Microsoft DreamSpark
(for students and educators)

1. Create a DreamSpark Account
2. Verify your student status
3. Download the Visual Studio 2010 Professional Edition
4. Use the SharePoint 2010 Easy Setup Script to download and install a copy of the free SharePoint Foundation 2010
• 26 minutes video tutorial on Channel 9: Building a SharePoint Development Machine Using the Easy Setup Script
• Chris Johnson: Announcing SharePoint Easy Setup for Developers (blog post with step by step configuration instructions)
5. Done.

Microsoft WebsiteSpark / BizSpark
(for small companies and startups)

As a startup or a small company you can get the required software for free for the first three years.

1. Create a Microsoft BizSpark account or a WebsiteSpark account
2. Get approved
3. Download the Visual Studio 2010 Professional Edition
4. Use the SharePoint 2010 Easy Setup Script to download and install a copy of the free SharePoint Foundation 2010
• 26 minutes video tutorial on Channel 9: Building a SharePoint Development Machine Using the Easy Setup Script
• Chris Johnson: Announcing SharePoint Easy Setup for Developers (blog post with step by step configuration instructions)
5. Done.

To qualify for BizSpark, your Startup must be:

• Developing Software
• Privately held
• Less than 3 years old
• Making Less than US $1 million in annual revenue 

To qualify for WebsiteSpak, your company must be:

• A professional service firm whose primary business is providing Web development and design services for its clients, with
• no more than 10 members (including owners and employees).
• Individual: An individual that performs web-related development and/or design services for its current customers or plans to provide such services to its customers in the future. An Individual does not have his/her own company and/or does not work for a web design or development company.

BETA software with GO-LIVE license
(for everyone)

Note: This method will stop working on 15 January 2013.

1. Download and install the free Windows 8 Consumer Preview
2. Download and install the free Visual Studio 11 Beta (Ultimate, Premium or Professional)
3. Use the SharePoint 2010 Easy Setup Script to download and install a copy of the free SharePoint Foundation 2010
• 26 minutes video tutorial on Channel 9: Building a SharePoint Development Machine Using the Easy Setup Script
• Chris Johnson: Announcing SharePoint Easy Setup for Developers (blog post with step by step configuration instructions)
• This might also help:  Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 (it is basically the same for Windows
4. Double check that IIS uses .NET 2.0 instead of 4.0 for the SharePoint web applications
5. (Optional) Getting a developer license for Windows 8 Consumer Preview
6. Done.

License: Go Live

Visual Studio 11 Beta and .NET Framework 4.5 Beta meet our high standards for pre-release software, so we support application design, development, test, and deployment in test and production environments. Before putting an application into production, you must review and comply with the INSTALLATION, USE RIGHTS AND RESTRICTIONS section of the Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Product Family Beta Software licensing agreement. This section describes your rights for internal and external production use.

Three of the newer additions to the web developer’s debugging toolset are error.stack, websocket frame inspection and breakpoints for dynamic web worker threads.

Error.stack

Although it is not an ECMAScript 5 standard, beginning with Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8 Consumer Preview now all major browsers offer support for Error.stack.

The Error.stack offers a trace of which functions were called, in what order, from which line and file, and with what arguments.

Error.stack browser compatibility (Source: Mozilla Developer Network / MDN)

Test it yourself by opening the following example in IE10 on a Windows 8 (virtual) machine:

Explore Error.stack

Want to learn more?

• IEBlog: Diagnosing JavaScript Errors Faster with Error.stack
• MSDN library: Windows Internet Explorer 10 Consumer Preview Guide for Developers
• Mozilla Developer Network: JavaScript Reference > Global > Objects > Error > stack

Websocket frame inspection

Thanks to a WebKit patch from RIM from 04/27/2012, you can now look into websocket pakets and see the data sent and received in Google Chrome. Before the patch, you could only see that a web socket connection had been established.

