePoint 2007.

So, if you go there, let me know, we could meet in Berlin.

2007-01-20T07:15:00.000-08:00

Cela faisait quelques années maintenant que le site et le blog étaient hébergé par Maximedia, devenu ensuite Nexlink qui a lui-même été racheté par green.ch. Mais depuis le début, la communication, la qualité du service, technique ou clientèle d'ailleurs, on été très laborieux.

L'encaissement par carte de crédit, lors du premier achat s'est par contre effectué sans problème, ce qui ne me surprends guère. Mais ensuite.... Alors que je désire installer DasBlog, moteur utilisé actuellement pour tourner ce blog, il me faut installer ce qu'on appelle un "application root". En d'autres termes, sous IIS, en sélectionnant un répertoire, ajouter un nom d'application. Dans un premier temps aussi, aucun problème pour demander au support technique de Nexlink ce genre de chose, ainsi que changer les droits d'accès sur certains répertoire.

Pourtant, après quelques mois de bons fonctionnement, je désire néanmoins installer une autre application sur le site, donc effectuer la même opération. Et là, impossible. On me dit soudain que pour des raisons de sécurité, il n'est plus autorisé de le faire. De plus, on m'annonce que les hébergements Windows Server 2003, payés grassement il faut le dire, ne sont plus supporté et qu'il ne me sera plus possible d'utiliser la même formule d'hébergement. Seule alternative, installer une machine chez eux, mais bien entendu, le coût n'étant pas en rapport avec le contenu du site, il était bien clair que je n'allais pas donner suite. De plus, on réussi à me dire que les hébergements .NET sont coûteux en puissance processeur et que c'est la raison principale de l'arrêt de leur offre Windows Server 2003. Connaissant bien la technologie en question, il est possible d'en rire, tout de même.

Par contre, aucun courrier, ni même un e-mail, pour me le signaler.

Deuxième acte, le site se fait attaquer et défacer, et là, il a fallu que je me batte pour faire valoir la fin de mon abonnement vu qu'il n'y avait plus de support.

Finalement, alors que je voulais mettre à jour les adresses e-mail, je me suis aperçu que la console de gestion du site avait purement et simplement désactivée et qu'il n'était donc plus possible d'y accéder. De nouveau, sans avertissement préalable. Ce dernier événement a plus que motivé ma résiliation, mais là aussi, tout ne fût pas si simple. Après avoir écrit tout le mal que je pensais de la gestion de leur clientèle, je n'ai reçu en retour qu'une lettre composée de deux lignes, me demandant les détails exacts de mon abonnement, car Nexlink/Green.ch n'arrivait tout simplement pas à retrouver trace de mon abonnement. Décidemment, gestion plus que pitoyable et ceci démontre bien que la sélection naturelle des hébergeurs en suisse n'a pas encore terminé son travail.

En conclusion, si vous lisez actuellement ces lignes, c'est grâce à un autre hébergeur, américain celui-ci, j'ai nommé brinkster. Et depuis les quelques jours que le site est hébergé chez eux, aucun soucis et lors de demande précises, celles-ci sont éxécutées dans la minute (montre en main !), et de manière extrêmement professionnelle. Bravo, et j'espère que cela va continuer.

Si vous désirez héberger votre site chez Brinkster, alors passez par ce lien, ce serait sympa :-)

2007-01-12T05:16:00.000-08:00

I have just read this post from the blog à Ollie and I was really interested.

According to the Zatoo's website, "Zattoo acquires, transports and presents quick-start, long-play streaming video in one browser for all channels for broadband users anywhere". I downloaded this free software and installed it. I just tried to show some channels a couple of minutes and the results is very good.

The software is in beta and currently it offers 21 channels, all the swiss ones with a nice quality. Of course, it depends of your bandwith....

As I don't want to subscribe to a Bluewin TV service, it is a good alternative.

2007-01-10T14:09:00.000-08:00

I discussed with a friend, who is also a colleague, about the possibility to import the IE Favorites into my del.icio.us repository, because doing it manually, even when using the appropriate button, is a real pain. And I was wondering if only it was possible. He said it should be possible easily and quickly :-) to write a little application using the REST API of del.icio.us. Just for the fun.

But wait ! Don't look for any api ! I just gave up when a little search on my favorite search engine gave me the answer. Not because it is to difficult, just because del.icio.us have already an import process. When logged in, go to your settings and select "import / upload". Sooo coool.

Now, I just have to categorize/tag all my favorites (between 100 and 200). Is that not fun ?

2006-12-18T13:28:00.000-08:00

It's unbelievable ! I have just received my brand new HP C5180 printer with a feature that made me to choose this one, the on-board Ethernet connectivity, and it just does not work ! How is it possible that such a so easy testable feature does not work out-of-the-box.

Let's see what happened.

I installed the printer and started the initial cartridge alignment and then I plugged the Ethernet cable. So far, there was no issue. Then, I installed the software and the driver that come with the product on one of my two laptops, the latest one, with Windows XP. And then, I was so surprised and scared by the time it took to install of the drivers. It took sooooo much time and it installs sooooo much things. I can not believe it is not possible, in the software industry we are living into, to have drivers that could not be smaller, imagine, 300 MB of software !!! If only it worked.

