Well as TechEd 2010 draws to a close this year in Australia, I had a great time getting away from it all and certainly experiencing a couple of firsts. For me this was one of the better TechEd’s I had been to – the sessions were a little light on, but the labs + exams made up for that big time.

So Scotty and I developed an Integration Pre Conference Training Session aimed at working out which MS Integration technology to run where – unscrambling the mess. We got a great turn out for the training in terms of numbers – we beat SharePoint 2010 dev + admin!!! :)

For all of you whom I had the pleasure of training this week – well done! I hope you enjoyed it and it was great sharing that time with you. The sun, sand, BizTalk and Azure…what could be better?? :)

As promised – here are the slides from those two days.

Keep smiling,
Mick.

Well folks, after a recent week of performance issues running a SharePoint 2010 VM image (40GB) on Virtual Box (v3.0.14 & v3.2.8) Olaf (a fellow Breezer) and I sat down and put our thinking caps on as how to improve things.

- Hyper-V wasn’t an option due to classroom setups and portability issues.

After scouring the forums, posts, blogs and other to see how to squeeze every last bit of performance from Virtual Box – I’ve come to the conclusion that current versions just don’t take full advantage of Core i7 architectures, hence they run dog slow (1 virtual cpu seems to run better than multiple).

Enter VMWare – I’m relatively new to the world of VMWare, although others on my team swear by it.

So I downloaded VMWare Player (free)

And configured a Virtual Machine (or two)

So the issue is (as I’m sure you’re well aware if you’re reading this), is that booting up Windows 2008 R2 (in my case), the native disks are SCSI and we get the dreaded Inaccessible Boot Device error (stop 0x7B).

(Back in WinXP, Win2000 & Win2003 (I think) there *used* to be a recovery option that you could repair my boot environment and it would ‘rediscover’ all the disks etc and you’d be on your way)

The aim is boot into Windows, allow it to discover, load and install the VMWare SCSI drivers (from LSI…) and then in theory you’re good to go.

After drilling down through the VMWare forums (a foreign place for me), there’s a few articles on ‘injecting drivers’ into the system, startup etc – none of these techniques worked for me (I booted to Repair window and ran regedit to ‘tweak’ some startup registry keys).

Still stuck and after many hours we noticed that CD/DVD (IDE) was an available device on the system as follows:

I thought “I wonder if I can attach the VHD as an IDE??”

After locating the VMWare VM config file – a *.VMX file I saw a couple of entries…

ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.filename = “…MicksBootIso.iso”

So I thought, let me try

ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
ide1:0.filename= "D:\VHDs\VHDs\SharePoint2010_v2_Child.vhd"

Saved and booted up like a bought one!

So for now…this works fantastically AND THE PERFORMANCE is at least 3-4 times faster than Virtual Box for this image. Just really snappy!

Here’s a sample file attached – enjoy.

Olaf and I were cracking away on some SharePoint 2010 work which we thought should be simple…point SPMetal to the site and start LINQ-ing to our hearts content…..

with the one exception that we couldn’t select items from a list based on their Content Type.

By default SPMetal.exe doesn’t include these ‘system’ fields (apart from ID + Title – go figure) and the secret is to use an Override file.

The good oil is:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee535056.aspx
(Here’s a good article on how .NET Types are mapped to SharePoint - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee536245.aspx)

The simple override/parameters file:

<Web AccessModifier="Internal" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SharePoint/2009/spmetal">
  <ContentType Name="Item" Class="Item">
    <Column Name="ContentType" Member="ContentType" />
   
  </ContentType>
  
</Web>

The SPMetal Command Line

The VS.NET Code

 static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            using (BreezeDataContext dc = new BreezeDataContext("http://breezelocal"))
            {
                var myitems = from i in dc.GetList<ContentListTraining>("My Content List")
                              where i.ContentType == "Training"
                              select i;
                var courses = myitems.ToList<ContentListTraining>();
 
                Console.WriteLine("There are {0} items",courses[0].Title);
                    
            }
 
            Console.ReadLine();
        }

Hey folks,

As we’re all aware there’s more than one road that leads to Rome when dealing with integration. When to use SSIS? For what? What about MSMQ? AppFabric and BizTalk etc.

At TechEd this year I’ve decided to run some preconference training dealing with this exact issue across many different Microsoft Integration Technologies.
(This is one of the biggest questions I get from customers)

If you’re heading to the Gold Coast this year, then this training is before TechEd – get up a couple of days early and then be fully charged and armed with all your questions….

---- here’s the official blurb----

When to use what Technologies Where [LINK is Here]

AppFabric, Azure Storage, BizTalk 2010, BizTalk Adapter Pack, WCF, WF, Oslo, MSMQ, .NET4 Distributed Caching, SQL Service Broker, SSIS and SharePoint 2010 Service Applications...to name a few technologies to be confused about.

