Install Sharepoint 2007 SP2 on a test server I ran into this problem. No log, no additional info.
The work around I found was:
Ok, the time for the braves is arrived!
Sharepoint 2010 is available to MSDN subscribers.
Marco (my colleague owner og my account) please, go on with the new servers!
The last week I had the opportunity to speak at the second edition of Microsoft ALM Day (Application Lifecycle Management) the 5th in Rome and the 6th in Milan. Here my presentation.
I love these events because I always to meet great people (dr. Ivar Jacobson during the previous edition, Brian Harry in Rome and Brian Keller).
I also had to opportunity to speak and eat with great and BIG people. Thanks Lorenzo for the fillet….
The previous week I attended to the Microsoft Inner Circle Partner Summit in Rome about Visual Studio and ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) topics.
Brian Harry announced the availability of Visual Studio 2010 for the Q1-2010, while the RC should be shipped for the end of the year.
The only certain thing is the product launch that will be held on march 22nd, at this moment is also sure that the RTM will be made available a little bit earlier or a little bit later :-P
The suite has been rebranded and the Team System name is gone on retirement (well officially the last Team System brand name will be the 22nd march)!
There are going to be 3 main products:
But the big stuff are on the supporting tools:
In the following pics the features stack of the different VS products:
These are the technology enablers to build real software farms!
More when I will have the time to delivery and reorganize our internal procedures of Milan Campus to leverages the new features!
I’m back from the Sharepoint Conference 2009 from a couple of weeks (it has been held on 19-22 October in Las Vegas) and I’m in a huge late in publishing some personal annotation from there.
The keynote was driven by Tom Rizzo and Steve Ballmer
The key messages were:
Here my presentation from the 01st July conference in London (I’m in huge late in blogging!).
It has been just a 5 mins speech about the awesome TIQ projects :-D on industrial vehicles tracking.
(Ok ok it’s always the same stuff).
The important thing in this blog is the excellent job made by friend Alessandro Faraci the London Technology Network business development manager and the conference chairman.
I'm working with a customer deploying MOSS 2007 and TFS 2008 in the same server farm, sharing the DB between the 2 environments and also the MOSS portal with TFS.
Indeed the topology is quite easy, with three servers:
Customer adopted a SCRUM methodology and would like to leverage the Conchango template, but I got in trouble because you've to manually setup Conchango on a dual server TFS topology, manually deploying a Sharepoint solution (Conchango).
I was unable to deploy the Conchango templates and after having thought it was caused by my fault, I found the following error in Sharepoint logs:
10/28/2009 10:59:38.94 OWSTIMER.EXE (0x0B64) 0x0A78 Windows SharePoint Services Timer 5utx Unexpected The timer service could not initialize its configuration, please check the configuration database. Will retry later.
This one, usually is due to a problem in Sharepoint configuration cache that can be easily resolved forcing an update of the cache (take a look to the blog post).
It didn't worked for me so I had to remove the server from the farm (easy in my scenario because it was just an 1 server farms) with:
psconfig -cmd configdb disconnect
The reinsert the server itself in the farm just with psconfigui.exe
To deploy Conchango is mandatory to install Team Explorer both on Sharepoint FE and on the TFS AT.
I don't like having team explorer on a MOSS FE, but in this case I need it because on the same server there is also Team System Web Access and explorer is a requirements also for it.
To manually deploy Conchango on Sharepoint : stsadm -o Conchango.TeamSystem.Scrum.Sharepoint.wsp from the path C:\Program Files\Conchango\Scrum for Team System\SFTS WSS Template
I’ve a got a report where a field must be populated calling a “cascading” stored-procedure from the main query.
There 2 ways to do it:
Obviously the second way is “more” pragmatic (it guarantees the best performance but… from a developer perspective it’s inelegant).
Well I’ve chosen the second way so I needed to setup the SSRS .Net CAS permission.
