- Posted by karthik on October 19, 2009
SPC2009 is here, finally. And it has been a long and fun day today. Got in last night, went straight to registration and afterward visited the exhibit hall browsing vendor/partner booths. It's been a while since I have been to a major conference like this and for a while there, I was just catching up!
However, I did manage to seek out and network with SharePoint folks I have been conversing with the last couple years and that was fun. The conference itself has been a blast so far and I am posting some raw, unedited pictures below, live from the event.
Video highlights of the events so far can be found here
Keynote Session:
SharePoint 2010 Developer Tools Overview:
More pics and info to follow. Till then, cheers!
- Posted by karthik on May 22, 2009
Just came across this announcement from the MS SharePoint team regarding MOSS Service Pack 2. If you have installed this or are planning on installing this, please be aware of the bug that is currently awaiting a hotfix.
"During the installation of SP2, a product expiration date is improperly activated. This means SharePoint will expire as though it was a trial installation 180 days after SP2 is deployed. The activation of the expiration date will not affect the normal function of SharePoint up until the expiration date passes. Furthermore, product expiration 180 days after SP2 installation will not affect customer’s data, configuration or application code but will render SharePoint inaccessible for end-users. "
Apparently, the install of MOSS SP2 will turn a fully licensed version of MOSS into a "trial version". This issue affects ONLY MOSS SP2 and NOT WSS 3.0 SP2 for obvious reasons.
Of all things they could have messed up, they introduced a bug that converted paying customers into non-paying customers AFTER the product has already been paid for :) Funny, isn't it!
Check for a supported hotfix to be released soon here.
Happy Long Weekend everyone! Drive safe and enjoy the time off...
- Posted by karthik on April 14, 2009
Why is it that service pack installs for Visual Studio 200X are ALMOST never, ever pain-free?
It's tempting to say it is a Microsoft Trademark that they make you go through a process that 15 minutes into an install, prompts you to CONFIRM that you REALLY, REALLY want to do this... As if you did not know what you were doing while going through the 15 steps on the install wizard before that prompt came up.
And when you say YES dammit, it then runs for another 20 minutes only to find out:
- that the space on the hard drive it needs to install is not enough OR..
- that there is a dependency check on an unrelated set of dll's, service packs or whatever that stops the installation and prompts you to go get that OR...
- that the current windows installer does not like the setup files that came from the media OR....
- anything else that drives you nuts waiting in front of the screen...
Sounds familiar? Well thats how my SQL Server 2008 install went last weekend...
For those who are trying to do this, a word of advice: make sure you have VS 2008 SP1 installed FIRST, then make sure you have ALL the right framework patches installed BEFORE you get to SQL!
- Posted by karthik on March 27, 2009
Last night, I had an interesting problem tossed my way. 
Background: For some reason, an application built in ASP with FCKEditor instances running on some pages was mangling special characters on display and update. The ASP page that was causing this issue had an include of the FCKEditor.asp on it. Removal of that include file from the ASP page did not cause the mangling. However, just including the file (even if the FCKEditor instance itself was not created) seemed to mangle any special characters put on the page.
For e.g: special characters like (Alt-0233 etc) "é" was getting converted into é as shown in the picture to your left.
This was peculiar because of data that was stored in the database for working conditions did not seem to be mangled. For some reason, the request and the response data seemed to be mangling it. (That should have tipped me off right then and there ;)
Anyways, I started looking into FCKEditor.asp to see if there was any rewrites going on and sure enough, there was this function call that seemed to be iterating through the DOM elements in the response and rewrite portions of it. At first glance, it seemed as though that was it. However, the FCKEditor instance was NOT getting created on that page! Only the include was a part of the page structure. So, what gives?
After spending a couple hours trying to further troubleshoot it, I called it a day and went home. It was still bugging me in the back of my mind that I had come across something similar before, but just could not remember what the fix was. Came back in the morning, fired up the app and started testing it from scratch and then it struck me. Maybe it was not FCK. Maybe there was some encoding issues with either the files themselves or the server looking at character encoding sets and making some adjustments.
I ruled the server out (as in most cases) it only does what it is told. If it was mangling the response then something was telling it. (BTW, I used Charles Debugging Proxy last night to determine if the request headers and response headers were doing anything. A neat and handy tool except for the annoying shareware feature that turns the tool off every 30 minutes)
Armed with that information, I looked at the files themselves and bingo! The application ASP files were encoded in ANSI format while the FCKEditor.asp was encoded in UTF-8.
Changed the type on the FCKEditor file to match the encoding for the rest of the app files and it started working! So, moral of the story, LOOK before you LEAP!
Cheers!
- Posted by karthik on February 26, 2009
Believe it or not, answers to this question have a lot more variety than what you would think as is evidenced from this question over at LinkedIn answers
What's the right answer, you ask? Mine is always, "It depends"!
Let me qualify that further. Sharepoint as a tool and Sharepoint as a framework are *TWO DIFFERENT* things. Like I mentioned in my answer, depending on what you want to learn about Sharepoint, more importantly how you want to use it, you can look at various options. I am a big fan of experiential learning, so it is no surprise that I would advocate actually doing the things that you want to learn.
However, with Sharepoint, it is not as easy as it sounds. Since it is tightly coupled with different parts of the Windows Server System and SQL Server 2005 and uninformed changes CAN cause mayhem, it is incumbent upon any technical person to read up on how MOSS/WSS3.0 works before messing with it.
For those wanting to soak up MOSS trivia and knowledge, my links page has a pretty exhaustive set of online resources for your reading pleasure!
Cheers!