Ben Walters InfoPath MVP

Registrations for SharePoint Saturday Sydney are now open, so if you are planning to attend I recommend you head over now and follow the “Click to Attend” link

Also don’t forget if you have any session ideas you can also forward them through using the form on the site.

It’s official SharePoint Saturday will be happening on the 8th of August at the Microsoft office in North Ryde.

For those of you who don’t know SharePoint Saturday is the tech community craze that’s been sweeping the U.S. (and more recently the world) Originally stared by Michael Lotter the SharePoint Saturday event is based around having a single day of sessions all about SharePoint that is totally free.

“Join SharePoint architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for ‘SharePoint Saturday’ event.  SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.  SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint! “ –SharePoint Saturday.org

So what do we need from you? at present Brian Farnhill and I are putting out the call for content, if your interested in presenting head on over to the SharePoint Saturday Sydney web site and fill out the speaker submission form then simply email it back to us. The call for content closes on the 10th of July so if you’re planning to be in Sydney at this time and have an awesome presentation it would be great to hear from you.

Also make sure you’re following SharePoint Saturday on twitter for all the up to date information on the event.

So as we all know by now I recently rebuilt my machine with Windows 2008 R2. My main reason for doing this is so I could have a fully functional SharePoint development environment that runs locally without the need for virtual machines. Plus I now have the option of using Hyper-V when I do have the need for a virtual environment.

I did however run into an issue when I attempted to setup my local development SharePoint site. Personally I prefer to have my local dev site under a host header, this time I decided to use spdev.local as my site host header. As per usual I also updated my hosts file under c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc to point to the local IP (127.0.0.1) for that host header.

However when I attempted to access my shiny new dev environment IE would prompt me for my credentials a number of times then simply display a blank page.

After doing some  “Binging” I tracked down the following TechNet article that informed me of a security feature related all the way back to IE 5.1. The long and short of it is that the security update in question prevents IE from navigating to a host header site on a loopback adapter.

This setting is configured in the registry on windows, and there are actually 2 registry settings that can be used to resolve this issue.

The first disables windows making the loopback check all together, the second allows you create a list of “trusted” host headers

Now while I could duplicate the instructions to this workaround best to checkout the TechNet article directly

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

This evening I began rebuilding my laptop with Windows 2008 R2, while the install went swimmingly I did run into an issue once my machine was up and running, I couldn’t connect to my wireless network. The now the obvious issue would be that the drivers for my wireless adapter were missing but further investigation cleared that up. My adapter was there but no wireless networks were detected.

So off to the fabled internet I went in search of answers. Turns out the Wireless Auto Configuration service is not installed on the server products by default. Open up the server feature manager and low and behold all the way at the bottom is the option to install the Wireless Auto Configuration Manager. Five minutes  later I was connected again.

Now to finish my rebuild before tomorrow morning :os

I’ve been running windows 7 for a while now on both my home and work PC’s and all in all I’ve been pretty impressed. However, today I found one feature/bug that I can see will cause no end of pain.

Today I decided to download the R2 of Windows 2008, so after firing up the Microsoft Transfer Manager selecting the C drive as my download location and then waiting for the next couple of hours my transfer was complete.

The problem, the file I had supposedly stored on my C Drive was no where to be seen. I did some checking in the FTM to be sure the transfer hadn’t failed, but still no file to be found.

So after some much heated clicking around I noticed the following button

Turns out that the file I told FTM to stored in c:\ was placed in “c:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore”

Not very intuitive place to put things Microsoft

Tonight a friend and I headed out to see the new Star Trek film at Hoyts in Melbourne. While we waited for the film to start we got to talking/reminiscing about some of the games we spent our youth playing. Some where between our recount of Grim Fandango and X-Wing Alliance we came to the conclusion that there is a lot of IP out there in the games industry that is ripe to be ported to Xbox Live Arcade.

