Martin Hinshelwood's Blog

Proxy server settings for SharePoint 2007

Well this was fun... All the examples of how to connect through a proxy from SharePoint are missing a crucial piece of information!

<system.net>
      <defaultProxy>
         <proxy usesystemdefault = "false" proxyaddress="http://proxyservername" bypassonlocal="true" />
      </defaultProxy>
   </system.net> 

 

This is the accepted route, with an exception to e added to the proxy to use anonymous authentication...

But is you use:

<defaultProxy useDefaultCredentials="true">
      <proxy usesystemdefault="false" proxyaddress=http://proxyservername" bypassonlocal="true" />
      <bypasslist>
        <add address="[a-z]+\.domain\.biz" />
        <add address="[a-z]+\.domain2\.biz" />
      </bypasslist>
    </defaultProxy>

The required bit of which is the useDefaultCredentials parameter that passes the logged on users credentials on to the proxy server.

 Now all I need to do is get the double-hop authentication to work...

posted @ Wednesday, October 24, 2007 12:10 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ Sharepoint ]

Why Integrated Authentication does not work with host headers!

You receive error 401.1 when you browse a TFS Web site that uses Integrated Authentication and is hosted on IIS 5.1 or IIS 6

This little problem occurs when you have Windows 2003 SP1 or later installed and you try to change your Team Foundation Server to a friendly name, like say tfs01.[intranet].[company].com.

What I found was that when you tried to view tfs01.[intranet].[company].com on the local server, it popped up an authentication dialog and would not allow you in. Eventually giving you a 401 error.

I consulted with one of Aggreko's Infrastructure Team guys, Gary Hay (no blog! Gary...Get a blog) , who when I pointed out the problem said, in way more polite terms, "WTF"!

After a surprisingly short time, he sent me a link and told me it was fixed: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

This issue occurs if you install Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) or Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1 include a loopback check security feature that is designed to help prevent reflection attacks on your computer. Therefore, authentication fails if the FQDN or the custom host header that you use does not match the local computer name.

First, why would you want your server called the same as your website, and second, why would you NOT be hosting multiple sites under multiple host headers on the same server. I can only think of a couple of servers I have setup that have only one site, and it is NEVER called the same thing as the server...

After some testing I found that it was indeed fixed. Now, I had this exact same problem at Merrill Lynch and even with their hundreds, if not thousands of technical folk, no one could solve the problem. Just goes to show...just coz you are big and have masses of people, does not mean you have the right people...

 Thanks Gary...

posted @ Monday, October 22, 2007 12:28 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Visual Studio Team System ]

Installing TFS 2008 from scratch

Well, setting up TFS 2008 is pretty easy. I have done an upgrade before, but I have now deployed my first pure TFS 2008 server to a clean environment. I have Reporting Services, SQL and TFS on one box and SharePoint 2007 in my Farm. Word of warning:

RTFM

The first thing I did after a successfully install of TFS was make sure that I could create my first project "Test 1". This is essential to determine that everything is working and should be done on the server to prevent any other issues getting in the way.

The only problem I had was getting the reporting working. The first issue was authentication. When I checked the "Default Website" config it was set to anonymous only, so I changed that to "Integrated Windows" and that solved the authentication issues.

 The second problem was that I changed the reporting server URL, again to the friendly one and it broke SharePoint. I have a SharePoint 2007 Farm where all the TFS portals will be deployed. Even though I ran "TfsConfigWss.exe" located in the Tools folder on the SharePoint server after installing the SharePoint TFS component I still needed to run a register hack to get it to work. The key is under the Local Machine @Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation\ReportServer\ and you get a key for each of your SharePoint managed paths. 

What TFS does now does that is very nice is that you can have multiple TFS servers deploying to the same SharePoint farm. So I created a Managed Path of "TFS01" (my first TFS server at Aggreko, Awww) and pointed TFS at it.

I then changed the name of the server to a friendly name. This is no longer the nasty mess it once was: The TfsAdminUtil.exe now has functionality to change all of the URLs for TFS, SharePoint and RS, so that was easy.

But I still have the old issue of not being able to authenticate when I am on the server once I have changed the "name" of TFS from the server name (default) to a friendly URL.