<PermissionSet
class="NamedPermissionSet"
version="1"
Name="Corra-Expression">
<IPermission
class="SqlClientPermission"
version="1"
Unrestricted="true"
/>
<IPermission
class="SecurityPermission"
version="1"
Flags="Execution"
/>
<CodeGroup
class="UnionCodeGroup"
version="1"
PermissionSetName="Corra-Expression"
Name="Report_Expressions_Default_Permissions"
Description="This code group grants default permissions for code in report expressions and Code element. ">
<IMembershipCondition
class="StrongNameMembershipCondition"
version="1"
PublicKeyBlob="blablabla"
/>
…just to share my praise to the italian VSTS team (…ok I’m not sure about the group definition). I mean:
(…alphabetically sorted by first name). They’ve closed the year with an excellent and astonishing result!
Their commitment is great but more important the professionalism and organization is simply perfect. When I worked with them for the italian ALM Day, everything was… like a swiss clock!
I hope to have the opportunity to work again with them!
If you get this error:
Try to install Office Web Components from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=7287252c-402e-4f72-97a5-e0fd290d4b76&displayLang=en
On my development VM I’ve installed only O2007 getting this error.
It’s a couple of weeks that I’m receiving a notification ad every boot of my Windows 7 RC Laptop reminding me to backup data because it will expires in july without providing me the opportunity to recover data and application.
I’ve just planned 2 day to reinstall everything but thanks to my friend AndreaR (the cyborg) I used this article to upgrade.
Recap:
I know, it’s the “italian way” very pragmatic. I guess that upgraded process hasn’t been fully tested so that it has blocked by MS.
In my case it worked great (it took a couple of hours to be completed)
On 19th June I had the opportunity to speak at Federico II University of Naples (Italy) to the italian national conference on Intelligent Manufacturing.
My speech was again about BAM (Business Activity Monitor) on industrial plant and it has been co-authored with Enzo Maria Tieghi from ServiTecno our partner providing us with GE Fanuc SCADA solutions.
The presentation is available here:
PS: …I was forgetting to suggest to avoid “Oste Pazzo” restaurant at Borgo Marinari in Naples. Expect from them a huge bill depending from your home town and a meal quality that is the same of a low level restaurant in Milan. Do you know the worst things about touristic restaurant? Well, you can find them there.
My company has been invited to present a project developed for an Hot-Rolling-Table for a new furnace at IBA Day 2009.
I was the speaker but I’ve just presented the great job of my colleagues Eros Valzasina and Chiara Susca.
The challenges of the project were:
Obviously if we were invited to IBA Day, the answer is yes to all of the question…
To know how, the presentation is here:
Yesterday I also attended to may meeting of London .Net User Group
There has been a great Battle of the WEB contest (great idea from Jason Chapman) where in a 35 mins for each speaker, different Content Managed platform and approach have been presented.
Obviously I’ve talked about Sharepoint but my battle has been a Waterloo…
My demo server with MOSS and WSS runs out of ADSL so that I talked about Content Management using the italian intranet running on WSS…
I’ve to be grateful to BT for this…
Anyway presentation is here:
For my company AISTech (America Iron and Steel Technology institute) is “the event” and until now we’ve 7 papers (and 7 sessions) about projects we’ve delivered on metal market.
This year we’re also exhibitor and you can find our stand on the aisle 2900.
In the past days I’ve took some sessions:
I was getting mad in configuring our internal report servers exposing them to internet on https using our CA.
Everything was ok using the reporting services web-server (I was able to navigate and invoke all the reports) but it was impossible having the report manager application working.
The problem was that the DNS names (obviously) were different from netbios name and I’ve found this article that solved my problem:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861
This is gold!
What is surprising is that in any real world scenario you will find a DNS name different from the internal, why I need to hack the registry to deploy my configuration?!
PS: Remember to restart IISAdminService, an iisreset isn’t enough!
In TIQ-Industrial we’re currently working on a revamping of a classic VB6 Client/Server application to WEB (for our customer’s Intranet).
This application is mission critical because it’s used to manage the production-planning and scheduling of the whole industrial site (accordingly to standard ISA-95, it’s a level 3 system). Obviously we’re talking about manufacturing sector.
