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• Excel Services ODC - Data Refresh Authentication Error

  Posted: 26 May 2009 at 11:50 by colinn

  Just thought I'd blog this as I had trawled the web and come up with all sorts of complex answers. The scenario - a Windows Authenticated SharePoint site running Excel Services but anytime a user refreshed a data connection through a browsable Excel workbook they got a data access error. Most of the advice on this suggested implementing a Single Sign On solution through an SQL solution or Kerberos. I couldn't help thinking there must be a simpler way - fortunately there is!

• Central Admin SSL

  Posted: 15 Apr 2009 at 15:56 by colinn

  Steve Smith and Spencer Harbar (again - oh no I've become his groupie!) were discussing Best Practice around setting up Intranet, Extranet and Internet sites - far too detailed to relay here I'll stick a link up when the slide deck becomes available - However, one area they discussed in detail was what should be on SSL and they recommended that if nothing else uses port 443 then Central Administration. I hadn't given it much thought but now that its been highlighted to me there is ce

• Lockdown

  Posted: 15 Apr 2009 at 15:55 by colinn

  I haven't done much on the Internet Content Management side lately which is my way of getting in my apologies/excuses for not knowing about this feature (call it expectation management - I won't ask what your expectations were). Another great session hosted by Andrew Connell and Spencer Harbar on publishing sites highlighted the use of the ViewFormPagesLockdown feature (click on 'lockdown mode' for the info). This little feature will stop anonymous users from accessing applicatio

• Like A SharePoint Cowboy

  Posted: 07 Apr 2009 at 16:20 by colinn

  Sorry for the Glen Campbell reference - couldn't resist, I'm getting help with it.   I promised some more on Eric Shupps excellent presentation on Custom Site Definitions. There's a guide on Mr Shupp's blog on how to build a Custom Site Definition. There is also a good diagram of how a Solution Package breaks down.   The Cowboy is also going to put up a VS2008 base solution for a a site definition and I'll pop that link up when I get it

• A Love, hate, Hate, HATE Relationship

  Posted: 07 Apr 2009 at 12:38 by colinn

  Given the tag line I'll bet you guessed this post is going to have a SharePoint Designer theme. I was in a brilliant talk by Eric Shupps (the SharePoint Cowboy) on branding and custom site definitions (more of which in a later post) when he reminded everybody that SharePoint Developer is now available as a free download and what it was and was not good for: PROS: Design Surface Simple Deploy Extensive layout control Utilise with minimal programming skills Versioning CONS: Can only use on

• The Anti-Practice

  Posted: 07 Apr 2009 at 08:29 by colinn

  Since this is a Best Practices conference there has been much discussion of what not to do. However, there seems to be divided opinion on what to call... well the opposite (see what I mean). I've heard 'Poor Practice', 'Bad Practice', 'Worst Practice' but my favourite was coined  by Natalya Voskresenskaya - the Anti-Practice - suitably apocalyptic.

• Stranded in the Mid-Atlantic

  Posted: 06 Apr 2009 at 16:58 by colinn

  There's been a lot of Twittering in the ether of late regarding just where Spencer Harbar's accent has migrated to. It's obviously bothering him because before he even started his talk on SharePoint Farm Misconceptions he had apologised for any lingual fluidity that might occur. Spencer was discussing common SharePoint Farm myths particularly around the "Magic Numbers" published by Microsoft. As many of you will know most of these get revised frequently, infamously the numb

• Registration and Keynote

  Posted: 06 Apr 2009 at 12:02 by colinn

  I was going to start by sticking in a picture of the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre but I'm not sure if I really want to inflict that on you - I'll see how my mood develops later in the day. All I can say is at least when you're in it you don't have to look at it. Anyway enough aesthetics laced with architectural snobbery you're here for the SharePoint bits right? Joel Oleson gave the keynote complete with Monty Python clips (for reference The Holy Grail bunny sequence,

• SharePoint Best Practise Conference

  Posted: 05 Apr 2009 at 18:21 by colinn

  The conference kicks off in London tomorrow and there seems to be plenty to interest anybody with even the vaguest, passing intimation of an interest in any of MOSS' myriad of forms. The first of these was held in Washington DC last year and demand was such that a couple of others followed quickly. This is the first (and according to the official blurb) only one that will be held in Europe this year. The full agenda can be found here  Of the different streams probably ITPro holds the most in

• SharePoint and Databases

  Posted: 23 Mar 2009 at 11:37 by alistairl

  Something that you will learn to realise with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is how important it is to have a handle on the SQL Server aspects of your farm installation. Ok, if you install everything on a single box and use Express edition you don’t really care about SQL much but try to do anything more adventurous and your SQL Server infrastructure will take a bit more thought. Explorer a bit further and there are a few points regarding network protocols and port numbers that are impor

