BIFocal LLC

Author: jhimmel

  • Our San Antonio SharePoint Connections Coast to Coast Boot Camp and Conference Slides

    My good friend Cornelius J. van Dyk and I just completed our San Antonio, TX stop of our speaking circuit.  We promised we’d publish the slide decks from our Pre-Con Boot Camp and our three sessions at the SharePoint Connections Coast-to-Coast Tour.  Here you go!

    SharePoint Connections Pre-Con Boot Camp

    Wish Id Have Known That Sooner! SharePoint Insanity Demystified

    Heavy Metal PowerPivot

    Time is money.  How SharePoint Logging will save you both

    We had a great time presenting, meeting everyone, sharing experiences and connecting with the San Antonio SharePoint Community at the “Ask the Experts” Session.  Thanks for the hospitality SATX!

  • Review of TechEd PreCon: “Microsoft Silverlight Inside and Out” by Jeff Prosise

    I attended the terrific “PRC03 Microsoft Silverlight Inside and Out” presented by Jeff Prosise.  The session was packed with a good background on Silverlight development and a bunch of great tips, tricks and samples.  Some of my favorites were:

    Dynamic XAP Loading: you can break apart your xap file into pieces to allow for faster load because you aren’t loading all of your assemblise on initial load of your silverlight app.  You have the ability to do the initial load and only call to the secondary xap files when the assemblies are needed.

    Automatic Out-of-browser updates: In only a few lines of code you can have your Silverlight OOB app check to see if there are any updates to the app and install them automatically.  A notification can be thrown to alert the user that a new version has been installed and that they need to close and reopen the app to get the new version to run.

    Client HTTP Stack: Silverlight has the ability to us the OS stack, rather than just the browser stack to give you information, such as errors.

    External URIs:  Using some samples that Jeff has, located on www.wintellect.com, that allow you to implement calling external URIs rather than ones that are only inside of your solution.

    Some of the cool new features available in this release of the Silverlight 5 beta:

    Style Data Binding: the xaml version of CSS.  Allows you to do dynamic theming easily.

    Data Binding Debugging (aka: XAML Debugging): you now get the ability to put break points in your xaml and debug the same way you can with C#.  Right now it only works with binding expressions, but keep your fingers crossed that they will expand on this dramatically as the beta rolls on.  This demo got a much deserved round of applause.

    Trusted Applications in Browser:  All of the goodness of trusted applications that was only accessible in the OOB experience is now available IN Browser!

    Trusted Application Out-of-browser enhancements: You can now access the file system completely.  Not just the user’s “My Documents” folder, but the ENTIRE file system.  As an Operations guy this scares me a bit, but it is an ever changing world.

    RichTextBoxOverflow:  This allows you to have a better text box experience where, in this particular demo, putting a richtextbox and a richtextboxoverflow in a horizonal scenario Jeff was able to increase the space between characters and show how the text flowed seamlessly from one text box into the next.

    Some cool things still to come in the Silverlight 5 beta:

    WS-Trust support for services
    64-bit support for the plugin
    COM interop for trusted in-browser applications
    P/Invoke for trusted applications
    PivotViewer control improvements and distributed in the SDK

    I am skipping a ton of cool stuff that Jeff showed us, but visit his blog where you can read about most of this and much, much more at http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jprosise/.  I didn’t even touch on any of the Windows Phone 7 goodness that he talked about.

    This was my first time attending a TechEd PreCon, and I will definitely be back.  Would have been a terrific value at twice the price.  This level of data dump in a single day is rare, I hope to live up to this standard SharePoint Connections Coast to Coast next week when Corne and I give our “SharePoint Collaboration Bootcamp” PreCon!

  • Speaking at SharePoint Connections Coast to Coast 2011 in San Antonio

    SATX

    My friend, Cornelius J. van Dyk, and I will be presenting at this year’s SharePoint Connections Coast to Coast conference in San Antonio held May 23-25 at the Hyatt Regency Hill County Resort & Spa.

    We will be teaching the ITPro Pre-Conference “SharePoint Collaboration Bootcamp” plus presenting three sessions, “Heavy Metal PowerPivot”, “Time Is Money. How SharePoint Logging will Save You Both!”, and “Wish I’d Have Known That Sooner! SharePoint Insanity Demystified”. All 3 of these sessions promise to be fresh and exciting so come out and see us if you’re anywhere in the San Antonio area during that time.

