Monthly Archives: Júní 2008

Júní 2008 SUGDC Conference — Það er Wrap

I attended my first ever SharePoint conference this past weekend and it was a blast.

Fimmtudagur síðdegi, Ég keyrði niður til Virginia, leiðarljósi nýlega keypt minn $50 GPS appliance plug-in thing to my phone. The device was flawless. After the five hour drive, I had the energy to do a nice run on the tread mill and then, even more surprisingly, had the energy to head to the lobby for an advertised speaker’s cocktail hour. Conference n00b that I am, it turned out that the cocktail hour was really a ruse to get speakers to show up and help stuff papers and swag into shoulder bags for conference attendees 🙂

Had a hard time sleeping because I was speaking first thing Friday AM. Nervousness, a nagging feeling that I needed to add a slide to my presentation and a very disturbing cat show on Animal Planet kept me up late. Since I went to sleep late, I naturally got up early. I did add a fairly detailed technical architecture slide. It was well worth the effort because the 25 minutes of Q&A would have been very awkward without it. I was lucky to get the first slot in the technical track. Sahil Malik was originally going to speak Friday AM and I was going to speak Saturday but he needed to swap times. This allowed me to do my presentation and then sit back and enjoy everything going forward Friday and Saturday.

The presentation went OK. I definitely have room to improve it. I spoke about how we can access and use web services from a SharePoint Designer workflow using a custom action. Með tímanum, I will tie this information into my series over at EUSP.com for End Users trying to get the most use out of that tool. I blew through my slides and demo in 35 mínútur, to my dismay at the time. Til allrar hamingju, Q&A was lively, no doubt helped by the fact that it was early morning before lunch. Q&A is my favorite part of any presentation.

There were many interesting subjects and I hope to blog about them in greater detail this week (time permitting, as always). A fellow from CMS Watch provided a highly critical yet very hopeful review of SharePoint’s position in the market. A different discussion focused on the paucity of SharePoint resources and the difficulty that recruiters have finding good talent that is also "affordable" in this very tight market. The CMS Watch guy referred to the SharePoint human resources pool as being like a "guild." I’m mainly familiar with that term in MMORPG terms and it gave me a little thrill, to be honest 🙂

The highlight of the conference was just meeting and catching up with people I’ve "known" online for a while. The best was sitting at the bar with Becky Isserman (MossLover) fyrir 3 eða 4 klst (and that, after I had finished drinking for the night). I don’t often get to talk about Farscape eða Babylon 5 with Kansas City residents.

Bob Fox was there and as usual, is a whirlwind of intros, chats and just plain frenetic energy. He invited me to Saturday breakfast with Sahil Malik and that was great.

Saturday (day 2), Mike Lotter dragged himself to the conference to speak about InfoPath and then he joined Becky at the end of the day to do a sort of general Q&A session for about 30 að 45 minutes mainly focused on InfoPath (Mike) and AJAX (Becky). I wish Becky had been able to go through her full/formal presentation but I’m sure I’ll get a chance to see that one of these days. I have a feeling she’ll be "hitting the circuit" going forward.

I could go on and on. Two last points — the financial purpose of the conference was to raise money for the Children’s Miracle Network and it raised $5,000. That was awesome. Lokum, I want to publicly thank Gary Blatt, Gary Vaughn and Bob Fox for alerting me to and allowing me to speak at the conference. Auðvitað, the two Gary’s had a team of people supporting and organizing and all of you were awesome. I had high expectations before I went and it was better than I had hoped for.

Keep on the alert for the next conference scheduled for November 7th and 8th. Aside from some great content, it’s terrific for meeting up with all those online personalities you’ve known through blogs, Twitter, forums, o.fl..

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FBA og SQL Server: A Love Story

My colleague has been working on a web part in an FBA environment. Among other things, the web part pulls some data from SQL server. The grand plan for this project dictates that a DBA configures data level security in SQL (öfugt við embedding kenni í SQL fyrirspurn eða einhver önnur nálgun).

The problem is that SQL server doesn’t know anything about our FBA environment so it can’t trust us. We solved this problem by, fyrir skort á betri orð, manually impersonating an AD user so that we could connect to SQL such that SQL data level security works.

Jafnvel þó FBA er ASP.NET lögun, við SharePoint Nation fólk hefur kennt á ýmsum leitarvélum að ef þú ert fyrirspurn um FBA, you must mean you want know how to configure FBA in SharePoint. I failed to find find any information on how to enable an FBA oriented ASP.NET application to communicate with SQL in the way we needed.