How to test this yourself:

• Download the latest Chrome Canary build and run it
• Open a web application that makes use of web sockets, e.g. http://html5demos.com/web-socket
• Open the developer console  (Control-Shift-J or ⌥⌘J), go to the tab “Network” filter by “WebSockets” select the web socket connection you want to debug and then click on the tab “Websocket Frames“
• Now if data is sent or received, you will see little arrows indicating the direction (ingoing/outgoing traffic), Time, OpCode, Mask, Length and Data

Breakpoints for dynamic Web Worker threads

With Web Workers, you can run processor-intensive code in background threads to keep the UI responsive. Debugging a multithreaded app can get difficult because of the asynchronous multiple threads.

The F12 Developer Tools in Windows Internet Explorer 10 now can help you debug these threads, letting you view individual worker scripts, set breakpoints, and watch variables.

Want to learn more?

• F12 Developer Tools: Debugging Web Workers in F12 Developer Tools
• HTML5 rocks: The basics of web workers
• whatwg specification: Web Workers

Plazes.com has gone out of service. On July 1st all personal data (including account info) will be erased. It has been bought by Nokia in June 2008 and parts of it are now getting integrated into Nokia Maps.

Time to say goodbye!

I was user 223 and registered on July 15, 2004 00:05. Plazes was launched on August 16, 2004. It was the first geosocial networking site that I know.

For comparison: Gowalla launched in 2007 and Foursquare in 2009.

The first Plaze where I checked in was:

408 CO4 Communications office Stuttgart 70178 Baden-Württemberg DE Tübinger Str. 19b 48.771960636115 9.1742873841973 http://www.co4.de 1584 5 2004-07-07 20:58:59 UTC 2005-07-11 15:15:46 UTC 842

That’s where I learned how to optimize HTML, CSS and JavaScript for browsers like Netscape Navigator 3.0 Gold and Internet Explorer 5.0. Thank you for the good times! By the way: Some of my former colleagues now work at VISIA GmbH and they are looking for a senior project manager and web developers.

Plazes was the first project for which I was contributing in my free time, followed up by a donation for the two-page advocacy ad for Mozilla Firefox 1.0 in the New York Times in December 2004.

plazes launcher (.NET version)

I developed the plazes launcher at a time when the .NET Framework 2 was still in BETA.
It was a little tool which ran in your Windows system tray / notification area, automatically detected your network location and sent it to the Plazes servers to check you in.

In addition to the original version, mine was faster and able to work with VPN connections, proxies and firewalls. You could send messages to buddies via tray menu or mail icon and you also got alerts for new messages and friendship requests.

It was also featuring a people radar and automatic updates. You could run it on Microsoft® Windows® 98, Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition, Microsoft Windows NT® version 4.0 with Service Pack 4, Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows XP or Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with Microsoft .NET Framework Version 1.1.

The last published version was release 0.1.6.0 (633 KB) on 14.06.2005.

In addition to developing the plazes launcher (.NET version) I also bought the domain codeplaze.com and started running a developer portal incl. a wiki.

Heck, I even own a polo shirt with their logo printed on it. It was an interesting journey!

Thank you and bye, bye…

Show search results from a WordPress blog next to SharePoint search results.

Prerequisites

One of the following enterprise search products:

• Microsoft Search Server 2010 Express
• Microsoft Search Server 2010
• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Microsoft FAST Search for SharePoint 2010
• Also works with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS 2007) and Microsoft Search Server 2008 (Express)

WordPress (cloud or on-premise)

How it works

SharePoint can integrate WordPress search with the help of a Federated Search Connector, a XML based definition of how to pass a query to a target system and accept and display results from that system.

In older versions Microsoft used .fld (federated location definition, an extension to OpenSearch 1.1 draft 3) since SharePoint 2010 Microsoft uses .osdx (OpenSearch description document 1.1 draft 5).

If you do not have such a definition file for the system you want to integrate, you can create a definition via the SharePoint Search Administration user interface in your browser. Which is what we will use in this example.

A nice side effect: As it is a open standard, it also works with other search tools, like the desktop search in Windows 7 or the search box in Mozilla Firefox. So afterwards you can export your new definition and re-use it.