    We hope to see you there!

    jase 

  • SPFLogger–A whole new way to look at SharePoint 2010 Logs

    One of the most amazing, and little talked about, features of SharePoint 2010 is its new logging database and the power that comes along with it.  About 4 months ago I noticed a gap in the market and started talking to 2 friends of mine, David Feldman and Cornelius J. van Dyk, making the statement “I think that this would make for a really neat winforms app.”  After some brain storming we decided to take the idea a different direction and use Silverlight 4 RIA Services.

    The tool in its initial beta offering is fairly simple, yet elegant.  It gives the user a very concise view of their NTEvent Logs, ULS Logs, and Timer Job Logs.  Rather than having to write T-SQL against the Logging Database’s views, we provide an easy to use Silverlight interface to quickly and easily view the log entries, complete with filtering and some basic analytics for NTEvent Logs and Timer Job Logs.

    This was my first foray into development and coding, as almost all of my career in technology has been spent on the ServerOperationsArchitecture site of the world, and this was an eye opening and career life changing experience.  I got to work with 2 of my very good friends on a project that I am very passionate about, and I have been overly supported by my amazing, wonderful, beautiful, and ever patience wife, Jill, and my 2 amazing boys, Max & Sam, as I have dedicated my every waking free moment to this project.

    Tonight, after 4 long months, I clicked the button to release SPFLogger to the CodePlex community.  Please go check it out and give us feedback so that we can continue to grow and evolve this into something great.  It is currently licensed under a dual license which allows for personal use under GPL version 2.0 and a custom license for commercial and closed source applications.  Basically we wanted to keep people from using our code to make money without giving some to us, but we want people to be able to use it!

    The link is http://spflogger.codeplex.com.  We really hope that you love this tool as much as we do.

    spflogger

  • Speaking at SharePoint Connections Coast to Coast 2011 in Boston

    image

    My friend, Cornelius J. van Dyk, and I will be presenting at this year’s SharePoint Connections Coast to Coast conference in Boston held April 25-27 at the Marriott Long Wharf.

    We will be presenting two sessions, “Heavy Metal PowerPivot” and “SharePoint Logging – The Undiscovered Country”. Both sessions promise to be fresh and exciting so come out and see us if you’re anywhere in the Boston area during that time.

    We hope to see you there!

     imageimage

  • Developer Dashboard activation and parameters… up to the elbow…

    Activating through PowerShell

    In doing some research I have had some difficultly finding a single good resource for how to turn on the Developer Dashboard using PowerShell and what the parameters are for doing so.  Here is what several hours or pouring through numerous resources has turned up, and I am sure it is not 100% complete:

    Code to turn on the Developer Dashboard

    image

    This will turn on the icon at the top right hand corner of your masterpage for anyone with Designer or higher rights. 

    devdashboard_icon

    Optional Parameters

    Who can see it?

    image

    Some Mask Settings

    EmptyMask = allows everyone to see the developer dashboard
    FullMask = requires full control policy or site owner permissions to see the developer dashboard
    AddAndCustomizePages = default mask setting

    There are many more options for Mask Settings which can be found by reviewing the SPBasePermissions list on MSDN.

    Options:

    1.) Allow everyone to see the Developer Dashboard
        a.) set EmptyMask and remove icon from Masterpage
        b.) append ‘?Developer Dashboard=true‘ to the end of any page you want to see the developer dashboard on
    2.) Allow only people with Full Control (policy holders or site owners) to see the Developer Dashboard
        a.) set FullMask
        b.) give the supporting team a full control policy or grant one-off permissions
    3.) Leave this setting alone and anyone with Designer or higher rights will see the icon

    Is there any more data I can get than this?

    image
     

    TraceEnabled gives the additional section at the bottom of the developer dashboard which gives you:
        1.) Request Details
        2.) Trace Information
        3.) Control Tree
        4.) Session State
        5.) Application State
        6.) Request Cookies Collection
        7.) Response Cookies Collection
        8.) Headers Collection
        9.) Response Headers Collection
        10.) Form Collection
        11.) Query String Variables
        12.) Server Variables

    There is a TON of data here that you might not see otherwise, and you only see it if you expand the section at the bottom called:

    trace info

    If you aren’t interested in seeing any of this data or allowing your users to see any of this data, just do not execute this option as the default is set to false.

    If you are still stuck in 2007 mindset

    Here is the corresponding STSADM Command:

    image

    A Quick Note from the Author

    All of the above examples have used OnDemand as I believe that is best option, however you can replace OnDemand with Off or On as you see fit, this is just how I am writing it.

