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A view from the Big Apple (Conchango offices in New York City)
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 At home I've been storing all my data on my Media Center PC. That machine had 3 x 500GB SATA drives set up using the on-board motherboard RAID 5 controller. The setup has served me well for the last year but I had been watching the progress of Microsoft's Windows Home Server product and once I saw the quite beautiful looking HP MediaSmart Server I decided it was time to have a dedicated NAS solution.
The HP EX470 is well designed. It is small, headless (no monitor or keyboard/mouse ports etc.), fairly quiet (even with four drives in it), and looks sleek. The drives use hot-swappable pull-out trays and colored lights give you at a glance status of each drive, network and overall health. Internally, the EX470 has 512MB of ram and an AMD Sempron 3400+ processor. The processor appears quite capable but I strongly believe HP should have put at least 1GB of RAM in the machine. My first job was to take the device apart and replace the stock ram with a single 2GB stick which definitely provided performance improvements (especially noticeable if you remote desktop into the machine). I then added my existing three 500GB drives to it (a very simple and quick process of putting the drives in the trays, inserting them and using the graphical user interface to format them and add them to the storage pool). I also installed SlimServer software which powers my network audio players. While the SlimServer software is not officially designed to work with Windows Home Server it works fine 
Windows Home Server is actually a stripped down version of Windows 2003 Small Business Server (yes, you can find places where it says that if you poke around) with the Home Software on top. Instead of using hardware RAID, WHS provides a flexible mirroring solution where it ensures that for shares you enable mirroring for that there is always a duplicate copy of each file stored on another physical drive (obviously this is only available if you have more than one drive in your system). As you might expect, when you add drives you get more available storage space and the rest of the devices on the network simply see one logical device. This approach does have some pro's and con's. The pro's are that the physical drives use NTFS so in a worst case disaster you can pull out a drive and read it on any Windows machine, you can add, remove and upgrade drives of different sizes (in hardware raid all drives need to be the same size) and you can choose which shares are mirrored/duplicated instead of an all-or-nothing approach. However, there are some drawbacks. The mirror/duplicate files are created by a background service thread, this means there could be some time between the creation or update of a file and how quickly the mirror copy is made and there are some performance bottlenecks to be aware of. When a new file is stored on the server it is first written to the primary drive and then migrated off to one or two secondary drives (depending on if mirroring is enabled) by the background service. When dumping a large number of files you can guess what happens, you see a lot of disk contention on the primary drive as you have concurrent write operations competing with the background service reading the data and migrating it to secondary drives.
My plan is to also run the SageTV Server on the box for video and television media and possibly to use it as the master server for my CQC home automation software.
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I've noticed that there is surge of voice mobile applications on the scene lately: - Grand Central: Google bought these guys and switched it to an invite-only service while in beta (and at the same time, eliminated the ability for you to upload your own custom ring tones, choosing now from just the list they provide). The concept is to provide a single "virtual" number that rings on multiple physical phones (they also support Gizmo VOIP too). They offer many ways to customize and manage the calls you get and have unlimited voice mail storage too. They do have a mobile enabled version of their site. I think they have a lot of potential to become a killer application if only they would provide an open API to their service. For example, they do not offer any native clients (e.g. Windows Mobile or Blackberry) nor do they have voice mail to text conversion - both of these could be provided by third parties if they had an open API.
- YouMail - Cell Phone Voice Mail with Personalized
Greetings and Online Retrieval is a free service that takes over the
voicemail service from the carrier where
you can pick up your voicemail in the usual way, or have it emailed it
to you as an audio attachment, and of course you can store it all forever. It also has visual
voicemail and you can customize your greetings for your contacts. I like the fact that you can set up multiple phones to send to the service, for example, mobile and work. They also have a huge library of pre-recorded greeting so this is a great service for people who want to jazz up their boring voicemail service.
- SimulSays [Beta] is a great service I have used. It replaces your existing voicemail service and converts your voicemail messages into text messages which you can then have sent via SMS or e-mail. They provide unlimited voicemail storage and have beta clients for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. I met these guys at a show once and they are growing like crazy. They told me that their translation is 100% computerized with no human intervention (apparently most other services do use some level of computer and human combination for translation)
- GotVoice - Another service that will convert your cell, home and
work voicemail to text and sends it to your phone and email. I've not tried them so I can't comment on the service yet.
- SpinVox - These UK based guys offer many different voice applications and are well worth checking out. They have a voicemail to text service similar to SimulSays but go further and offer services to allow you to dictate your blog, send yourself a memo, send an instant message (SMS), update your social message status (Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook) and more all by voice.