I really took care to shutdown all the firewalls both on the laptop and on my wireless router. The install ran really fine and it seemed to work perfectly. I rebooted the laptop and it was ok. Then, I made the mistake (yup, I think it was a mistake because I suddenly switched into a nightmare…) to install the same software on my other laptop with Windows 2000. The print feature was perfectly installed but….it was simply impossible to connect the scan functionality. Every time I tried to scan a document or a picture, I got the "Impossible to connect the scan device" or a similar message. Moreover, the Photosmarts softwares just crashed. But, with a different user on the same machine, with no special privileges (so, a non-admin user), the Photosmart softwares are running fine but it is still impossible to detect the scanner.

Okay, I switched to my first laptop, and, gosh ! It was not working anymore ! Impossible to connect to the scanner, nor the printer. What was unbelievable is that on the HP web site, there was really nothing about this issue. At least, I thought it. But after a long time of googling the web about this problem, I finally found this post. The final word is that to be able to detect your scanner on your LAN, you have to touch your windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file to add the IP address and the name of the printer into it. On the post above, they say that HP opened a trouble ticket with the number (a case) with the number 7335453334.

Euh, not a so final word. Ooooh, noo ! On my other laptop, the Win2K one, I still can not use my HP software with my admin account. So, if a reader has a solution, I will really be happy to finally fix this annoying issue. Otherwise, I will continue to google the web….

UPDATE : It seems that a part of the problem was caused by my previous HP scanner software/driver. Indeed, I had a HP Precision Scan installed and after the uninstall, the HP Solution Center worked a _little_ bit better. A little bit better, because now it crashes only when I click the "Scan Picture" button. With a non-admin, it works.

2006-11-27T07:57:00.000-08:00

Couple of days ago, writing an ASP page enabling users to download attachment generated on the fly, I struggled a bit on a nice "Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found" error. As I know that GIYVBF (for those of you who are wondering what it is stands for, try this)

First, I checked several times that I used the correct caching expiration and attachment settings without any success. Finally, the only thing I did not find was this :

If, during the generation of your attachment, there is an non-handled error or exception, the attachment genaration will abort and you will get this famous error message. Thus, this is another way of getting the nice error box....In my case, there was some code accessing a database and when it failed it displayed this message.

2006-11-20T14:25:00.000-08:00

I remember a discussion I had with a colleague about workflow engine developments and moreover, about the real needs of starting such developments. But, the topic was not only and not really about the development itself, but more about the existence of such engines.

Last June, Gartner published a document presenting the major actors of BPM solutions. Among them, we can find K2 with a coming product called K2.NET, based on the new Windows Workflow Foundation from Microsoft. We can also find FileNet which has been bought by the giant IBM in the meanwhile, but also Fuego and last but not least, Microsoft with BizTalk Server 2006.

Then, on one side we have ready-to-use products, proprietary and requesting customization, and on the other side, Microsoft with the WF. Thus, the question that has come on the table was : When to use the WF and when to use BTS ?
Since this time, I tried to figure out the different criteria needed to help to decide. But the list is absolutely not finished and I am sure that a lot of points could be added.
In fact, what needs to be understood is that the WF has never been designed to replace BTS, not at all. In one case, we have a framework on top of which our application has to be developed and which will be part of the developed application. In the second case, it is a licensed product which needs a bit of understanding (I would say that the learning curve is quite big...) to implement orchestrations between existing applications, building the final solution. Nevertheless, these technologies are complementary.

First, BTS comes with a lot of features and functionalities that are not necessary needed for the majority of the applications.
But, if your application needs to interact with one or more other applications, hosted on different servers or using different technologies (such as Java, for example), BTS is certainly an advantage. With this, BTS allows document transformations quite easily, some of them or some of the file formats are already implemented or just need the installation of an add-in (HL7, SWIFT for example).
With BTS, it is also easy to know what is happening in the system using the BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) and when you need to share credentials or authentication informations between systems whether they are Windows or not, the use of SSO (Single Sign-On) is a big plus over the WF.
At the opposite, if the application has to contain the workflow, the use the WF. And finally, if none of the BTS features is required, of course, then use of the WF is quite obvious.

Again, this list is not exhaustive and would need more points to add, but, in my opinion, it is an interesting start when we think about using a workflow engine.

Comments are welcome...

2006-11-20T13:04:00.000-08:00

The countdown has been started !

In the near future, a little revolution is going to happen.

Stay tuned on this web site......

2006-11-13T14:10:00.000-08:00

Last week, I attended a 3-days training at ESI International in London named "Project Leadership, Management and Communications".

This course was amazingly great. Very interesting either by its format or by its teacher. 3 days, it is long enough to present the material and the different topics of the course, mainly focuses on how to communicate with people, colleagues and the clients. A large part of the training is about the relationships between people and how to influence it in order to improve the quality of the exchange inside a team or even outside.

This course uses a lot the team working and the environment makes it more easier by putting all the attendees around round-tables, making group of about 6 people. A bit of role-playing games is also used during this training.

Finally, the teacher (name will follow...) was a great one.

On the other hand, it was 4 years since my last visit in London and I did not remember it was sooooo expensive. But I really like this city.....

2006-10-14T07:56:00.000-07:00

I finally wrote my article for the newsletter of the AAEIT about the Cambridge Technology Partners Open Source Survey. For those of the people interested in reading this paper could download the complete newsletter here (Number 53).

Unfortunately for english speaking people, this article is available only in french.

2006-10-07T07:35:00.000-07:00

I just finished the migration to the latest version of DasBlog.

As usual, this migration went live perfectly fine. Now, the version of DasBlog is 1.9.6264.0

Thanks to Scott Hanselman and Omar Shahine for their great work.