This is no problem as that was how it worked in my previous environment. I think it is a proxy server issue, but I am not sure. Not much of a problem though...

posted @ Saturday, October 20, 2007 12:53 AM | Feedback (4) | Filed Under [ Visual Studio Team System Sharepoint Work ]

Falling of the TFS rehabilitation wagon...

And here I though I was waving good buy to TFS in the short term, but here I am Installing it for Aggreko. My boss came to me a couple of days ago and asked for a Work Item Tracking system in SharePoint 2007. I did my best, but as the requirements got more complicated and the metrics that they wanted to report on exploded, I said that TFS was the answer...

This is not just a deployment of TFS for the purposes of tracking development projects. Nor is it only to be used for non-IT projects, but across the board of our companies project management. If I can prove that it will work :)

Some of the features that they have hinted at I know will not be there until Rosario is available, and other features will require some amount of customization, especially some of the fleet utilization capabilities we want to build in among other things.

In the short term we want to use as many of the out of the box functionality as possible, but major customizations are on the way... I will need to resurrect my TFS Event Handler for some of the things we have been discussing and implement the Windows Workflow functionality that I threatened to do before.

On that note, and to bring SharePoint 2007 properly into the mix...has anyone setup any Business Data Catalog stuff that points to SharePoint? Hmm, interesting...

And just when the cost of Team Suit was getting me down I got an email from my good friend Jon Pratt from Microsoft UK saying that he had a spare copy of TFS 2005 and Team Suit 2005 sitting on his desk and would I like it  Its funny how things work out...

posted @ Friday, October 19, 2007 3:26 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Visual Studio Team System Sharepoint Work ]

Naming your servers in an enterprise environment

This is an issue of contention in many companies, but I am firmly of the belief that server names should be at least consistent and at most should be able impart a large amount of information at a glance. Information should include:

• Where the server is
• What operating system it is running
• wither it is an application or database server (or a virtual hosting environment server)
• What the application or system it is running
• the environment it is for

This is a tall order, and I have worked many places that have server names like "glasgow1", "glasgow2", "exchange" or "fileserver". I even went through a phase of naming servers "Titan" or "Colossus". This is fine if you have at most 5 servers, but once you get to the data center or multiple data center level you need something more meaningfully.

All this was knocked out of me when I started working for Merrill Lynch. They have thousands of servers and applications and systems that consist of 70-80 servers at a time and you need to be able to identify servers on your network more easily.

I grew to like Merrill's naming convention which is:

[where][virtual?][OS][Application|database][system][environment][identifier]

If you had a server in London that runs on a virtual host with a Microsoft operating system that is an application server for SharePoint in the development environment, and it is the first server you would get [elon][v][m][ap][sp][d][01] (elonvmapspd01).

Lets look at an example where you have 2 web servers, 1 application server and 1 SQL server for your SharePoint production deployment:

Glasgow1, Glasgow2, Glasgow3, Glasgow4

Now add your development, Quality Assurance and User Acceptance Testing environments:

Glasgow1, Glasgow2, Glasgow3, Glasgow4, Glasgow5, Glasgow6, Glasgow7, Glasgow8, Glasgow9, Glasgow10, Glasgow11, Glasgow12, Glasgow13, Glasgow14

Now, in the intervening time, the company adds a TFS server development environment for testing:

Glasgow1, Glasgow2, Glasgow3, Glasgow4, Glasgow5, Glasgow6, Glasgow7, Glasgow8, Glasgow9, Glasgow10, Glasgow11, Glasgow12, Glasgow13, Glasgow14, Glasgow15, Glasgow16

Do you see the problem. If you now want to add another web server to your production SharePoint it would be "Glasgow17". Oh, and we need to add our TFS UAT environment, and lets not forget a SharePoint disaster recovery environment.

