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| Thanks to all who attended my presentation at SharePoint Saturday Austin in January. As promised, here are the slides for your reference.
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Here's a picture from the event by Victor:
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| I’ve blogged about SharePoint Development on Cloudshare in the past, see Some SharePoint Development Machine Options, but I thought I’d go through a screen-shot how-to so you can see how easy it is to get up and running with them. First, browse the solution showcase, pictured below: 
After choosing a pre-set environment of one to many vm’s, register for the trial account. I suggest trying the Microsoft Information Worker VM first because it has lots of great demos set up already. 
After confirming you received their email to finish registration, your machines are already running in the cloud and ready for you to open in the remote desktop active X application direct from the browser. 
Enjoy using Cloudshare for SharePoint Development and Testing. Let me know if this was helpful or needs work in the comments on http://www.tomresing.com |
| Last night I presented SharePoint for DBA’s Part II to the San Antonio League of SQL Server Administrators. Slides The slides from the presentation are available for download and viewing on SlideShare. 
Screencast of part of Demo 2 I recorded a screencast of one of the demos from the presentation. 
Video Note: I recorded the video above because during the presentation I ran into an error which prevented the creation of the External List from the External Content Type and I wanted to show how the demo should have ended last night. More detail on the error I received and how to solve it is below. No Finders Error Solution While creating the external list I received the following error every time I tried to create the list. I also received various other errors which came from rushing trying to recover from this one I hadn’t seen before. 
The error states “No Finders available in the View Group associated with the Specific Finder (Read Item) operation.” That alone wasn’t enough information for me to figure out what was wrong with my Read Item operation at first glance. A quick search turned up the solution on MSDN Forums. “Try making sure that the columns in your Read List and Read Item Operations are the same.” This indeed is the key and it’s easy to reproduce the error condition once you have this tip. To generate the error screenshot above, I just removed one column from my Read Item Operation so it didn’t match the list of columns in my Read List Operation and attempted to create a new External List from the External Content Type. Simply adding the same column back restores us from the error condition. Reference |
| In late 2006, when I asked my mentor what I needed to do to get up to speed quickly on SharePoint for my first major SharePoint project, he had great advice that I only followed reluctantly. The mentor was Matthew McDermott. He told me to read more than 1000 pages of free documentation from Microsoft. And he told me to practice it and then re-read it and only then I would know the basics. At the time, it sounded crazy to me as an additional workload to my current projects. Only because I trusted Matt, believed in Microsoft’s new vision for the as of yet unreleased SharePoint 2007 at the time and wanted to deliver a quality first SharePoint project that I took his advice. And I couldn’t be happier that I made that leap. Combined with the advice and mentorship of another great consultant, Tom Stewart, I was ready for learning what I needed to lead a project on this new platform. With Tom, I had already gained experience on Microsoft Content Management Server. I had become comfortable with the Content Management concept of page layouts and publishing pages that applied in SharePoint with the 2007 release. I also had worked on SharePoint web parts before. But I hadn’t really grasped the power of the platform before I set off to really understand how it is installed and configured. What follows is my advice for new SharePoint installers based on the advice I received when I was new. I’ve updated it to SharePoint 2010, but keep in mind there have already been multiple releases of the books below during the current product’s life and there may be more. The Downloadable Books There is so much Downloadable book content for SharePoint Server 2010 now compared to before. I noticed they even have many of the downloadable books for sale on Amazon now, which isn’t a bad option. I normally print some of the books out, but it is a lot of pages. It might cost as much in ink and paper as the cost to buy it preprinted and bound on Amazon. 