• Applications with Smart Client architrecture

  Posted: 20 Mar 2009 at 07:14 by deniss

  Recently I had a chance to develop an application in the core of which laid a model called a Composite Smart Client. In the next few posts I would like to share my experience and opinion related to this technology. Composite Smart Client model is actually another form of more general model defined by term Smart Client. In this introductory post I’ll overview more general term first and move to Composite Smart Clients in the next post.The term Smart Client is dedicated to highlight the differenc

• ASP.NET MVC in production

  Posted: 17 Mar 2009 at 19:07 by gopalk

  Is ASP.NET MVC ready for production use? ASP.NET MVC Beta version was the first one to come with an explicit go-live licence. We went live with our first ASP.NET MVC website in December, based on ASP.NET MVC Beta and the results have so far been very impressive. The beta was of high-quality and very stable during development. With the release candidates its only got better  and hopefully the release version isn’t too far away. In my opinion releasing the source code and keep the community

• SharePoint Deployment Planning Services

  Posted: 12 Feb 2009 at 16:50 by alistairl

  I am part of a team within Charteris that is qualified to deliver consulting under the SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) program from Microsoft. “What is SDPS?” I hear you cry, “Why should I care?”. The idea of SDPS is to help Microsoft Software Assurance customers with getting the most out of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server by allowing them to claim a number of days time with a SharePoint consultant. Registered Microsoft Partner Organisations deliver the consultancy, and this ha

• Some of those SharePoint Prerequisites to Remember

  Posted: 12 Feb 2009 at 11:33 by alistairl

  A recent visit I made to install SharePoint for a production extranet reminded me of the importance to plan ahead and make sure that the prerequisites for successful installation and operation are in place before a visit. The big difference between development and production is the flexibility of the environment and the control you have over it. I would suggest this is the case because things like change control don’t necessarily exist (at least formally) on your Virtual PC environment that sits

• How does ASP.NET MVC work – Part 2

  Posted: 11 Feb 2009 at 07:41 by gopalk

  In the last post we saw how an ASP.NET MVC request gets routed through to the MVC framework through the ASP.NET framework. We also saw that the MvcHandler class is the HttpHandler responsible for servicing an ASP.NET MVC-request. A simplistic view of the order in which routing and MVC classes come into play is like this: UrlRoutingModule -> MvcRoutingHandler -> MvcHandler So at this stage our request has got an HttpHandler assigned in the form of MvcHandler. Moving ahead in the HttpApplica

• Scrum and Outsourcing

  Posted: 09 Feb 2009 at 11:51 by davidmy

  Software development projects are increasingly utilising resources which are located offshore exclusively as well as in conjunction with on-shore (or near-shore) resources. The reasons for the increased usage of offshore resources span from the attractive reduced resource costs to the ability to scale the development teams quicker and easier. At the same time more and more software development projects are employing Agile practices and in particular Scrum in order to deliver a fit-for-purpose so

• Virtual Earth & Windows Mobile - "Nugget" Talk - NextGenUG - Oxford Branch - Wednesday 4th February 2009

  Posted: 03 Feb 2009 at 13:05 by rogerw

  Another Chance To See.... I gave a talk to the Oxford branch of the NextGenUG in January 2009 on the subject of Location Based Programming with Windows Mobile & Virtual Earth. Unfortunately the demo failed because of networking issues/config and as a result I ran out of time to fully explain the code sample. Weather and traffic conditions permitting, I am hoping to do a reprise of the last 15-20 minutes of my talk as a "nugget" at the February meeting of the NxtGen User Group,

• Nxt Gen User Group Talk - Location Based Programming - The "Demo Gods" Were Frowning

  Posted: 03 Feb 2009 at 12:59 by rogerw

  A few weeks ago (Tuesday 13th January) I gave a presentation to the Oxford Branch of the NxtGen User Group on Location Based Programming with Windows Mobile. If you are interested, you can find the slides in PDF form for the talk here. This presentation was one of those occasions however, where things just don't go as planned. The problems occurred during my final demo, which hoped to show how to use Windows Mobile to call Virtual Earth Web Services 1.0. The other previous demos were ru

• How does ASP.NET MVC work?

  Posted: 20 Jan 2009 at 06:56 by gopalk

  If you’ve looked at the ASP.NET MVC framework, you might have wondered how it fits within the rest of the ASP.NET lifecycle. To understand it though, the ASP.NET request lifecycle needs to be understood first. What happens when an ASP.NET request is made? The answer depends on the version of IIS being used. In IIS 5.0 / 6.0, ASP.NET support was accomplished using an isapi extension i.e. aspnet_isapi.dll. In IIS 5.0 / 6.0 there is a distinct handover of the request from IIS to .NET before any ma

• Asp.net 4

  Posted: 22 Dec 2008 at 09:44 by deniss

  In this post I would like to share some information related to Asp.net 4 after visiting recent DDD 7 conference, reading some online resources, and attending Charteris Tech Day event. In development of Asp.net 4 Microsoft tried to set up new ground in openness and community involvement. For this purpose they were using their codeplex (www.codeplex.com/aspnet) site heavily where all the interim work and unofficial releases of different products can be found. So Aps.net 4 will contain many product