Glasgow1, Glasgow2, Glasgow3, Glasgow4, Glasgow5, Glasgow6, Glasgow7, Glasgow8, Glasgow9, Glasgow10, Glasgow11, Glasgow12, Glasgow13, Glasgow14, Glasgow15, Glasgow16, Glasgow17, Glasgow18, Glasgow19, Glasgow20, Glasgow21, Glasgow22, Glasgow23, Glasgow24, Glasgow25 

Do you remember which server is which? Try and identify a development SharePoint application server? :)

This method just does not work in an enterprise environment...

posted @ Thursday, October 18, 2007 9:04 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Rant ]

Team Foundation Server SharePoint Integration

Why is there not more integration found in Team Foundation Server "out-of-the-box" with SharePoint 2007. It seams obvious to me that you would want to show your Work Items in SharePoint and integrate SharePoint Workflow into Team Foundation Server. It only make sense to be able to initially create a SharePoint Work item that is a request from a user into SharePoint, have some sort of approval workflow before assigning it to a project within TFS.

I think that Mike Glaser's blog post on "How about one Team Foundation Server portal? I had a dream!" hits the nail exactly on the head. Why can we not view our bugs in SharePoint and create Change requests there?

What would be excellent would be Mike's hierarchical project space. You should be able to create work items at the root level and then assign them to projects on the way down. This way, user, who have no idea what project a Change Request is for  can create them in the central pool, and then the project manager or technical experts can filter them down into the actual project that the change is for.

As a start, instead of releasing "Web access for Team Foundation Server" as a power tool, it should have been re-engineered into a set of web parts that can be integrated into SharePoint. That way we could have used the default site, or created our own custom components.

Microsoft, if you are listening to either Mike or myself...please do not forget the Workflow integration too....

posted @ Tuesday, October 16, 2007 9:22 AM | Feedback (3) | Filed Under [ Visual Studio Team System Rant Sharepoint ]

Amusing job requirements

I recently received a job spec that had the most ridiculous "Required" skill set for an "Analyst Programmer". I though I should share it with you as I have just spent the last 10 minutes cleaning tea out of my keyboard with cotton bud's. Here is how it was presented in the email:

* C# Java Script Java
* ASP.NET 1.1 ASP.NET 2.0 J2EE
* Visual Studio 2003 SOA Visual Basic
* Winforms Development Visual Studio 2005 Linux
* SQL Server 2000 (TSQL and Database Design) AJAX Data Cleansing
* Full Life-Cycle SQL Server 2005 SMS
* Object Oriented Design Multi-channel CRM IVR
* Strong verbal and written communication skills Call Centre UML
* Organisational and problem solving capabilities ISO9000

Now obviously this list was formulated by someone who has no idea what these things are, so lets brake that up into a proper list...

Skills Required:

• C#
• Java Script
• Java
• ASP.NET 1.1
• ASP.NET 2.0
• J2EE
• Visual Studio 2003
• SOA
• Visual Basic
• Winforms Development
• Visual Studio 2005
• Linux
• SQL Server 2000
• TSQL
• Database Design
• AJAX
• Data Cleansing
• Full Life-Cycle
• SQL Server 2005
• SMS
• Object Oriented Design
• Multi-channel CRM
• IVR
• Call Centre
• UML
• ISO9000

I can't imagine anyone actually knowing how to do all of these things. If they do, they would only have a cursory knowledge of  each think and be useless at programming any one of these. I could understand this for a Architect or Evangelist role where depth of knowledge is not required. But for a programmer there is a necessity to concentrate on one technology at a time, and only with 2-3 years commercial experience would you be considered "good" at it.

Whoever this employer is needs to come to the realisation that this is about 5 (or more) roles all mashed together:

• Architect
• .NET Developer
• Java Developer
• Web Developer
• SQL Developer

If I am wrong, please let me know! And if you are one of these "Uber-Analyst Developers" then...well, I don't believe for a moment that you could actually do all of these things well...

Advice for an employer: If you are an employer, only define a list of the absolute essential skills. If you find someone good enough at those, then they can learn the bits and bobs that go with the others.

Advice for a job seeker: If you are a prospective employee, don't lie and say that you know all of these things (I have interviewed my fare share of people who did), but instead say that you know a set of core things, and that you can learn the rest...

Advice for everyone: I am not saying that it is the holy grail or anything, but read Joel on Software, many of his articles are just common sense, but other are down right genius (and, no, I am not looking for a job at Fog Creek Software ;).