For example Lucas Arts has around 7 titles that I can think of off the top of my head that were great hits back in the 90’s that would be accepted with wide open loving arms if released to XBLA. As mentioned above Grim Fandango and X-Wing Alliance are a great start. But why stop there when Lucas Arts has some great content in games like Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Rebel Assault and of course the original space flight sim that I’m sure we all sunk more than a few hours into X-Wing vs Tie Fighter 

Of course Lucas Arts isn’t the only studio out there that I can see is resting on it’s laurels when it comes to classy game IP from yester year. Take Activision or as they were known in the day Sierra, they had a great series of games in the Space Quest, Kings Quest and Gabriel Knight franchises, while these were probably not amazing graphically they had great storylines and humour that gave them a special charm,

Now I can understand people like Activision and Lucas Arts are probably more focused on your big budget games, but it surprises me that Microsoft hasn’t made an attempt to re-release some of it’s older titles and breath some new life into them. Two I can think of that got a lot of my attention gaming wise was Starlancer and Freelancer both games that have some great co-op and multiplayer prospects, and in theory would not be difficult to move across to the Xbox Architecture.

What I’ve listed above is by no means an exhaustive, and I’m sure there are more you could probably think of but the above are a few that I enjoyed completing more than once.

So this is my official call out to each of these developers/publishers time to look at some of those games that made you great and see if you can’t help us gamers in our mid-20’s relive our youth :o)

Last week I had my first official deployment of SharePoint SP2 in the field. While most of the install succeeded with out any issues I did run into a problem while I was attempting to run the configuration wizard. The error I received indicated that the Timer service failed to start. My first idea was to start the Timer service manually and then re run the configuration wizard.

This approach soon came to a halt, when I started the timer service the service began attempting to run the scheduled update jobs in the background. This caused issues as the configuration wizard would not start as it believed there was an update already in progress.

So now I was stuck with a server that was apparently updating but I had no idea if this was actually happening or not. So after doing some hunting I found I could force the upgrade using STSADM. However I still had the issue that SharePoint thought an upgrade was already in progress.

After a little more hunting I found the following command to reset the Upgrade running status;

STSADM –o setproperty –pn command-line-upgrade-running –pv no

then I ran this command to execute the upgrade using the command line

PSCONFIG –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b –wait –force

10-15 minutes later I was up and running.

Ok so this is the last of my video posts for today. This video shows how you can design a new InfoPath form based of an existing schema file.

The embedded video below highlights how to load user details from Active Directory into your InfoPath form.

The solution highlighted uses the LDAP Webservice found on codeplex to make the LDAP connection. The best thing about this approach is that the search method included in the service pretty much takes care of returning around 90% of the data you might need to get back from your AD.

Once again big shout out to the guys at Camtasia for making this so easy to record

Recently while helping some people via the Newsgroups I’ve found it easier to build a video of how to solve a problem rather than type pages and pages of instructions.

In addition to giving a big call out to Camtasia studio as an editing platform and the Silverlight Hosting from live I thought it would be useful to also post my videos here.

This solution specifically deals with how to calculate the number of days between 2 selected dates.

How to Calculate the Number of Days between to dates in InfoPath

Officially the second service pack for the Office suite will release next week, and while I’m sure there are a whole swag of features, additions and security improvements that will not be immediately visible to the naked eye. There are a couple of things that peaked my interest when reading through the summary of updates on the “Microsoft Update Product Team Blog”

The first piece of information that caught my eye was the addition of a new STSADM command for assessing how ready your SharePoint server is for upgrade to O14, and also provides best practice feedback for your current environment.

The second little nugget that I noticed is the mention of “Substantial improvements to Forms-based authentication.” while no more detail is provided for this I can only hope that this means the setup and configuration of FBA has been improved and that its now more compatible with web based InfoPath forms.

The third point that interests me is the Form Server improvement around reducing the load times around large web based forms, I’m not sure on the exact improvements that have been made here but I'll be very interested in to try this out.

The final improvement that I made note has been a personal bug bear for a while and has finally been addressed. That being when a web based form is rendered that contains a required field the “Cannot be blank” message would render above the field, preventing the user from clicking on the field in question. With this Form Server issue addressed I can start using the “Cannot be blank” option in my InfoPath forms again WooT!

For full details on the other updates included be sure to check the link above.

For the last couple of days I’ve been doing some work on a SharePoint event handler which was progressing at a good rate until I started getting a “503 Service unavailable” error after deploying an update.

After some searching it turned out that when WSP builder deployed the update for my Event Handler the App Pools for the SharePoint site failed to start. After restarting these from IIS manager all was good. Not sure exactly why the App Pools decided they didn’t want to come back up as I couldn’t spot any issues in the event logs on the server, but all is well now.

Wow where does the time go I just had a look and my last post was on the 27 of Jan lot has happened since then and lots to tell but this is a quick post before I head back out in to the fray.

