Kit Kai's Tech Blog

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http://www.office2010themovie.com/

I'm attending training this week, and I'm using virtualised Windows 2003 R2 given by the training company. I'm also using Windows 7 on my laptop, hence I need to upgrade the integration services. During the upgrade, Windows 2003 R2 dvd is required. I was thinking to myself, oh no! Must download from MSDN over 3G! :(

Then I remember I was mounting ISO using Virtual CD over network at home whenever I'm reinstalling my OS. Then I was wondering if I could do the same over internet...

Establish VPN back home, mount the ISO over VPN, and within seconds, I'm done! No need to transfer the entire ISO over!

I'm damn pleased!

For those playing with Vista SP2 (why am I doing this??!!) on Hyper-V, and no matter what they do, integration services just don't get installed properly, don't panick...

Pop in the SP2 for Windows 2008, wait damn long (30 min to 1 hour) for the update to complete, then install the new integration services, and you are good to go.

Many preach that deployment of assembly to GAC is a potential security breach, as codes are run with full trust. So many advocate deploying your assemblies to the Bin directory and use CAS to give them the necessary rights to run.

I've been working on a customisation to improve wiki and forum functionality in SharePoint to better support a technical community. I decided to give CAS a try, and deploy to Bin (my work are mostly POCs, hence I just deploy to GAC). It was difficult at the beginning, as it is so difficult to understand and determine the necessary permissions. Fellow MVPs Reza Alirezaei, Paul Schaeflein, Todd Bleeker helped me pick it up, and managed to grant all the necessary rights for my webparts. I gave up on application pages, but later know that inheriting from layoutsPageBase requires full trust.

When trying to figure out the how to give the assemblies the necessary rights, I found myself just adding permission requests in the assemblyinfo.cs. Then I realise, the target environment doesn't have any code review process in place. Many clients that engage my consulting time also doesn't want to hear about code review, testing. They still insist of using app pool to prevent code from one vendor to bring down production server, etc etc. Hence there is nothing to stop a dev from just basically requesting every permission available!

I also find the permission request quite general. Some of the request are just granting the code to access the object model. Tell me, which SharePoint customisation doesn't use OM? Why isn't it broken down to smaller pieces, like code to request administrative objects like central admin, or shared services. So I don't believe CAS will help deliver more secure code. But if IT has code review process in place, then CAS will help to a certain extend (though I think it would even be better if permissions can be made more granular)

For now, I rather GAC all my assemblies...

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=1308&tag=nl.e539

This is already the second time information is leaked from Google. So if you have NDA information, or company secrets inside Google, be warned!

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=86101991840

After reading Andrew Connell's post on Live Mesh, I've decided to give it a try, and see if it can replace Live Sync, which is working very well on my computers, except that it doesn't do mobile sync, or web sync.

Basically, I'm looking at Live Mesh to meet two short comings of Live Sync

1. Web Sync of certain folders, so that I can have access to some files outside my own workstations.

2. Ability to sync sub folders to someone else. E.g. I've set up sync for community projects. That's for me to access the files on any machines I'm developing / testing on. But each project, I work with a different set of people, and sometime, source control is not an option. So I would like to be able to sync a project, (e.g. COP), which resides inside community projects, to members of the project team.

After setting up Mesh with the various computer I have, I like the ability to

1. Sync with web,

2. Potential to extend the Mesh to sync other stuff (What I'm really lacking is true multi device rss reader, (Newsgator does sync all the subscriptions across devices, but doesn't mark a post as read across multiple device),

3. Create a new sync via drag and drop.

I find more short comings for now, though it is not enough to stop me from using. Just have to be careful.

1. If you setup with existing folders which are synced, but not update to date, there is a risk that older files will override newer files (which unlike live sync, will make a copy of them). I was lucky, I was working on the project, hence I can reject reloading in visual studio, and save the new copies back.

2. It is still not able to meet my second requirement.

3. Remote desktop, while useful, is less than usable. I rather use my existing vpn / rdp setup, which is much faster even when done on my HTC Touch Pro (A blog post coming up soon!)

4. Not able to set up the sync in one central location. Live Sync allows you to set up the sync on the web, to various computer, specifying details like where you want to sync to on each computer. But Live Mesh requires to go to each computer to pull it in. Web based setup also doesn't allow you to specify where you want to sync to. This is a big NO NO for me, a control freak!

5. Slow! Live Sync synchronises files much faster!

Pardon my yet another very "expressive" post. Wasted quite a bit of precious time, especially when the work I'm doing is community work, and a new born baby is competing with this precious resource. (More to come!)