Especially:

• The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)
• A Field Guide to Developers
• Finding Great Developers
• Writing a programmer job description

posted @ Saturday, October 06, 2007 8:45 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Personal Rant ]

Experts Exchange Hell - The slowest site in the world.

I know a couple of people who have been complaining that Experts Exchange was getting rather slow, and I had noticed the same. So I thought I would investigate how big the pages really are.

The first test is to save the page "Complete List of Zone Areas.mht" and see how big/ or small it is...Well my jaw hit the floor and here is why:

What are those guys at Experts Exchange thinking! I know we all have broadband, but this is ridiculous... I am on my corporate network and it is soooo slooow. It is slow from home as well, and that's a 20Mb Cable line...

Even when you download it as a .htm file it is more than 1.2mb and its mainly the HTML :o And it still locks up IE7 on my Intel duo, 2gb laptop when viewing the page from my HDD.

The main reason that I am writing this here instead of sending them feedback is I don't have the time to so:

http://www.experts-exchange.com

pause - 15 seconds

Scroll - coz I only get the header on my windscreen display

pause - 30 seconds

Scroll more - coz the page is really big

pause - 28 seconds

click link- coz I only get the header on my windscreen display

pause - 15 seconds

...sod it, I'm board...

Click

posted @ Friday, October 05, 2007 5:05 PM | Feedback (2) | Filed Under [ Rant ]

Branding and Customizing SharePoint 2007

I have been delving into the black art of SharePoint Branding, and I have been finding it a grueling process. Don't get me wrong it is a vast improvement over SharePoint 2003 and I have already built 2 Features (but not for public consumption yet).

SharePoint 2007 uses a combination of CSS and master pages to allow the developer to make most of the changes that are required for branding, but it is still just so hard... I am no CSS or html expert so I am relearning skills I have not really used for about 4 years. The last web project I worked on I had the luxury and the privilege to work again with my friend Greg Fyans, who is the BEST CSS, Accessibility and HTML guru I have ever seen.

SharePoint is predominantly built using tables. Why, I don't know, in this world of CSS, but it is.

MSDN has a three part article on "Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites" which is very informative, but which still lacks lead through. By that I mean that you select and load brands that already exist on the server and only add a single (ish) line of HTML to show how to customize it. This is not quite enough for me, but the articles are very usefully anyway.

XFN:

P.S. Although Greg Fyans CSS and HTML skills are beyond guru(Savant I think) his DotNetNuke skills are still being honed: I look forward to seeing his site up again.

posted @ Friday, October 05, 2007 3:01 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Microsoft Windows Sharepoint ]

Refocus...

You may have noticed that over the last month or so I have been neglecting my blog (too many personal posts) and my focus on development in general. This has been a temporary setback due mostly to starting a new job and not getting to play with Team Server at the moment (plus I had a knee operation the other week). So for now, I will be trying to focus more on Sharepoint 2007 / MOSS and the feature deficient Sharepoint 2003.

My new job entails maintaining a heavily customized Sharepoint 2003 deployment and some other nick knacks, while deploying MOSS for the company I am now with. I am quickly expanding my knowledge of Sharepoint from that additional bit bolted onto Team Foundation Server to a more rounded look at its enterprise deployment and integration with other systems.

I will need to migrate and integrate a number of other applications into MOSS including:

• Sharepoint Server Portal
• over 500 team sites in Sharepoint 2003 (Created over time, with no structure...Oh my!)
• a BI Portal built on Reporting Services and Crystal Reports
• an extensive intranet that incorporates many Sharepoint like features and an extensive custom workflow system
• an HR Administration function site

This is not an exhaustive list, but those applications that I have either found or been made aware of, and it does not by any measure include the future work already being talked about within the company on workflow and automation.

At least I have some help, a nice guy from New Iberia (Hi Michael!) and a Gal from Chicago who are both currently snowed under with the current work on the systems.

This should be fun...

posted @ Wednesday, October 03, 2007 8:57 PM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Sharepoint Work ]

Windows Live Writer Beta 3 Hmm!

I submitted a trouble ticket about my previous post on http://support.live.com and got a prompt reply from Microsoft support giving me some directions for cleaning up beta bits of my system, and a URL for a direct download:

Windows Live Writer 2008: http://g.msn.com/4SAWLWENUS/WriterMSI

Now, this looks good. But when you try to download it you get the "WLMail.exe" install... Dough!