Recommended read:

• Vedant Kulshreshtha: Federated Search Connectors for Enterprise Search
• MSDN Library: Federated Search Overview
• OpenSearch.org (originally developed by A9.com, Inc., an Amazon.com company)

Now that you know how it works, let’s begin implementing it.

Configuration

Federated Search Location

Step 1: Prepare the search URL

• Go to your blog, search for “Test” and copy the URL from the browser. In my example this gives: http://blog.christian-heindel.de/?s=Test
• Now in the URL replace “s=Test” with “feed=rss2&s={searchTerms}“>
• You should end up with sth. like: http://blog.christian-heindel.de?feed=rss2&s={searchTerms}
  

Step 2: Create a new federated location

• Open the “Central Administration“, go to “Application Management > Service Applications > Manage service applications > Search Service Application“
• Now click “Queries and Results > Federated Locations > New Location“
• Under “Location Information > Location Type” select “OpenSearch 1.0/1.1“
• Now in the field “Query Template” fill in the prepared URL from step 1.

  

Search Web Parts

Step 3: Site Collection Feature

• Under “Site Actions > Site Settings > Site collection features” be sure that “Search Server Web Parts” is “Active“.

Step 4: Edit Page, add Web Part

• On the page where you want to show the search results, click on “Site Actions > Edit Page > Add a Web Part“
• Choose the “Federated Results” Web Part from the “Search” category
  

Step 5: Configure Web Parts

• Now on the “Federated Results Web Part” click on “Edit Web Part“.
• Unter “Federated Results > Location Properties > Location” select the federated location created in step 2 and click “OK“.
  

This were 5 simple steps to integrate WordPress search in SharePoint. Happy searching…

Want more?

• Federated Search Connector Gallery for Enterprise Search (download pre-defined federated locations for: Bing, MSDN, TechNet, Yahoo, Google, Youtube, WIkipedia, Flickr, etc.)

Problem

E-Mails still land in the drop folder but don’t get picked up by the “Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming E-Mail” timer job. (The default folder is “c:\inetpub\mailroot\drop” if you want to have a look.)

The document libraries / lists will not receive e-mails.

In the ULS log you will start seeing entries like this:

05/01/2012 13:17:12.71 OWSTIMER.EXE (0x14B78) 0x113C4 SharePoint Foundation Monitoring nasq Medium Entering monitored scope (Timer Job job-email-delivery) 0a9e5349-84ef-4669-9bba-2a3c9bd12a0a

05/01/2012 13:17:12.83 OWSTIMER.EXE (0x14B78) 0x113C4 SharePoint Foundation E-Mail 0000 High E-mail cannot be delivered because site is over quota or locked for editing. Site URL: http://sharepoint.christian-heindel.de. 0a9e5349-84ef-4669-9bba-2a3c9bd12a0a

05/01/2012 13:17:12.83 OWSTIMER.EXE (0x14B78) 0x113C4 SharePoint Foundation E-Mail 6871 Information The Incoming E-Mail service has completed a batch. The elapsed time was 00:00:00.1130065. The service processed 1 message(s) in total. Errors occurred processing 1 message(s): Message ID: 0a9e5349-84ef-4669-9bba-2a3c9bd12a0a

This message occurs although no quota limit is set.

Outgoing e-mails still work.

Workaround

Go to “SharePoint Central Admin > Application Management > Configure Quota and Locks“, set a limit via “Limit site storage to a maximum of:” and press “OK”.

No downtime necessary. No data loss. (E-mails will get collected in the drop folder until SharePoint starts picking them up again.)

Further information:

Looks like others are having the same problem: “Incoming Email stuck in Drop folder after SP/Hotfix installation”

Update 14.05.2012:

Nintex LazyApproval also affected

Problem: LazyApproval uses the incoming e-mail functionality, but runs in Central Administration, for which you cannot set a quota limit via the browser UI.

