Agile Sharepoint development by 21apps and Andrew Woodward MVP

Found a really annoying bug this week after upgrading one of my Windows 2003 SharePoint development Virtual Machines to IE8 Beta 2.

HTTP 401.1 - Unauthorized: Logon Failed

As most people do I make use of the HOSTS file to allow the use of FQDN to remove the need for high port numbers (i.e. http://agile.21apps.dev).  First thoughts were this was down to the zone within IE, but changes here had no affect.  All of the web sites continued to work in Firefox so there was no issue with SharePoint.

I eventually found the solution here  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956158/en-us which requires you to add a new registry entry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0

This problem occurs because Windows includes a loopback check security feature that helps 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. 

What the problem does not explain very well is the format of the entries, they need to be without any protocol handler i.e. agile.21apps.dev (see image below).

401.1 error in IE8 Beta 2 for local domains

What this does mean is that if you add any newweb applications to you dev setup you need to edit the registry and also reboot the machine.   Not ideal.

Wow, two great SUGUK events planned for November.   London on 25th and Scotland on 27th.

Edinburgh at the Scottish Parliment

Thurs 27th November

Spencer Harbar SharePoint MVP - MythBusters - debunking common SharePoint Farm Misconceptions
This interactive, whiteboard session will dive into common SharePoint Farm Myths and discuss common misconceptions around Global Deployments, Farm Topologies, Shared Service Providers, High Availability, Security and more. Alongside best practices for each “myth”, the SharePoint “magic numbers” will be covered and there will be plenty of scope to discuss any particular queries you may have on farm deployment.

Andrew Woodward SharePoint MVP - Test Driven Development – Contrary to popular belief it can be done on SharePoint projects
In the style of Don Box this PowerPoint free session will take you through the development of a SharePoint solution using TDD. We will introduce TDD , the tools of the trade, how TDD influences you design and mocking out the core SharePoint object model elements using the new Typemock Isolator APIs.

Sign Up for the Edinburgh event at SUGUK forum with your full name.

London at Microsoft Cardinal Place

Tue 25th November

Ben Robb SharePoint MVP - Customizing SharePoint Search

SharePoint Search is very powerful, and there are some key best practices which should be used to ensure that your search results are giving users the ability to find information more quickly. In this session we will learn how to customise search results and what search rules should be put in place to make sure that system pages do not find their way into search results. Finally, we will explore how to apply Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques so that external search engines can crawl public facing sites effectively.

Rickard Lofberg - Lessons learned deploying SharePoint at Credit Suisse

This session will explore how Credit Suisse, a world leading financial services company, has deployed SharePoint as a large scale collaboration platform.
We will learn about the design, best practises and challenges of hosting more than 2000 Site Collections and 1.8 TB of data.
We will cover topics ranging from the physical farm architecture to SharePoint Designer Contributor settings.
Finally, we will discuss some of the operational process and policies needed to ensure platform stability.

Sign Up for the London event

At long last Microsoft have announced publically the excellent SPDisposeCheck tool.   This tool will examine your IL level components and report any possible areas where you may have the potential for a leak due to objects not being disposed of correctly.   The output from the tool does require a deep understanding of the way objects are disposed of as there is the potential for false positives.

For more information check out the SharePoint Team Blog even if you can’t get the tool just yet, its coming soon, the referenced posts are a must read for all SharePoint developers.

Keynote announcement on the new SharePoint features in Visual Studio 2010.  Paul Andrew has posted a summary here.  It’s very evident that Microsoft have been listening to the community and also looking at the open source projects that have started to fill the gaps in the product.

• Server Explorer for SharePoint viewing Lists and other artifacts in SharePoint directly inside of Visual Studio
• Windows SharePoint Services Project (WSP file) Import to create a new solution
• Added a new web part project item and showed the Visual web part designer which loads a user control as a web part for SharePoint
• Showed adding an event receiver for SharePoint and using the wizard to choose the event receiver and to just create a source file with that event receiver.
• Added an ASPX workflow initiation form to a workflow project and showed how this workflow initiation form has designer capability
• Showed the packaging explorer and the packaging editor which lets you structure the SharePoint features and WSP file that is created

It was with great pleasure that I was able to contribute to the first SharePoint Patterns and Practices guidance.  I really like the fact that the team have included unit testing.   I recommend reading the related CHM file as this provides details about the design with links to related posts explaining the patterns used in more detail.