    Grab a copy of the PowerShell code referenced about from my SkyDrive here.

  • Silverlight with RIA Services GroupBy in a DataGrid

    There are lots of examples for Silverlight 3 and before when System.ComponentModel was directly accessible, however in Silverlight 4 with RIA Services none of those patterns work.  We looked at the sample videos, some great blogs by Tim Heuer and others, and even looked at the most recent Silverlight Toolkit but had no luck.

    After an hour or searching for the proper way to do grouping in a DataGrid in Silverlight 4 with RIA Services we found that it is really very simple:

    1.) Open Domain Data Source

    2.) Under Other: add GroupDescriptors

    3.) Add the PropertyPath to your desired GroupBy

    Thanks to my good friend, Dave Feldman, for helping to figure this out.

  • Now powered by SharePoint Foundation 2010

    Since my world is already mostly SharePoint 2010, I figured it was time to move my blog from Blogger, which has been a great starter experience, to something I am more familiar with, SharePoint Foundation 2010.  I am blessed with many friends who had offered me space on their servers rather than needing to stand up another on at my house to worry about, and I finally took one of them up on the offer.

    In the coming days you can expect some new content, but for tonight I am just excited to put the finishing touches on my conversion from Blogger to SharePoint.

  • SharePoint 2010 & Site Directory revisited: bug fix request rejected by Microsoft

    We received the official, and well thought out, answer back from Microsoft regarding the Site Directory bug that I reported on with my post “SharePoint 2010 and the Site Directory” back in December 2010.
     
    Here is the official answer from Microsoft:

    Issue Summary
    Site collection creation fails with access denied error when the master site directory site collection is located on a web application which is using the new claims aware authentication method.

    Cause for Rejection and Technical Explanation
    The Microsoft Office team has reevaluated this bug and unfortunately our initial decision still holds.  We realize that this causes a lot of inconvenience but the code change required is extremely large and introducing a change can leave behind a huge and unexpected bug trail.

    The site directory feature has been deprecated in SharePoint 2010.

    Site Directory provided site collection admins a central location where they can pin bunch of URLs with categories. Users could then browse through categories, view and access all URLs/sites associated with the site collection. In SharePoint 2010, social tagging provided a much richer way to categorize URLs, and we provided tag cloud web part for navigation. To avoid having two similar solutions, site directory was deprecated.

    Please know we carefully review all Hotfix request because each code change that we implement must maintain or improve the quality and stability of the product.  We strive for this to ensure the continuing integrity of the code base and to maintain a supportable product. While we recognize the impact that this issue is having on you, we cannot compromise the stability of the product’s code base using the Hotfix process.

    Alternative solution

    1. Ensure that the master site directory site collection is located on a web application which is using classic windows authentication.

    2. Disable master site directory setting and explore the capabilities of the new social tagging feature to categorize sites. Learn more about this new feature at ”Social tagging overview (SharePoint Server 2010)” http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff608137.aspx

  • Set-SPManagedAccount syntax for password resets

    Working with the PowerShell command for Set-SPManagedAccount this morning I found that the TechNet bulletin for this command has an inaccuracy with regard to password changes. 

    When trying to reset a password from PowerShell I followed the syntax and used:

    Set-SPManagedAccount –Identity domainaccount –AutoGeneratePassword true

    I got the following error:

    Set-SPManagedAccount : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument ‘true’.
    At line:1 char:21
    + Set-SPManagedAccount <<<<  -Identity domainaccount -AutoGeneratePassword true
        + CategoryInfo          : InvalidArgument: (:) [Set-SPManagedAccount], ParameterBindingException
        + FullyQualifiedErrorId : PositionalParameterNotFound,Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell.SPCmdletSetManagedAccount

    Turns out that the command has been changed and there is now no need for the “true” flag as the default is now “true” but you get the opportunity to choose (unless you pass the -confirm:$false flag)

    The result of passing the command without the “true” looks like this:

    Confirm
    Are you sure you want to perform this action?
    Performing operation “Set-SPManagedAccount” on Target “USsvc-ssaspfarm”.
    [Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [S] Suspend  [?] Help
    (default is “Y”):

    If you select “Y” the system will change the password for you with an automatically generated password.  If you want to validate the change an easy way to do it is to follow my previous blog post, https://bifocal.llc/how-to-get-your-managed-account-passwords-when-they-are-changed-automatically-by-sharepoint-2010/, to view the passwords before and after you run the command.