Again, SDK says if you want to check if the person have approval rights (CAML), then render certain stuff, you use <RightsGroup PermApproveItems="Required" />I use this without really testing it in an existing field, and now there is something wierd going on in my SharePoint. Ok, maybe I should uninstall and reinstall the feature. And you know what? stsadm tells me the above attribute is not declared! NOW I AM PISSED!

Removed the attribute, and install the feature. Then put the attribute back, and now I did proper testing. Added a user without approval rights, and see if information rendered. No it didn't. Used back the administrator account and see if the information renders. Yes it did. HUH? So documentation is correct and works! So next time u see "something not declared" error from stsadm, remove that offending attribute, install and place the offending attribute back.

Maybe my next job, I must make sure SharePoint Architect / Developer must have access to a Psychiatrist!

Pardon my very "expressive" post. Wasted quite a bit of precious time, especially when the work I'm doing is community work, and a new born baby is competing with this precious resource.

SDK says, to define a field (using caml in field definition) to be a person field, which allows multiple selection, you need to set the type to "UserMulti". The value of this field will be return as SPFieldUserValueCollection. I was able to retrieve the field, but I can't figure out why I add a user to the collection, and the collection.count returns > 1, when I save and re-retrieve, the count is 1, and it only has the first user...

Dig and dig until fingernails are gone ("Imagine those war movies [My favorite, Band of Brothers], where soldiers are trumatised"). Finally figure out you need to set the mult attribute to true. And what did the SDK says?

"Optional Boolean. A scale factor used in multiplication before displaying a number." <- Does this mean anything related to what I am trying to accomplish here? Is my English that bad, or someone neck should be in my hand now?

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39596616,00.htm

How does EU expects home users to download a browser without a IE in windows? Command prompt?

How about asking consumers what they want, instead of applying their antitrust muscle on us? I don't want to go download IE everytime I format my machine!

Oh, just for your information, Opera, if you are good enough for people to use, (like firefox), people will download you to use, even if I have IE!

If you haven't already install Windows 7, install Windows 2008 R2 first, then install Windows 7. I'm not very sure all the technicalities, as I can't find boot.ini which I know exist in Windows XP, which would let the PC know what OS is available to boot to. All i can say is Windows 2008 probably changes the partition it is on to the active boot partition, hence doesn't maintain boot information that shows the existence of a Windows 7 boot partition. Hence if you install Windows 2008 R2 later, you will lose the ability to boot to Windows 7, unless you pop in the dvd to recover the partition. Doing that will allow you to recover the ability to dual boot, but you will not recover the nice boot screen that Windows 7 gives, but the boring Windows 2008 R2 boot screen (at least for my case, as I have itchy hands and change the active partition)

So the best way moving forward is to install Windows 2008 R2 first, then install Windows 7, as Windows 7 is smarter (at least the PDC build still allows me to boot back to Windows 2008, so I guess the current build would be the same).

Or if you like, you can validate this feedback item...

Doesn't work.... '

I'm in the process of setting up a POC environment for a tender I'm working on. It consist of more than 7 virtual machines. Obviously I will use HyperV, instead of VMWare, which is what the client is using, since I have all the OSs sysprep, and it would take much less time for me to get the environment up. So after booting all the virtual machines up, the first thing to do is obviously to install the integration service. Do it all together, you will get an error. Do it one by one, each would be ready to reboot in minutes.

Just something for you to take note of if you are setting up a lab enviornment, and hitting an error.

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The two major ones are

Losing Sleep (If you load all your daily-used applications and use it like a production OS)

Whenever my windows 7 laptop goes into sleep or hibernation, when it tries to wake up, you get BSOD. On a bare minimum Windows 7, you won't get this.

Unlocking the hidden features of Windows 7

www.withinwindows.com shares that there are hidden features in the M3 build that is not available to people who are not under Microsoft's payroll. Workaround are given to unlock those features, and they work. However, don't do it on a machine that is shared by various people. The unlock steps I believe changes the permission of explorer.exe. On my wife's laptop, after I unlock the feature using my account (domain admin), and I log in using her account (normal user) you will get a blank gray desktop. Basically, normal user account do not have rights to run explorer.exe. Changing the permission does restore the desktop, but not to full functionality.

Minor stuff

Other minor issues do happen, especially when you are installing drivers and applications. Most of them can be solved by running the installation in Vista RTM compatibility mode.

EndPoint Protection won't install properly too. You need to manually install life update first, before installing EndPoint protection. Even then, proactive thread protection is not enabled initially. Just antivirus. After running it for a few days, Endpoint protection will return to normal operations.