- Jott is a free (ad supported) voicemail to text or voicemail to
email service. You leave a voicemail message at the Jott phone number,
from your registered cell phone, and the message gets translated into
text and delivered to your email inbox or phone sms, if you send it to
yourself (reminder, calendar item etc.), or it gets sent as an email to
anyone you pick from your contacts list.
- Call Wave - Thse guys provide mobile Visual Voicemail, voice, text and fax solutions at very reasonable prices. They do have voice to text translation but I've found it very basic in comparison to other services (but right now it is free so you can't beat the price). Definitely worth checking out.
- Pinger - A hands free
alternative to SMS. According to their website: Pinger lets you trade voice messages with anyone's mobile phone. There is no ringing or lengthy prompts and it's more personal than text because it's your voice. Plus you can send
a Pinger message to a group with one call. Pinger is free and works on
any US mobile phone.
- Nuance Voice Control - Now here is something that is different. This is an application that installs on your mobile device. You then use it to compose
emails, texts, play tracks from your media player, open web
pages, or check weather all from your voice commands. Since mobile devices don't have the processing power to do great voice recognition, this application uses a back-end service to do the work (hence the monthly charge) and because of this is extremely accurate. If you don't have a proper keyboard on your mobile device or you are in some way physically handicapped (or just don't like typing on tiny keyboards) or you want to be more productive while driving I think this is must have application/service!
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Anthony Handley & Rockford Lhotka presented a session on Real-World lessons learned from their project with WPF and Silverlight. You might know Rocky from the CSLA .NET framework. Overall, they said the process was definitely more fluid working in physically different parts of the country over their traditional methods.
Designer Perspective - The designer will need to learn the basics of Visual Studio. They can't work purely in Expression.
- Design was originally done in PhotoShop using layers and saved out to PNGs to be imported into Blend
- Blend has brought over much of the terminology that other tools use to
help with the transition making designers comfortable working in it.
- No TFS support in Blend
 and many designers may never have used source control before - Any changes made to the backend code requires the designer to go into Visual Studio to recompile so Blend can use the latest project assemblies.
Developer perspective - You will use data binding, get over any stigma about it from VB days
- Visual Studio designer is not the same as the designer in Blend, they do not use the same engine and you probably won't see the same visual representation.
- You will end up typing, copy/paste and modifying XAML directly. For example, you cannot add subclassed controls from the designer directly.
- Rocky was able to add code to the XAML and the designer (Anthony) could still make visual changes in Blend without knowing about code
- There is no intellisense on the binding expressions
- The designer must agree not to change the names of controls otherwise existing binding and events will fail. There is no way to "lock" them so Blend can't change them.
Overall this was a good informative session without any big surprises. The good news was really about how easy Blend is to adopt for existing designers and that Blend copes well with the changes made by developers to the XAML it produces and consumes. This gets us closer to the ideal full round-trip solution which allows designers to continue to contribute throughout a project without significantly increasing the overhead of developer re-work, however it highlights that the developer experience is much more low-level than Microsoft would lead you to believe and the designer needs to be willing to learn a little more about development.
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It is raining in Boston but I'll be indoors at the ReMIX 07 conference today and tomorrow which covers the Microsoft web technologies (e.g. Silverlight, Expression and Atlas). There are about 800 people registered and I'm still trying to finalize which sessions I'm going to be going to. Brad Abrams (Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services team) who I have a lot of respect for gave the keynote and spoke about the balance between web and desktop applications, the offerings Microsoft have in both those spaces and the trend towards compelling media and rich internet applications (software and services together) using WPF and Silverlight using the same set of technologies (Visual Studio, .NET and Expression Studio). It was refreshing to see Brad doing the Siliverlight 1.0 streaming video technologies on a MacBook Pro with Safari and on Firefox on the PC. From my personal experience, Microsoft still have a ways to go with 1.1alpha performance on the Mac. Brad demo'd www.tafiti.com for a Silverlight 1.0 search engine interface and www.microsoft.com/silverlight/halo3.aspx for Halo 3. Miguel de Icaza came up at the end and showed off Linux and Moonlight (which is Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 running on Linux) to the delight of the crowd. He showed off not just being able to run Silverlight streaming and rich applications but also made changes (using Emacs of course) to the demo code and showed the recompiled (using Make of course) application and running the modified version. It was great to see both Brad and Miguel up there, I don't think I've ever seen any Microsoft event where so many platforms were being shown off under one technology umbrella. What is left unsaid is that this is really only completely "new" in the Microsoft-centric world of course (can anyone say Adobe?) but no matter, it is still an important new direction for Microsoft. Unlike Microsoft of past, they have a cross-browser & multi-platform solution indicating possibly a final realization and proof of a real move away from the idea that IE and ActiveX was going to rule the web.
