May 8, 2009

Am loving it



TweetDeck.. is an amazing tool....you need twitter login and find out why twitter is a big hit...then only you can enjoy this tool..

Jan 12, 2009

MOSS / WSS Language Packs

To use vairaitions feature of MOSS / WSS for multiple languages you need to install following components in your dev enviornment.

Below is the list of components for english and french. If you need to manage any other langauge then just specify appropiate value for 'displaylang' parameter in URL


-------------------------------------
WSS 3.0 English x32 language packs
-------------------------------------
#SharePointLanguagePack.exe
#wssv3lpsp1-kb936988-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe
    WSS Service Pack 1

-------------------------------------
WSS 3.0 French x32 language packs
-------------------------------------
#SharePointLanguagePack-fr.exe
WSS x32 Lang Pack
#wssv3lpsp1-kb936988-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe
WSS x32 Service Pack 1 

-------------------------------------
MOSS English x32 language packs
-------------------------------------
#Serverlanguagepack.img (english)
MOSS English Language Pack
#officeserverlp2007sp1-kb936984-x86-fullfile-en-us.exe
MOSS x32 Service Pack 1

-------------------------------------
MOSS French x32 language packs
-------------------------------------
#Serverlanguagepack.img (French)
MOSS French Language pack
#officeserverlp2007sp1-kb936984-x86-fullfile-fr-fr.exe
MOSS x32 Service Pack 1


Jan 9, 2009

Chrome innovations

Google is known for its innovative ideas, here is one more.

Chrome release channels” clearly segregate audiences. Now if you are developer you can get weekly updates of chrome, otherwise you can subscribe to monthly updates (beta releases) or quarterly updates (stable releases)

More details:-


Dec 23, 2008

FireBug Developer tool Tip

Scenario1: To determine which style sheet or css class is applied to HTML element at runtime. (Figure 1)
Scenario2: How to debug css class? (Figure 2)

Solution:
  1. Download FireFox 3
  2. Download FireBug Add-in
  3. Open firefox, Start > Run > Firefox
  4. Open web site by typing URL
  5. Right click on page and click “inspect element”
  6. Refer below two screen shots

Figure 1

Figure 2

Launching Visual Studio 2005/2008 faster

Ever thought why visual studio takes so much time for loading. Following are two reasons.

1. Start Page gets list of recent projects
2. Start Page connects to internet and get latest visual studio news and headlines and other crap.

Solution: Disable start page from loading when you are launching visual studio.
Start > Run > devenv > Tools > Options > Enviornment > Startup >
a. Set "Show Empty enviornment" in "At startup" dropdown.
b. Uncheck "Download content in every 60 minutes.

See below screen shot for settings.


If you still want to access start page, then go to View > Other windows > Start Page


Nov 3, 2008

Chrome at its best

How to search directly in website?
Let’s say you are searching for latest “wss vhd”, so in classic fashion you would either go to google.com or download.microsoft.com

How does chrome saves time and improve efficiency?
You just need to type “keyword” (I will tell you later what it is), and then followed by query in address bar. See screen shot below

Example: download.microsoft.com

Another example: support.microsoft.com



Manage Search in chrome:
Chrome > Options > Basic tab> Default search > Manage > Add
Enter some user friendly Name: download.microsoft.com
Enter Keyword(this would appear in address bar): download.microsoft.com
URL: Enter valid url and replace query with %s.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/results.aspx?pocId=&freetext=%s&DisplayLang=en&sortCriteria=date&nr=20



Oct 17, 2008

Request format is unrecognized for URL unexpectedly ending in

Scenario/problem: Browse service.asmx on localhost and click on any webmethod, you get error as shown below.




Solution: This problem may be due to many reasons.
1..NET Framework version 2.0 and 1.1 by default disables web services HTTP GET, HTTP POST and SOAP protocols. Click here to see details on how to enable this http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;819267

2.After making changes mentioned above, if problem persist than add all protocols in web.config to get exact error. Hopefully this will give you exact error details
< name="HttpSoap">
< name="HttpPost">
< name="HttpGet"> 
< name="HttpPostLocalhost">
< name="Documentation">

Sep 13, 2008

Chrome fans

Yes I think am :)

A very cool feature in chrome i.e. “Find” (Ctrl+F), as you can see on vertical scrollbars there are indications of text found




How to rename SharePoint_AdminContent_someGUID database?

