When Software Attacks!

SharePoint Website Schematic

I find myself drawing the same diagram over and over again in meetings to explain how SharePoint sites relate to IIS web sites, how managed paths and alternate access mappings fit and why you need to extend the SharePoint web application if you want more than one authentication provider. After some of my colleagues pestered me to draw it again, I decided to create an electronic version, and since everybody seems to find it so useful I thought I’d post it here as well.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, August 1, 2008

Unable to access My Tasks in Project Web Access

Sometime ago we noticed an issue with My Tasks in Project Server. Certain users were unable to access My Tasks at all - they simply got a SharePoint error page. A little jiggery-pokery with callstack and custom errors later, we saw that the error referenced a GUID for a task. I then searched the Project Server Publishing DB for the task GUID and subsequently located the project to which it belonged.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, August 1, 2008

Site Policies and FBA in SharePoint: Update

My apologies to Craig, who posted a comment to my earlier post about our FBA problems and I didn’t notice until today. To update you all on the situation, the fault is still with Microsoft and I have not yet received a hotfix. However, for anybody considering FBA in their deployment, I would not let this issue stop you. There are two reasons I say that: Normally with FBA you would extend the web application in question, having both FBA and Windows authentication available on the same content via different URLs.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Life with a Diamond: nearly two weeks on

I said I’d post again once I’d had the Diamond a little while. It’s now been two weeks and I can honestly say I’m completely happy with it. Battery life for me is fine - I charge it about every three days and it chugs along with exchange push pretty much constantly. I am quite comfortable with the soft keyboard and I can honestly say I haven’t noticed any issues with the speed of the device either.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Touch Diamond Battery Life

In my last post about the Diamond I said I would let you know what the battery life is. I therefore carefully refrained from giving it any charge over the weekend, even when connected to my PC. That means that it received no power from 5.30pm on Friday until it died (which it did, eventually). After that time, exchange push carried on notifying me of email immediately on arrival until 8pm, after which it downshifted to checking every hour and continued like that for the rest of the weekend.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, July 14, 2008

Workflow and SQL Error: Update

I posted last week about a couple of issues we were experiencing with SharePoint. I made some traction on the Workflow History issue at the end of last week and the revelation was pretty far-reaching, so I’m posting again. It turns out that the stuff I said about systemupdate was wrong… up to a point. There is a bug with systemupdate and triggering events, but it’s not the one we thought it was!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, July 14, 2008

blogging on the move: redux

Richard’s little mobile blogging app is nice, but he isn’t that responsive to user requests (ie, mine!) so I thought I would see if anything else was out there. Sadly, the answer appears to be ’not really’ However, I did come across Diarist, from Kevin Daly. Perhaps not surprisingly I am using it now. I must say that two thumb typing on the diamond keyboard is not bad, although nowhere near as fast as the real keyboard on the tytn.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, July 12, 2008

My Orange Diamond is... err... black

That might sound like a strange thing to say, but when my shiny new Touch Diamond, which I picked up from Orange this week, has no Orange branding or customisation of the UI. I hadn’t really noticed that until I went into the manual, where the screenshots are totally different from my phone. I was beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong with the setup process, when I saw this thread at XDA-Developers.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, July 12, 2008

HTC Touch Diamond on Orange

Thanks to the advanced notice from Tracy and Matt’s blog, I picked up my HTC Touch Diamond yesterday from the Orange Store and it’s great! ‘But wait!’ I hear you cry, ‘didn’t he go on about the experia x1 and how he wanted one?’ Well, yes, I did. I admit it - I am fickle in my affections.Since I wrote that post, I have spent time considering what I want in a phone and size has become a significant factor.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, July 11, 2008

Useful .Net Search and Replace tool

I need to update something like 300 web.config files today, with the same change in each. I turned to my old friend Google for his recommendations and up popped a magnificent free tool from Nodesoft. Why magnificent? It’s advanced mode allows you to specify start and end tags and update everything in between. That’s fantastic for dealing with big chunks of web.config files! Better yet, give it a file mask and a path and it will run through the entire folder tree if you like.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, July 5, 2008