Solution: Same as above, but via Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Server 2010:

Get the storagemaximumlevel for Central Administration using PowerShell (insert your Central Admin URL):

$ca = get-spsite -identity http://Servername:CAport
$ca.quota.storagemaximumlevel

A numeric result will be returned.

Then set a bigger maximum for it using the same command but with a number bigger than the result.

$ca.quota.storagemaximumlevel=80000000

No IISRESET is required after running the script.

(Source: Cameron McConnell, Support Manager for Nintex, http://connect.nintex.com/forums/thread/22907.aspx)

In a presentation  (“Efficient Denial of Service Attacks on Web Application Platforms”, Dec 28th 2011, PDF) at 28th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin (#28c3) there have been published details on how to perform so called “hash collision attacks” on webservers.

This does not only affect Microsoft technology (ASP.NET), but also Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, v8/node.js, …

Microsoft has already reacted and will release an out-of-band security update today.

For more details see:

• ScottGu’s Blog: ASP.NET Security Update Shipping Thursday, Dec 29th (en)
• Microsoft Security Advisory (2659883): Vulnerability in ASP.NET Could Allow Denial of Service (en)
• Microsoft Security Research & Defense: More information about the December 2011 ASP.NET vulnerability (en)
• TechNet Team Blog Austria: Workaround gegen Denial of Service Attacke in ASP.NET #hashDoS #28C3 (de)

So a good advice is to create some automated build script that changes a version number in your manifest file.

Also keep in mind that when the manifest file has changed and the browser has updated the files, it won’t use them for the current session. So you may want to ask the user to reload the application. For example like this:

window.applicationCache.addEventListener('updateready', function(e) {
	if (window.applicationCache.status == window.applicationCache.UPDATEREADY) {
	  // A changed manifest file has been found and downloaded by
	  // the browser. Swap cache and reload the page to use the new files.
	  window.applicationCache.swapCache();
	  if (confirm('A new version of this site is available. Load it?')) {
		window.location.reload();
	  }
	}
}, false);

Debugging using Google Chrome

You can get deeper insights in the caching behavior of your application by using Google Chrome. It offers two helpful functions:

1. Developer Tools

Learn: How to Access the Developer Tools

If the Console is activated (Control-Shift-J or ⌥⌘J), you can see details of the caching mechanics that are automatically logged by the browser.

Example:

Files are getting cached...

Files have already been cached...

You can also implement individual logging by hooking up to the events provided by the API. See the the “AppCache events” section in the Beginners Guide to Using the Application Cache on HTML5 Rocks, for example.

2. AppCache-Internals

You get a list with all cached offline applications with information about Size, Creation Time, Last Update Access and Last Access Time when you open the following internal URL:

chrome://appcache-internals/

If you click on “View Entries”, you will get detailed information about each individual file. You can see if a file has been explicitly or implicitly cached and which one is the master document of the application.

Now, if you click on an individual file, you can even control the actual content of the cached file and see which headers had been sent from the server.

Debugging on an iOS device

If you are debugging on an iOS device be sure to follow the instructions from the Safari Web Content Guide, Section “Debugging”. If in Safari, you will have a chance to see errors with your manifest file.

If in Web App mode, to be sure the cache is deleted, you have to clear history, cookies and cache and to reboot the device. Otherwise you might still be loading old versions of your updated files.

In my tests I found the iOS Web App cache the most hardcore cache to use, ever.

See also:

• How to host HTML5 Offline Web applications on an IIS web server
• How to clear the cache of offline Web Applications

For example, try to delete the cache of an Offline Web application:

iOS

The only way to be sure it’s deleted is:

• Open the Safari settings
• Clear your cache (“Clear history”, “Clear Cookies”, “Clear Cache”)
• Restart device

Google Chrome

• Open the following URL: chrome://appcache-internals/
• Look for your application and click “Remove”

See: Troubleshooting Offline Access Issues for Chrome10+

Mozilla Firefox

• Go to “Preferences… > Advanced > Network > Offline Storage”
• Click on “Clear now”

See: Firefox Help “How to clear the cache”

You might also want to read: How to host HTML5 Offline Web applications on an IIS web server

By providing a manifest file to the browser, you can specify which files should be available for offline usage, which files always have to be fetched form the internet and you can define fallback resources (what to use when the online ressources are not available).