There is no silver bullet for application integration. Different situations call for different solutions, each targeting a particular kind of problem. While a one-size-fits-all solution would be nice, the inherent diversity of integration challenges makes such a simplistic approach impossible. To address this broad set of problems, Microsoft has created several different integration technologies, each targeting a particular group of scenarios.  

Together, these technologies provide a comprehensive, unified, and complete integration solution.

Come on a 2-day adventure examining each of these technologies and reviewing the When, Why's and How's on each, with their own distinct role to play with integrating applications. When you come through the other side you'll be able to slot each of these technologies into a *practical* use.

This developer workshop is based on real world examples, real world problems and real world solutions.

Join me and be prepared to roll up your sleeves and unravel the maze that awaits....

TECHED LINK

I’m in the process of planning a SP2007 to SP2010 ‘migration’ moving over the content database and other web artifacts.

I was making sure all things were ticked off and available in the new SP2010 environment such as – additional external scripts, paths, externally accessible images, webparts + flash movie files.

Migrated over – fired up the browser and after some minor tweaking most things came over, except for the flash movies.

The flash movie was not being displayed.

So naturally you think – must be a path, permission, activeX, flash object declaration, upload or even a masterpage might need a tweak…

Fired up FireBug in firefox and went to work – we could access the *.swf file directly from within the browser, but when the Page loaded with the link in there… no go.

In fact we got a ‘304 not modified’ response within FireBug – which seems pretty normal if the flash player already has the movie locally and it’s just comparing the server version versus the local…but still no flash playing.

SharePoint 2010 Web Applications restrict ‘active’ content – aka Flash out of the box.

After some digging and a seemingly unrelated option appeared in Web Application –> General Settings.
Browser File Handling - Default setting: STRICT

This was the culprit, setting this to permissive did the trick.

Wow! Have a great weekend folks!

Breeze SharePoint 2010 Bootcamp

The Breeze SharePoint 2010 Bootcamp is here!

These bootcamps have been written for the ITPro & Developer who need to upgrade their SharePoint skills, or are just starting out with SharePoint 2010.

Be ready to roll up your sleeves and start your adventure here.

Sydney: 2nd August 2010

Price: $3450 ex GST

Register NOW: info {at} breeze {d.o.t.} net

*Quote this blog article to receive a special promotion.

Enjoy,

Mick.

p.s. anyone seen the octopus…I’ve got destiny with it….

Folks this is too good to be left out…

There’s an Octopus named ‘Paul’ that’s predicted 5 from 5 of Germany’s last results (wins + losses), with his previous success rate for the Euro 2008 being 80% where he wrongly predicted Germany would beat Spain and Spain won.

Now, with the Semi finals very close, the Octopus has predicted Spain to win.

Essentially his prediction is – they drop 2 cubes each with the nations flag on it, and in the cubes they have his ‘dinner’ (a muscle). The cube he opens the lid to first and eats the muscle is his prediction.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/07/07/2946732.htm

Let’s see how he fairs tomorrow morning (my time).

Sorry I’ve been quiet folks – I’ve been sleep deprived, not really knowing which day is what and…I guess it’s like having a new born again. :)

My extended family is English and they sent through a cracker….

See you soon,

Mick.

As you know I’m a big fan of Virtual Box being able to run my x64 VMs on my Win7 machine. Yay!!

So armed with my trusted new Core i7/8 GB laptop – I figured the VMs will be cooking on this new kit…

After installing the lastest VirtualBox (3.2.0) I was away – only to notice the machines were running like a SLUG! (I actually have a cat that has the nick name ‘slug’ and this machine was slower than her)

After waiting a full 20mins (still booting - ‘loading windows files…’ etc) my machine Blue Screened for a millisecond and then rebooted.

So I rolled up my sleeves and started digging – could be the VHD, the bios, the machine, the 1000 and 1 settings…

Firstly I ran a command line command (from under the vbox install dir) -
VBoxManage setextradata VMNAME "VBoxInternal/PDM/HaltOnReset" 1

Finally I got a glimpse of the BSOD and it was an error “…STOP…7B…”

I twigged this is an error of “Inaccessible boot device….” which I’ve had several times when the SATA drivers couldn’t be loaded by the O/S during boot up.

Solution: (in my case)
I configured the Virtual Box VM with IDE Storage Controllers and NOT SATA ones for the bootup.(still connected to the same VHDs though)

Win2008/R2 boots up and I’m able to load the SATA drivers in and we’re away.

Back to BizTalk 2010 Beta playing…. :)