Guess someone along the line messed up ;)

When I get the correct link I will post it...

UPDATE:

Windows Live Writer 2008 Direct Download: http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/e/c/1ecbf3be-298b-467c-84d8-6f86f01478d7/en-us/Install_WLWriter.exe

UPDATE:

But not Beta 3: dough!

posted @ Wednesday, October 03, 2007 11:57 AM | Feedback (2) | Filed Under [ Windows Live ]

Deep vein thrombosis (DVT) Update

Back in March I posted about my friend Katie McPherson that died of DVT and her family's petition calling for the Scottish Executive to introduce mandatory assessment tools for all health boards for the diagnosis of deep vein thrombosis and to get all newborn babies tested for the "Factor V" gene that increases their susceptibility to the condition.

I would like to share this email from my good friend Steven McPherson...

Subject: Update on epetition for my sister

Hi all,

Just a wee update on the above. Hope you will remember earlier this year you and many others very kindly signed the epetition for changes to the management and protocols for DVT as a result of the death of Katie.

My parents were at the Scottish Parliament today (which they say is a truly horrendous building) to meet with the epetitions panel to discuss this petition further which I am pleased to say went very well.

They were met there by newspapers and a TV crew, before and after they went into the parliament and the news clip can be found here http://www.stv.tv/content/news/health/display.html?id=opencms:/news/health/Call_for_DVT_screening_20071002. If you wish to see the full 35mins of their presentation within the parliament drop me a line and I can forward this onto you. I am told it will appear on www.holyrood.tv/ tomorrow under the archive section, although I have a copy of it if this is not the case. Both my parents did very well within the parliament making their points very clear and answering all the panels questions in great detail.

I am aware from my good friend Martin there were also stories on the radio and teletext (of all places) today, covering this. My parents were interviewed by a number of press after the session, so no doubt this will appear in further papers/TV/radio etc tomorrow and over the remaining week.

It appears that at long last we are beginning to make some head way. I believe the next stage is for the epetitions panel to look into the existing guidelines / protocols to establish the current situation and then look into how things can be changed for the future.

I'm sure you don't need reminding but Katie would have been 28yrs old this Sunday.

Main point of this email is to once again thank you for your support. In the end we managed to get 143 signatures for the epetition which is fantastic and would not have been possible without all your support.

Many thanks and look forward to seeing you soon.

Steven McPherson

The family have a Website "http://www.dvt-awareness.co.uk/"  where they link to many news stories on the subject and a couple of videos. Although it is too late to sign the petition, please lend your support any way you can...

posted @ Tuesday, October 02, 2007 9:43 PM | Feedback (5) | Filed Under [ Personal ]

Windows Live Writer Beta 3

Well, a new version of WLW, Windows Live Writer Beta 3, is available. Its just a pity that I can't install it. Why do Microsoft insist on writing these bundle application for installing many products at once? I can see the point for home users, but at work you always get something blocked. They should provide the choice of using the bulk installer or using a direct download link. This would allow companies to unblock a specific URL without allowing users to download and install one of the other, banned, applications.

As it is, if even one of the applications in the installer is banned, then they have to block the whole thing. This is what has happened in my company with "WLInstaller.exe", because it installs Messenger. This punishes the rest of us who want to use one of the other pieces of software...

As it is, I had to install Windows Live Writer Beta 2, from a direct link:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/e/c/1ecbf3be-298b-467c-84d8-6f86f01478d7/en-us/Install_WLWriter.exe

It took me about a week, after getting authorization, to get my download capability un-restricted in SurfControl. The Infrastructure team spent a while going back a fourth testing changes to get it working, all the while saying "It must be IE7!" or, "Do you have Office 2007, ah, that's why! If you uninstall it it will work!" and other assorted rubbish.

What did it boiler down to? What did they have to do to get it working? Was it permissions? No! Was it IE7? No! Was it Office 2007? No!

They rebooted the server!

posted @ Tuesday, October 02, 2007 11:38 AM | Feedback (2) | Filed Under [ Windows Live Rant ]