The main challenges we’ve to face are:
The technology standard for the new web application are ASP.Net 3.5 and SQL-Server 2005
The above requirements will be addressed the following ways (in vision):
Requirement 1
The application will be developed in a RIA-style (Rich Internet Application) strongly leveraging AJAX and 3rd party controls (Telerik RADControl for ASP.Net Ajax).
There will be a strong commitment by the development team on the user interface (…and not as happens sometimes on business components generalization and sexy technical stuffs creating no value for the customer)
Requirement 2
PostBack is the enemy!
Usually in ASP.Net forms development model, a PostBack is generated each time users click on a button, asking the server to perform some tasks.
We can also say that an event is generated on the browser and that event is processed by the web server generating a new page.
Today’s page are rich and large and where there is a lack on network bandwidth the user experience is bad!
Our aim is the reduction of the postbacks needed providing direct access to database data and business services to the client (browser).
This aim can be reached through a REST architecture where AJAX it the enabling technology providing richfull browser logic and functionality (…we’re emancipating the browser :-D )
Requirement 3
I’ve to admit that we don’t like the current database design but we cannot improve it!
Although this project is an opportunity to think about a new and improved database design. We’ll try doing this providing a virtual implementation of the database entities using an ORM (in this case ADO.net Entity Framework)
It this way, we take 2 advantages:
The diagram below explains the main layers of the application:
It’s the “classic” web-server and provides the navigational logic to the application (page generation and page navigation).
Nothing different than standard web development approach, reference technologies are based on IIS 6 and ASP.Net 3.5
When an user asks for Something to Show, a new page (for example a Report, a Master/Slave view) is generated by the WEB server and pushed to the browser (as HTML obviously with graphics and scripts mixed-up). The important thing is that the page doesn’t contain data!
Data will be bound later and page itself (hosted by the browser) will ask/pull for the data.
It’s the service that exposes data to the browser through http in a restful way (…in this project data will be exposed in read-only)!
I don’t have time to explain REST approach here (and there are a lot of blogs about that). For more information take a look to:
WCF: Developing RESTful Services
Here, the main idea is that page controls will directly ask the data needed (something to read) to this layer that will send them using JSON/ATOM without needing to generate a new page avoiding the PostBack.
The idea is easy to understand, but in the was tricky and challenging to be implemented. The good news is that today we’ve technology for doing effective development with this approach.
ADO.Net Data Services (built on top of Microsoft’s ORM ADO.Net Entity Framework mentioned above) is a framework to expose relational data sources and manage REST events.
We’re using this framework to expose our data model to the external clients (browsers).
ADO.net Data Service is great to expose data clusters and also their basic operation (CRUD) to the browsers but it’s not effective enough to expose complex business services and transaction. It hasn’t conceived for this!
The Services layer is in charge of exposing to external client applications (hosted by browsers) high-level services (business actions) that can be invoked by users.
Technically, there is nothing new in doing this, we leverage WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) that is mediator between the clients and the stored-procedures that currently are implementing the business-logic.
Currently there is a 1:1 correspondence with a business-services to stored-procedure, but strategically we can compose more complex services aggregating stored-procedures in transactions.
What is new here is that we exposes WCF using the REST Starter Kit so that this interface is compliant to the way in which data are exposed by the Data Services layer (atom/json), providing a single pattern in accessing data and services.
With this approach we can satisfy all the customer requirements and further we‘ve a couple of more gains:
That’s SOA!
This morning I was getting mad working with a colleague on the deployment of a RIA (Rich Internet Application) application developed targeting Adobe Flash 10
The application calls some web-services to get data from back-end system (data for tracking and telemetry of locomotives but this is irrilevant).
Using Fiddler we found that when a flash file is hosted by IE it asks for a crossdomain.xml resource.
Googling and looking to Adobe documentation we discovered that a crossdomain.xml must be deployed (saved) on the root of the web-server providing the web-services (that invoked back-end) and it contains the default policies allowing incoming Flash clients to call the hosted service.
Our crossdomain.xml is:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<cross-domain-policy>
<site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="master-only"/>
<allow-access-from domain="*"/>
<allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="SOAPAction"/>
</cross-domain-policy>
Don’t forget the last line to allow a SOAP (web-service) interaction.