The list of books, posters and white papers is on TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262788.aspx Of those, I generally recommend reading the two planning guides cover to cover, about 800 pages and the deployment guide, another 380 pages. Your First Install For a first time install of SharePoint, I recommend printing out the deployment guide and following it step by step, making notes on the pages where you might make changes in a future installation. After installing and configuring SharePoint a few times using the deployment guide and after reading the planning guide, you should have a good grasp on most of the backend features of SharePoint. You might even be ready to pass a Microsoft Certification for IT Pros. For Developers and Admins? Whether your goal is to move more into the administrator or developer side of SharePoint, following the steps above is a good start. The IT Professional side of SharePoint deals with server installs, configuration and maintenance. The Developer side of SharePoint involves writing custom solutions that are deployed to a SharePoint Server. However, as a SharePoint Developer, you often are best served by installing and configuring your own development environment to mirror the production server. The better you grasp the concepts introduced in the above books, the better you will be able to control the fate of your development server. |
| I just noticed on the SharePoint Weekly Newsletter from Nick Swan that Andrew Connell has a new blog series on SharePoint, Silverlight and MVVM. Developers love design patterns and just the thought of MVVM takes me back to my one of my favorite Computer Science classes on Java 15 years ago. | If you’re not familiar with Andrew, you should check out some of his stuff. He’s one of my favorite SharePoint Development Authors and Presenters and having shared a few pints with him, I can say he’s a nice guy. I’ve been reading his blog posts and books since the Microsoft Content Management Server days before SharePoint 2007 when he was one of about two reliable sources I found on the product. One of his latest books is Inside Microsoft SharePoint 2010 which I’ve only skimmed but this one he co-authored looks to be the premier SharePoint 2010 dev book from MS Press. |  | If you haven’t heard of SharePoint Weekly, check it out here: http://www.sharepointweekly.com/ 
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| I’ve been working with Claims Authentication a lot recently and I’m still tripped up by some of the basics, it would appear. Yesterday, on Halloween, I received an access denied error on my web application after configuring it for Forms Based Authentication. I had previously migrated it to windows claims, but this was my first try moving an existing web application from windows claims to FBA Claims. The error in the ULS was misleading: Cannot get Role Manager with name aspnetsqlroleprovider. The role manager for this process was not properly configured. You must configure the role manager in the .config file for every SharePoint process. After searching all my web.config files for the word aspnetsqlroleprovider I realized I was on a wild goose chase. The culprit was the “Claims Super User Settings” as I will phrase it. I’d dealt with it before when moving the same web application from windows integrated to window claims authentication, but thought I’d properly addressed it the second time around until I got this error. If you receive an access denied after changing claims authentication settings, take a minute to re-read Configure object cache user accounts in the TechNet SharePoint 2010 Server Operations section. In the case of my FBA implementation, I tried the PowerShell method first, but still received the error afterwards. It wasn’t until I configured the User Policy as described in the reference above that resolved the error. Claims References |
| Last night I presented a session titled SharePoint for DBAs Part 1 at the San Antonio League of SQL Server Administrators (www.SALSSA.com). There was a great group of 10 Microsoft SQL Professionals attending who gave me great feedback and interaction during and after the presentation. I've agreed to do a follow up, Part 2, sometime in the future.
Most of the presentation was demo which I may record seperately and upload to YouTube, but the slides are available from Slide Share now.
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Walking around Disneyland with my friend Michael Doyle last night, I said to him, “Could this day get any better?” and I think we really did both feel that way. Michael has had two books published within weeks of each other, one of them Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Inside Out we were co-authors on. We had a book signing event, heard great sessions, I passed another certification test, met lots of old friends and new ones and spent 4 hours in Disneyland. Today was a great day! I posted some photos from the conference so far to a public photo album on Facebook. Here’s a picture with my co-authors and editor at the book signing and giveaway: 
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For #SPC11 conference attendees looking to get some fresh air and exercise while not in sessions at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011, October 3rd-6th, there is some good news. The SPRunners group is back and active on Facebook this go-around. Join the open group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/sprunners/ Also, I found some good maps of the Conference Center Area. If you’re looking for the entrance to the conference center, I believe you’ll find the best, and maybe only, entrance on the following map at the place marked Lobby. You can also see how close together the Marriott, Hilton, Clarion and Sheraton Hotels are together on the Convention Center Way leading up to the Conference Center. 
The Disney Fitness Map shows some paths going through the resort area that aren’t on the main streets. That should be nice for walking or running, I’m guessing. 
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#SPC11 - I’ll be at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference October 3-6, 2011 at the Anaheim Convention Center and the party Tuesday night across the street at Disneyland. If you see me at the conference or the park, don’t be afraid to ask me to sign your copy of my new book, Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Inside Out. If you’re looking for a copy of the book, there will be multiple giveaways and, I’m not sure, but it might be available at the conference book store. Look for a little more activity than usual on this blog this week with the official release of the book and coverage from the conference. I’ll also be tweeting at @resing. Book giveaway details My co-author Errin O’Connor will be signing and giving away 250 copies at the EPC Group Booth at the following times: - Sun 10/2, 7pm
- Mon 10/3 & Tues 10/4,12:30-1:30pm
- Wed 10/5, 6:30pm
Microsoft Press will have a limited number of copies to give away at their booth. During the giveaway, you can meet me and my co-authors, Penelope Coventry, Jonathan Lightfoot, Troy Lanpier and Michael Doyle and get your copy signed. The Microsoft Press giveaway will be at: 
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| Tom is a Microsoft Certified Master in SharePoint 2007. I write an average of 2 posts a month on topics I have interest and experience on. |
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