This is not only good for Offline Applications, you can also speed up live websites with this technique. (See “Tip 5: Use cache manifest for live sites, not just offline apps” on HTML5 Rocks)

Short example:

In your HTML file, specify the manifest file: <html manifest="myapplication.appcache">

Sample content of a manifest file:

CACHE MANIFEST
# Revision 1
# These files will be cached for offline usage,
# also if they are not otherwise linked or used by the current document 

CACHE:
index.html
css/default.css
images/logo.png
scripts/main.js

# These resources require online connection and will never be cached
NETWORK:

http://your.sharepoint.server/_vti_bin/ListData.svc

http://api.twitter.com

# profile-placeholder.png will be served in place of all images
# from the Gravatar service
FALLBACK:

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/

img/profile-placeholder.png

For this technique to work with files hosted on Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) you have to teach the old server new tricks.

What to configure in IIS: MIME Type

The manifest file hast to be served with the mime type “text/cache-manifest“, otherwise the browsers will ignore it.

You can add a new mime type to IIS via the UI, command line, configuration files or WMI. (See documentation “Add a MIME Type“ on MSDN)

When you’re done, it should look sth. like this:

You will find older examples on the net, where it says, that your manifest file should be called “cache.manifest“. Unfortunately, “.manifest” is already used by Microsoft, so the new recommendation is to use “.appcache“. (see HTML5 tracker, rev. 5812)

What else to configure in IIS: Control expiration of your files

You might want to adjust your settings so you are sure that the browser always gets the current manifest file. Otherwise you have no control over when the Offline Web application will be updated on the client.

You can configure this via UI, command line, configuration file or WMI.
(See documentation “Configure the HTTP Expires Response Header” on MSDN)

By the way: If you are running your web applications on an Apache web server, you might want to have a look at the pre-configured .htaccess file that comes with the HTML5 Mobile Boilerplate.

Want to learn more?

• W3C Working Draft (HTML5 > Web application APIs > Offline Web applications)
• WHATWG (Living Standard version)
• A Beginner’s Guide to Using the Application Cache

There were not so many new topics, that you would not have heard before. But in almost every talk and with almost every product in the exhibit halls you could see, that what was there, now had a few years time to evolve.

What I liked

• Meeting great people I already knew and those I didn’t know before.
• Internationality
• Cooperation Offers / New Contacts
• Workflow Shootout (3 competing products, same tasks, different approaches)
• Active Community (not only on Twitter #EuropeanSP / @EuropeanSP)
• Very well organized! A big THANK YOU to Helen, Tracy, Declan, the people from the Estrel Convention Center, Michael Greth, the exhibitors and sponsors…
• My speaker badge! I hope to have another talk at the next conference, not only because it will be in Barcelona…

What I didn’t like

• session time to short
• not enough caffeinated beverages

The tweet, that makes the true potential of the conference visible

No tweets during coffee breaks? ;) #EuropeanSP

19. October 2011 16:09 via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@Sw1ma

Martin Swinkels

People were networking so actively, there was simply no time to tweet…

Some of the sessions I’ve attended

Tuesday, 18th October

• SharePoint 2010 – THE Platform for Business Collaboration, Internet Sites and More (Bjorn Olstad, Microsoft, Norway, Keynote)
• Drive Adoption and Get Users Excited about SharePoint 2010 (Matt Berg, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft, USA, T6)
• SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Best Practices (Joel Oleson, Collaboration Solutions Director, USA, T3)
• What to Avoid to Ensure Workflow Projects Succeed (Mike Fitzmaurice, Nintex, USA, T11)
• Diving Into the SharePoint 2010 Fluent User Interface (Christian Glessner, Data One GmbH, Germany, T19)