It allows any incoming request from external Flash clients.
I admit that I’m totally incompetent on Flash and RIA techniques so I’ve lost a couple of hours on that!
Volevo segnalare il seguente evento dedicato all'infrastruttura ed alle pratiche operative su Sharepoint:
http://www.decatec.it/Eventi/Decatec-Evento-Sharepoint-Roma-7-Maggio-2009.aspx
L'evento è organizzato da Stefan Demetz un eccellente professionista oltre che un amico e quindi sarà sicuramente sinonimo di qualità.
AvePoint ha delle eccellenti soluzioni per il backup/restore di Sharepoint che operano su base selettiva consentendo quindi di partizionare i contenuti da salvare in maniera semplice ed efficace.
Just a quick note about the last speeches.
I'd also wanna thanks the italian Microsoft Team for the perfect event organization (Francesca, Lorenzo, Paola, Pasquale) and Joanna, Jason and Pete from DDG for hosting me again.
Today the point of no return has been passed (sigh), unfortunately (for me) I've been charged also with a biz-development role in UK...
Just to begin, let me know if someone needs support or mentoring on BizTalk, Sharepoint and TFS, me or someone from my team will be delighted to work with you smiling, at the best of out capabilities and ...uhm ah! yes providing great value and effectiveness to your solution (...I don't wanna be a sales person sigh)
It's a lot a time from my last note and I was very busy in a lot of different tasks for my company.
I prefer using my blog to write something about the technologies I'm using but I stll writing somethink about the incoming speeches...
This week I'll be in these italian events at Milan (11.03) and Rome (12.03): http://www.microsoft.com/italy/alm/eventi/almday.mspx
To be honest, I'm a little bit proud of sharing the same event with Ivar Jacobson...
The week after the next, I'll speak The Developers Group in Microsoft Cardinal Place (London UK) again on Team Foundation Server and how we use it in TIQ-Industrial. For more information on this take a look to http://www.richplum.co.uk/
Hi everybody,
One of the companies in my group is looking for certified professionals to get the CDS Competency from Microsoft.
Is anyone interested?
Let me know!
Cheers!
Yesterday I've took a speech @ The Developers Group in Microsoft Cardinal Place (London UK) Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation (WF not WWF which is copyrighted by World Wrestling Federation and it's another story...)
You can download slides and demos from Speech & Conferences area on the "naked" TIQ-Industrial site (or click here Slides, Demos).
I'm absolutely unhappy with yesterday presentation because I've totally missed the presentation timing that I planned!
I started writing code to much slowly so that I was unable to complete all the demos that I consider to be "a must" to learn the pillars of WF.
The basic things You should know:
For the upcoming sessions from DG Group take a look to http://www.richplum.co.uk/
Final Note (unfortunately last but not least):
VSMT doesn't support Dynamic-Partition. Every "real" WIndows server system is installed with Dynamic-Partion
...so any consideration is up to you...
The only thing you can do is to TRY to virtualize the disks of you server with WinImage without leveraging VSMT.
There is a lot of work to do for VSMT team for making it suitable for real world scenarios!
In our tracking projects (GPS/GPRS systems in industrial plants) we leveraged Zoomify technology to process the plant images (usually took from an airplane and the reassembled by post-processing).
Today there is also SilverLight with DeepZoom to achieve the same result but if you're still working with Flash Zoomify it's still the best tool.
A new version (Version 4) has just been release. Take a look here for the main features.
To my colleagues: PLS take a look!
PS: About tracking project, this week has been published a white-paper from my company about a project on Iron & Steel Technology magazine. It's at page 58....
Just to inform you that I was charged as local representative to LondonIn (a LinkedIn group to connect London professionals) for the Italian network LiguriaIn ( www.liguriain.com ).
Liguria is an industrial district where are located top companies for healthcare, industrial engineering, naval-shipping, energy and obviously tourism.
I'll be focused to enabling relationships, synergies and hopefully business initiatives between UK companies and LiguriaIn companies.
Feel free to contact me for any further information.
I'm really honoured of this commitment because I was born in Genoa (the main town of Liguria) and I've a very good feeling with people of my hometown!