Problem:

  1. Unable to specify config database name when you install MOSS 2007 / WSS 3.0 with help of wizard psconfiggui.exe(that appear just after SharePoint setup, with check box “Run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard”). Configuration database name by default has weird naming convention that is “SharePoint_AdminContent_”. Typically in SharePoint it’s called configdb.
  2. Second problem, you are unable to use same database instance for more than one SharePoint farm. Or let’s put in other words, I want to share single SQL server for multiple SharePoint farms (not a best practice but sometimes we have to do :) ).
Solution:
Note: Post installation you are not allowed to rename this database name. 
So only solution left is to configure MOSS 2007 / WSS 3.0 with help of command line, see below steps.
  1. Run SharePoint installation (Server type=complete), uncheck “Run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration wizard now”

  1. Open command prompt Start > run > cmd > cd c:\program files\common files\Microsoft shared\web server extenstions\12\bin
  2. Type following command (text in red color will be as per your environment, rest all should be as-is)
psconfig -cmd configdb create server "SQLServer" database WSS-Farm-configdb user domain\spsetup password "p@ssword" admincontentdatabase WSS-Farm-CentralAdmin

SQLServer: Name of the machine where sql server is installed
WSS-Farm-confidb: Now this is what you are specifying, otherwise if you use wizard it will be “SharePoint_AdminContent_
Domin\spsetup: A domain user that should be member of administrator group of all servers in farm(WFE and DB). Secondly it should have “securityadmin” and “dbcreator” role on SQL server with windows authentication
WSS-Farm-CentralAdmin: Database name of central administration web site.

Finally to complete installation run following commands
psconfig.exe -cmd adminvs -provision -port 12345 -windowsauthprovider onlyusentlm
psconfig.exe -cmd services install
psconfig.exe -cmd secureresources

Note
: Description of above three commands are available here

Aug 25, 2008

BizTalk Developer productivity

Many times BizTalk developer is annoyed by mundane tasks like start/stop/deploy/undeploy/import bindings/host instance restart/terminate instances etc.

Even sometime we miss few task and then struggle why changes are not reflecting in this build.

Here is simple batch file that performs above tasks.
deploy.bat
Open deploy.bat and make changes as per your environment.

Supporting files that you should copy in system32 folder
utils.zip (unzip first and copy to system32 folder)

Apr 6, 2008

Architecture and Design Review

Lately, my management asked me to review one asp.net application from architecture and design perspective.

As usual, I googled it on how and what should be the overall approach. After half a day research I thought review comments can be grouped in following categories.

1. Code quality

2. Design constraints

3. Performance constraints

4. Duplicate code

5. Dependencies

Certainly, I concluded report with summary that highlighted most risky components within application and recommendations on how to mitigate risk.

Now, here is the list of tools and articles that I have used to accomplish this task.

1. To start with, this is the best article: Chapter 4 — Architecture and Design Review of a .NET Application for Performance and Scalability

2. Metrics, metrics and more metrics: Gather and understand as much as you can. Ndpend is great tool, initially you will feel slightly uncomfortable with UI and ocean of information it gives. But hang on there and after some time you will find this tool worthy.

3. SourceMonitor is another good tool to understand cyclomatic complexity of application.

4. To know memory leak and slowest lines of code in application use ANTS Profiler.

5. Duplicate code, here is magic wand. “Simian - Similarity Analyser”. You have a liberty to specify number of lines of duplicate code you would like to check(threshold property)

To know recommendations and efforts spent on this activity, leave a comment on this post!

Cheers!

Mar 2, 2008

Google's answer to Windows Sharepoint services (WSS)

Here comes Google with its innovative products line and this time it has well targeted Microsoft SharePoint services (more or less same). If your company is not interested in investment and looking for a neat collaboration platform then consider yourself lucky. There are two products namely http://sites.google.com and http://www.google.com/apps

They have some great features like:-
1. Site creation
2. Page creation
3. Customization
4. Upload files
5. Custom list
6. Templates
7. Authorization (contributors, owners, readers)
8. Email Alerts
9. Search
10. Docs, excel, PowerPoint
11. Calendars
12. Instant messaging (IM)

It has a growing number of customer as well, to name few Capgemini, Procter & Gamble, GE, and Salesforce.com



http://sites.google.comhttp://www.google.com/apps