Í tengslum við rannsókn þessa, við aftur að lesa þessa grein: ASP.NET Impersonation

Fleiri rannsóknir leitt okkur til þessa codproject grein: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/cpimpersonation1.aspx

Það hjálpaði okkur að skrifa kóðann okkar, which I’ve included below. It’s not the most elegant stuff, but it worked. I hope you find it helpful.

Hér er kóðinn sem starfaði fyrir okkur:

vernda ógilt btnSearchCarrier_Click(mótmæla sendanda, EventArgs e)
 {
 reyna
 {
 ImpersonateUser ae = ImpersonateUser();
 // TODO: Skipta persónuskilríki
 ("DomainName", "UserName", "Password");

//
 CODE
//

 iU.Undo();
 }
 veiða (Undantekning fyrrverandi)
 {

 }
 }

// Using Impersonation bekknum eins og getið hér að neðan.

almennings flokki ImpersonateUser
 {
 [DllImport("advapi32.dll", SetLastError = satt)]
 almennings truflanir Ytri bool LogonUser(
 String lpszUsername,
 String lpszDomain,
 String lpszPassword,
 int dwLogonType,
 int dwLogonProvider,
 tilv IntPtr phToken);

 [DllImport("kernel32.dll", Msgstr = CharSet.Auto)]
 einkaaðila Ytri truflanir bool CloseHandle(IntPtr höndla);

 einkaaðila truflanir IntPtr tokenHandle = IntPtr(0);
 einkaaðila truflanir WindowsImpersonationContext impersonatedUser;

 // Ef þú fella kóðann í DLL, vera viss um að krefjast þess að það
 // keyrir með FullTrust.
 [PermissionSetAttribute(SecurityAction.Demand, Name = "FullTrust")]
 almennings ógilt túlka(band vistfang, band username, band lykilorð)
 {
 reyna
 {

 // Notaðu óviðráðanlegur LogonUser virka til að fá notanda tákn fyrir
 // sem tilgreind notandi, lén, og lykilorð.
 const int LOGON32_PROVIDER_DEFAULT = 0;

 // Brottför þessa breytu veldur LogonUser að búa til aðal tákn.
 const int LOGON32_LOGON_INTERACTIVE = 2;
 tokenHandle = IntPtr.Zero;

 // Skref -1 Kalla LogonUser að fá handfang til aðgang skapi.
 bool returnValue = LogonUser(
 username,
 vistfang,
 lykilorð,
 LOGON32_LOGON_INTERACTIVE,
 LOGON32_PROVIDER_DEFAULT,
 dómari tokenHandle); // tokenHandle - ný öryggi tákn

 ef (rangar == returnValue)
 {
 int RET = Marshal.GetLastWin32Error();
 Console.WriteLine("LogonUser call failed with error code : " +
 RET);
 kasta Ný System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception(RET);
 }

 // Skref - 2
 WindowsIdentity newId = WindowsIdentity(tokenHandle);
 // Skref -3
 impersonatedUser = newId.Impersonate();

 }
 veiða (Undantekning fyrrverandi)
 {
 Console.WriteLine("Exception occurred. " + ex.Message);
 }
 }


 /// <Yfirlit>
 /// Hættir notendur villi
 /// </Yfirlit>
 almennings ógilt Afturkalla()
 {
 impersonatedUser.Undo();
 // Free tókum.
 ef (tokenHandle != IntPtr.Zero)
 CloseHandle(tokenHandle);
 }
 }

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Bæti við Lore: SSRS segir mér “rsAccessDenied”, En … Ég virkilega Hafa aðgang

Nokkrum vikum aftur, I was working with my developer colleague on a project involving SQL Server Reporting Services plug-in for MOSS. He was developing a web part that provides a fancy front-end to the report proper (The aðalæð lögun að vera snjall útlit á breytu með nokkur þúsund leit gildi á bak við það).

Þetta var að vinna mikið í þróun umhverfi en í móttöku notanda próf (UAT) umhverfi, it wouldn’t work. Firing up the debugger, við viljum sjá undantekningarlaust upplýsingar eins og þetta:

The leyfi veitt til notanda UAT_domain mosssvc 'eru ófullnægjandi til að framkvæma þessa aðgerð.(rsAccessDenied).

Ef þú lifandi leita á Ofangreind villa, you find it’s quite common. Scarily common. The worst kind of common because it has many different potential root causes and everyone’s suggested solution "feels" rétt. We probably tried them all.

