CHI - Life Beyond Technology

Today I gave a hand to my team member to create his SharePoint 2010 development environment. When I was running configuration wizard it suddenly ran the way I never expected without giving any details on database access and any other information (Usually it prompt us to enter account details and database server details). So I wanted to write this post to help others on how to prepare development environment. When I searched through the net I found this MSDN article which shows the full guide one how to prepare the SharePoint 2010 development environment. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869.aspx

Yesterday we downloaded the newest preview version of Microsoft SharePoint 2013. Preview version is available in technet http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh973397 . I configured a virtual machine with the preview version and following are the steps I followed to configure the SharePoint 2013. Prerequisites Installed OS – Microsoft Windows server 2008 R2 SP1 Installed Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Find more information about the prerequisites from the link http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(office.15).aspx Downloaded SharePoint 2013 installer using link http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh973397 Above link will download .img file named SharePointServer_en-us.img. I installed winrar and extracted the content inside the .img file to a separate folder. Installation steps Then I ran the installer and it gave following message. Which said I need to have couple of updates need to install in to the system. Microsoft has provided a tool...

In my BizTalk development environment I configured BAM portal some times back and I configured BizTalk several times after that. Today when I tried to access the BAM portal url it wasn’t there. So I checked the BizTalk configuration wizard and it look like follows. I thought that I haven’t configured the BAM portal so I pressed the Apply configuration and applying process went smoothly. But still the portal did configured. Then I found that this was due to a previous configuration I have done to the environment. I followed following steps to correct the issue. Open the command prompt in administrator mode. Go to the location where the bm.exe resides. It usually resides in “ C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009\Tracking” folder. Then run the following command to get the current BAM portal configuration values to a configuration file. bm get-config -FileName:"BAM_Config.xml" This will create a BAM_Config.xml file under the same location where the bm.ex...

Yesterday Microsoft has released latest version of SharePoint called Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013. I wanted to download the latest version and I found following urls which we can used to download SharePoint Server 2013 Preview. Technet Url - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh973397 Spjeff’s powershell script - http://www.spjeff.com/2012/07/16/download-sharepoint-2013-preview-with-powershell/ SharePoint Foundation 2013 Preview - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30345 To start with new SharePoint Server 2013 I found some training materials which published by Microsoft. You can get more information related to those training materials from the following URL. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vesku/archive/2012/07/17/sharepoint-2013-it-pro-and-developer-training-materials-released.aspx Cheers, Chinthaka Wimalaratna

Last week I bought my first ever DSLR. I searched a lot on model which suites for my budget and finally decided to settle in Nikon D5100. For the fast few weeks Nikon 5100 price went down due to some reason. So I thought of buying it without waiting anymore. I got a bundle package with reasonable price from CameraLk. So my new camera gear is as follows. Nikon D5100 Lens AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR Nikon Tripod Nikon side bag I’m waiting to do some experiments with the current gear and will definitely add more items to the list. I did some DSLR photography before using one of my friend camera. At that time I was amazed by photos generated by long exposure shots. I hope to do some experiment and stick to a specific area.

When developing complex BizTalk maps using BizTalk mapper using simple functoids will make the map more complex. Recently while I was working on complex maps I faced some situations where we need to write complex XSLT scripts to get the output what we wanted. Using simple functoids increased the complexity. While I was using the custom script XSLT functoids I found following article which suggest different situation where we wanted to use custom XSLT script and guideline for implementing complex maps. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/10001.biztalk-virtual-mapper-vs-custom-xslt-en-us.aspx I hope this article will help you in next BizTalk map you are going to implement.

While I was searching for a compile issue on a BizTalk orchestration I found a really good MSDN article which gives different ways to troubleshoot our orchestrations and advice for solving many common errors. That article consist on following topics. Orchestration Tracking Options Replaying an Orchestration Instance in HAT Interactive Debugging of an Orchestration in HAT Using Debug and Trace Statements in an Orchestration Writing Information to the Event Log General Troubleshooting Questions and Answers Common Errors Article URL - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc825581(v=bts.10).aspx You can definitely get information on how to fix your orchestration related issues by reading this  article.

Sometime when we are solving SharePoint related problems or when SharePoint features not functioning properly as we expected we tend to search related to those issues. But after couple of forum posts and spending two there days searching when you found that that problem was due to a SharePoint upgrade issue or its a limitation which they have fixed in SharePoint latest upgrade :S its really frustrates us. I have faced SharePoint user profile activity application related issues  where finally I had to deploy latest SharePoint update to fix those issues. This will be a nightmare if you are deploying your SharePoint application on a production machine. When the developed application features not functioning properly it will be a headache until you sort out the issues. It be really good if we have a common guide which we can use to keep our development machine and production environment up to date with latest version of SharePoint upgrades. Following is a TechNet article i...

There are instances we need to find the Public key token for a strongly names assembly. One instance is when you want to put the assembly reference in a configuration file. Follow the following steps to retrieve the public key token. Open Microsoft Visual Studio command prompt Type the command sn –T [assemblyname].dll Once you press enter it will list the public key token of the given assembly. Its simple as that