I got news the other day that SharePoint Designer that Application we all know and love (and hate at times) will officially be a free download from 1-Apr-2009.

Also any existing licensed SPD users will be upgraded to expression web.

Ok that’s it for now time to get going

Got the notification this morning that IE8 has officially gone RC1, if you’re running the Partner preview this will not automatically update so you’ll need to head on over to the Internet Explorer Beta Website to download the latest copy.

Yesterday I received an email from an old colleague of mine Adrian Downes, letting me know that there is a new User group starting up in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide dedicated to all things PerformancePoint, while a launch date for the Australian PerformancePoint Special Interest Group (APSIG) is still on the way you can check out more details on the group and who’s involved here

Recently I upgraded my work laptop to Windows 7, so far I’m enjoying the new OS from Microsoft and while there are obviously a lot of upgrades under the cover I though I would highlight my personal top 3 features in no particular order

1. New Start Menu

   Probably one of the main features that will cause some commotion amongst users who are upgrading, personally I love it I’ve already noticed an increase in my productivity simply from this small design change. Rather than having to filter through all my open windows I can now find the window I want by hovering over the items on the start menu

2. Slideshow desktop

   Ok so this is purely a cosmetic feature but as a new father this is something I can see winning a lot of hearts with new users, basically Windows now allows you to select multiple images for your desktop and on a predetermined time changes your background picture.

3. Native VHD Support

   This is a feature that will have developers and presenters cheering along, while attaching a VHD doesn’t offer a huge gain as far as features go, it’s the ability to boot from a VHD that has me really excited. The prospect of being able to boot into a number of different Demo/development machines as needed makes this a killer feature

   

Recently I’ve been working on improving some internal processes at Stargate, one of these processes related to submitting travel requests.

I ran into issues however, when I started building the workflow in SharePoint designer. My workflow was pretty simple but did require that an email be sent to a distribution group setup in Exchange.

My problem was that even though the workflow showed that it had completed successfully no email had been sent. Naturally I made the obvious test to see if the distribution group existed and a quick email from Outlook confirmed this. I also double checked both the SMTP settings in SharePoint and also tested my workflow with my own email address entered, all this turned up positive.

Finally after some troubleshooting with the Infrastructure Team I found that the distribution groups had been setup for use with only Authenticated users, so after clearing the “Require Authenticated user” check box everything worked like a charm.

Now I’m sure there is a way to have the workflow run as an authenticated but as yet I’ve not tracked it down, and for the purposes of this solution it didn’t cause any issues. If I do manage to track down another work around to this I’ll update this post.

Well the new year is here and with the advent of 2009 comes a barrage of blog posts summarizing each posters 08 year, so I figured rather than review my year I’d simply provide a list of my top 10 achievements for 2008. This thought failed as all of my achievements seemed to be eclipsed by the arrival of my son Thomas. So I thought a simple farewell would be best suited to see out the year past.

2008 you were a good year lot’s of stuff happened some I shall remember vividly and some I shall push to the back of my mind only to resurface when I’m old an senile. You’ve been replaced by 2009 a new fresh year that with it brings opportunity, and a sense of the unknown that stirs up feelings of excitement of what could be.

2008 you shall always be remembered as the year I became a father and for that you can rest assured that you will hold a special place in my memory.

Now onto the New Year!!!

SkyNet|Systems Memorandum Incoming:
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---BEGIN MESSAGE---
To all Terminator units, 
in an effort to better understand our human foe 
all terminator models are required take part in
the Human holiday known as Christmas.
Each machine will be assigned a set of decorations
they must use to celebrate this holiday.
If your current processing capacity does not provide 
insight on how to use these new items
please refer to Image001.jpg of Henry below.
thank you Henry for your input.

P.S. Decorations are provided in addition
to the annual Kris Cringle organized by SkyNet
you will be receiving your assigned machine ID
by encrypted transfer at 1900 hours
---END OF MESSAGE---
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The Empire would like to inform all active storm troopers that contrary to certain rumors afoot Christmas will continue as scheduled. The Emperor believes that in these overly politically correct times, certain traditions that made the empire great should be kept alive.

With this in mind a new uniform must be adhered to affective immediate, and will remain in effect until Jan 1st 2009

Any trooper found to be in violation of this change of uniform will be asked to report to Lord Vader directly

Any issues with this uniform update should be submitted in writing directly to Lord Vader.

Long Live the EMPIRE!