Í okkar tilviki, the problem was that we had done a backup/restore of DEV to UAT. Somewhere in the data, eitthvað var enn að vísa til "DEV_domain" (í stað þess að uppfæra "UAT_Domain"). We created a new site, bætt á vefnum hluti og að leysa vandamál okkar.

Vonandi mun þetta spara einhvern klukkutíma eða tvo niður línu.

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Quick Fix: Aðgangur SharePoint Site kastar [HttpException (0x80004005): Beiðni rann út.]

One of my developer colleagues was working on a project this week and ran into a timeout problem while working on building some crazy web part. His web part was fine, but "suddenly" ótengdum staður varð mjög hægur og oft rann út með þessari villu:

[HttpException (0x80004005): Beiðni rann út.]

I logged in and saw that several other sites were just fine. I suspected that there were some hidden web parts on the page and using traustur ?Innihald = 1 kemba tækni, Ég gerði í raun að finna 11 Vefur Varahlutir á síðunni, only two of which were visible. Even better (frá let's-von-I-finna-eitthvað-ljót-hér-að-I-get-festa sjónarhorni), three of those closed web parts had a name of "Error".

Ég eyddi þeim vefur hluta (sem sjálft tók furðu langan tíma) and that solved the problem. For today 🙂

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Í sínum flokki FAST Þjálfun er Excellent

I’m starting day 4 of FAST’s partner training headed up by Larry Kaye here in Needham, MA.

This 5-day session is broken down into classes (3 og 2 days respectively) entitled "FAST ESP: Developing Custom Search Applications for Alliance Partners I" and "FAST ESP: Developing Custom Search Applications for Alliance Partners II".

This is a real boot camp type class. The material is deep (very, very deep). The instructor (Larry) clearly knows his stuff. I highly recommend this training if you considering it.

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SharePoint og FAST — á Reese er Peanut Butter Cups af Enterprise Apps?

Ég hef lokið upp daginn 2 af fljótur þjálfun í sólríka Needham, MA, og ég er að springa með hugmyndir (sem allir góðir bekkjum þjálfun við mig). One particular aspect of FAST has me thinking and I wanted to write it down while it was still fresh and normal day-to-day "stuff" pushed it out of my head.

We SharePoint WSS 3.0 / MOSS implementers frequently face a tough problem with any reasonably-sized SharePoint project: How do we get all the untagged data loaded into SharePoint such that it all fits within our perfectly designed information architecture?

Often enough, this isn’t such a hard problem because we scope ourselves out of trouble: "We don’t care about anything more than 3 months old." "We’ll handle all that old stuff with keyword search and going-forward we’ll do it the RIGHT way…" Etc.

En, what happens if we can’t scope ourselves out of trouble and we’re looking at 10’s of thousands or 100’s of thousands (or even millions) of docs — the loading og tagging of which is our devout wish?

FAST might be the answer.

FAST’s search process includes a lot of moving parts but one simplified view is this:

  • A crawler process looks for content.
  • It finds content and hands it off to a broker process that manages a pool of document processors.
  • Broker process hands it off to one of the document processors.
  • The document processor analyzes the document and via a pipeline process, analyzes the bejeezus out of the document and hands it off to an index builder type process.

On the starship FAST, we have a lot of control over the document processing pipeline. We can mix and match about 100 pipeline components and, most interestingly, we can write our own components. Like I say, FAST is analyzing documents every which way but Sunday and it compiles a lot of useful information about those documents. Those crazy FAST people are clearly insane and obsessive about document analysis because they have tools and/or strategies to REALLY categorize documents.

Svo … using FAST in combination with our own custom pipeline component, we can grab all that context information from FAST and feed it back to MOSS. It might go something like this:

  • Document is fed into FAST from MOSS.
  • Normal crazy-obsessive FAST document parsing and categorization happens.
  • Our own custom pipeline component drops some of that context information off to a database.
  • A process of our own design reads the context information, makes some decisions on how to fit that MOSS document within our IA and marks it up using a web service and the object model.

Auðvitað, no such automated process can be perfect but thanks to the obsessive (and possibly insane-but-in-a-good-way FAST people), we may have a real fighting shot at a truly effective mass load process that does more than just fill up a SQL database with a bunch of barely-searchable documents.

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Nám Um notendur At www.EndUserSharePoint.com

Mark Miller yfir á http://www.endusersharepoint.com has built, í minni reynslu, the best end-user focused SharePoint site in the ‘sphere. Í síðasta mánuði, he has enlisted some of the premier end-user focused bloggers around to contribute to the "front page" með reglulegu millibili, including but not limited to Paul Culmsee, Chris Quick, og Dessie Lunsford. He has others lined up and ready to contribute as their schedules allow.