Patterns and Pratices

This guidance helps architects and developers design, build, test, deploy and upgrade SharePoint intranet applications. A reference implementation that is named the Contoso Training Management application demonstrates solutions to common architectural, development, and application lifecycle management challenges.

This guidance discusses the following:

• Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring, and packaging.
• Design tradeoffs for common decisions many developers encounter, such as when to use SharePoint lists or a database to store information.
• Implementation examples that are demonstrated in the Training Management application and in the QuickStarts.
• How to design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration.
• How to set up different environments including the development, build, test, staging, and production environments.
• How to manage the application life cycle through development, test, deployment, and upgrading.
• Team-based intranet application development.

MSDN site: SharePoint Guidance

Future friendly url: http://microsoft.com/spg

Download: SharePoint Guidance – November 2008

Codeplex site: http://codeplex.com/spg

Community Forum: http://www.codeplex.com/spg/Thread/List.aspx

TypeMock have recently made some updates to their site and have started to pull together information around testing SharePoint. I’m really getting to like the new AAA (Arrange, Act, Assert) approach that they are building into the product from version 5 onwards.

 Gil Zilberfeld post a great example of this by refactoring the work that was done on the SharePoint Patterns and Practices project using the (coming very soon update to TypeMock).   Although I like Natural Mocks it tended to make the tests quite long and very brittle, using the new AAA syntax this becomes so much more cleaner.

Members.ReturnRecursiveFakes seems to be where all the magic exists.    Previously you would have to write stub code for everything your method touched on the objects, which made the tests very brittle, now using the Recursive Fakes approach you only need to stub out the methods that you want to validate.

Roy Osherove manages to explain this in a very easy to understand way.

Wow the demo on the new Office collaboration feaures at PDC2008 was fantastic. Everyone always asked of Excel Services can I edit my workbooks in the browser?  Can I see what other people values?   Now you can and in near real time.

Taking advantage of the Live Mesh services changes are sync’d between all devices automatically. The online editing is also pretty amazing,  will run in IE, Firefox and Safari.

Joel is doing some pretty good blogs remotely.  Good to see SharePoint still the platform of choice in the Enterprise.

Multiple ways to get the web application versions - Consumers through Office Online, Business Customers through Hosted Services and as part of Volume Licensing ON SHAREPOINT IN THE ENTERPRISE (That’s the key word we were looking for!)

See for yourself on Channel 9

Big news,  the announcement of Windows Azure as the cloud platform for everything that is Microsoft.  If you run it on site you will over time be able to run it in the Cloud.  Taking away the issues of scaling, effectively buying what you need.

Identity Management is a big play,  the ability to sync security from your on site Active Directory with the indentiy in the cloud.  Windows Azure is looking to take away the issue of identity from the developers.

SharePoint Online and running on Windows Azure will open it up to a new market,  not sure when we will see anything though - Ray is saying this will be a conservative roll out.

Sign up for the CTP of Windows Azure

Mike Gannotti has hinted that there is likely to ge some exciting news on the Future of SharePoint and Office 14 at the PDC.

SharePint was a great event,  not too many people and a way to meet up with old friends and meet some new faces.  It was great to see so many Microsoft SharePoint people,  Arpan was quoted as saying he’s not been as excited about a conference as this one.  Check out the SharePoint Team blog for news throughout the week.

Andrew Connell is co-ordinating the SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night event at PDC in LA.

Going to PDC 2008 in Los Angeles, CA in just over a week (or live in the greater LA area)? Interested in hanging out in a casual social setting with other folks interested in SharePoint? We’ll be doing another SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night in LA the Sunday (October 26) @ 7p before PDC 2008 officially kicks off. So check into your hotel, drop your bags off and come on over to the Millennium Biltmore Hotel bar around 7p (till whenever) and join us (a few SharePoint MVPs will be there as well as a few folks from the SharePoint teams @ Microsoft).

I’m flying into LA on Sunday so will head straight to the Bar after checking in,  If you plan on comming please leave a comment on Andrews Connells blog post.