I jumped on the chance to participate and my inaugural post is here. I’m writing a series on how to use SharePoint Designer to create first-class business workflow solutions. In keeping with the EUSP.com’s focus, those articles will always keep the End User front and center.

I personally tend to divide the SharePoint world into three broad groups: SharePoint consultants, full-time SharePoint staff developers and end users. When I write, I often ask myself, which of these groups might be interested in the subject? Most often, I end up writing for the first two (technical) groups, mainly because I’m a consultant myself; it’s always easier and more authentic to write about those things with which you’re most familiar on a personal level.

As I’ve noted before, the end user community is far, far larger than the technical community. EUSP.com is top-notch and I heartily recommend it to all three groups. The site’s laser focus is obviously valuable to end users. Hins, we developers and consultants can only be better at our profession if we can understand and effectively respond to the needs of the end users we serve. I know I need all the help I can get 🙂 Stöðva það út.

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Skírskota SSRS Web Services Frá WSS / MOSS í FBA Umhverfismál

We needed to invoke the "CreateSubscription" method on an SSRS web service that is hosted in an FBA managed MOSS environment from a custom web part. We kept getting variations of:

  • 401: Ekki heimilt
  • Object Færð

The "object moved" message was most interesting because it was saying that the "object" (SSRS þjónustu okkar) had "moved" to login.aspx. This clearly meant we had some kind of authentication problem.

I eventually realized that I had bookmarked a blog entry by Robert Garret that described how to invoke a general purpose WSS/MOSS web service living inside an FBA environment. Note that I can’t link directly to the article (og með 06/09/08) because it wants to authenticate. The link I provide brings you to an "all posts" view and you can locate the specific article by searching for "Accessing MOSS Web Services using Forms Based Authentication".

Hér er kóðinn sem starfaði fyrir okkur:

ReportingService2006 rs = núll; 
// Authenticate Authentication auth = Authentication(); 
auth.Url = "HTTP://URL/_vti_bin/Authentication.asmx";
auth.CookieContainer =
CookieContainer();
LoginResult result = auth.Login("userid", "password");
ef (result.ErrorCode == LoginErrorCode.NoError) 
{
// No error, so get the cookies.
CookieCollection cookies = auth.CookieContainer.GetCookies(Uri(auth.Url));
Cookie authCookie = cookies[result.CookieName];
rs =
ReportingService2006();
rs.Url =
"HTTP://server/_vti_bin/ReportServer/ReportService2006.asmx";
rs.CookieContainer =
CookieContainer();
rs.CookieContainer.Add(authCookie);
}
reyna
{
  rs.CreateSubscription(report, extSettings, desc, eventType, matchData, parameters1);
}
veiða (Undantekning fyrrverandi)
{
  Console.WriteLine(ex.Message.ToString());
}

I interpret things to work like this:

  • Our web part needs to dial up the authentication service and say, "Hey, Tony, it’s me!".
  • Authentication service replies saying, "Hey, I know you. How are the kids? Here’s a token."
  • We call up the SSRS service and say, "Tony sent me, here’s the token."

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Hefur þú Flutt Monthly Leita greining?

Það er gott, sennilega jafnvel Best Practice, að endurskoða leitina skýrslur einu sinni í mánuði og leita að tækifæri til að bæta bestu veðmál, tune your thesaurus and maybe even uncover some business intelligence that is otherwise hidden to management.

It’s already the 3rd of the month. Time’s awastin’ 🙂

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Faceted Leita Fence Sitter No More

Ég hafði ástæðu í dag til að spila um með Codeplex faceted leit project today.

Það hefur verið í kring fyrir a á meðan, en ég hikaði við að sækja og nota það fyrir venjulegum ástæðum (aðallega skortur á tíma), plus outright fear 🙂

Ef þú ert að leita til að bæta leitina og kanna nýja möguleika, download it and install it when you have an hour or so of free time. I followed the installation manual’s instructions and it took me less than 20 minutes to have it installed and working. It provides value minute zero.

It does look pretty hard to extend. The authors provide a detailed walk-through for a complex BDC scenario. I may be missing it, but I wish they would also provide a simpler scenario involving one of the pre-existing properties or maybe adding one new managed property. I shall try and write that up myself in the next period of time.

Neðsta lína — í mínútum, þú getur sett upp, stilla það, use it and add some pretty cool functionality to your vanilla MOSS search and be a hero 🙂

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