That said, they have a significant uphill battle ahead of them: - Designers tend to use Mac's. Microsoft needs to produce solid Mac versions of their design tools in addition to the browser plugins. This alone breaks the concept Microsoft have of designers and developers working together using the same tools and universes. Until that happens the best I see is buying designers a copy of VMware Fusion (or Parallels) so they can use the designer software (and let's hope they've done a better job than the abhorrent SharePoint Designer)
- Adobe has many years head-start partly because Microsoft even shipped the flash plugin with their browser. Unless Microsoft pushes this out (e.g. as a Windows Update) the industry is going to be reticent to expend energy developing Siliverlight web solutions until there is a a critical mass (the same reason we still see people ignoring Opera and other non-mainstream browsers)
However, it is worth remembering when Microsoft introduced .NET and C# when Sun Java was the only player in town. It took time (and a few revisions) but it would not surprise me to see a repeat of history only with Adobe playing the role of Sun. In the corporate world that is my focus, I believe Silverlight and SharePoint make an excellent combination for providing rich media and webparts/applications to business users and for building light but rich desktop client/server applications such as the ones Conchango has demo'd at ReMIX in Milan, Italy.
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Yes, I know it is some shameless self promotion but I'm going to join the ranks of blogger's who occasionally need to post a recruiting blog entry and so here mine is! Over the last few years that I have been working with SharePoint 2003 we have had a variety of implementations, from the small 50 user level to global implementations of 50,000 users and already we have a number of 2007 beta implementations (soon to become RTM) under way and many more on the horizon. So I'm looking for people who have had significant experience with SharePoint 2003, who have in-depth skills covering areas such as CAML and ONET.XML modifications along with customizing SCHEMA.XML. You also have excellent XML and C# skills and have already been playing or working with MOSS 2007 along with any .NET 3.0 technologies (such as the Workflow Foundation) in some capacity and would like to work in a team environment with a variety of projects involving MOSS technologies. Most of our US projects are in the North East (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut) areas although further travel is likely at times. As for work environment, a number of our consultants (including most of the practice heads here) came from Britain or originally worked in our UK offices so we have a fairly multi-cultural environment established. You can read more about us from our website at www.conchango.com and check out Michelle's blog who is our UK recruiting manager and you can contact the US offices directly at newyork@conchango.com.
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There appears to be an issue using domain groups in MOSS 2007 to assign permissions which I have had confirmed by another consultant. The scenario is this. I can go into site permissions and add a new user and give them read access to the site and it works as expected. If instead I create an NT domain group, let's say for example we call it “Portal Readers” and put the same user in that security group and then add the domain security group to the site permissions directly and give it read access the user does NOT get any rights to the site. It appears as if MOSS is ignoring the domain group membership while individual rights assignments and SharePoint group rights assignments do work. Am I doing something wrong or is this a bona-fide bug (feature?) in B2TR?
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Working with a client we had a need to allow anonymous users to fill out InfoPath Forms and have their responses show up in a SharePoint document library. Unfortunately, anonymous users cannot be given the right to post to a document library (for good reason) so we settled on the idea of having the form submit via e-mail to a MOSS e-mail enabled document library set to allow anonymous e-mail submissions. However, it appears after testing that there is an issue with the way MOSS Forms Server is creating SMTP emails that causes SharePoint E-Mail enabled document libraries to be unable to accept the inbound email and the contents are simply lost (which is never a good thing). The test scenario is as follows: A simple (one field) MOSS InfoPath Server Form is created that uses E-Mail submission. The e-mail address given to the form is that of an e-mail enabled document library on the same server. Results: Submitting the form from InfoPath Server through the web interface is successful, the SMTP service on SharePoint picks up the email (confirmed by the SMTPSVC logs), SharePoint consumes the e-mail from the Pickup folder (confirmed by visually checking the message file was removed and is not sitting in any of the SMTPSVC directories) but no file is placed in the e-mail enabled document library. Test results: 1. Submitting the form from the form server to the e-mail enabled document library is not successful. 2. Submitting the form to an Exchange end-user e-mail account is successful and the form can be opened by InfoPath 2007. 3. Saving the form XML attachment to the desktop received in the previous step, creating a new e-mail and attaching the XML file and sending it to the SharePoint e-mail enabled document library is successful. The form can then be opened from the document library. 4. Forwarding the original e-mail message from the e-mail account to the SharePoint e-mail enabled document library is NOT successful. The form never shows up in the document library. 5. Sending other attachments (e.g. an image file) to the e-mail enabled document library is successful. The results indicate that there is something specifically about the content and structure of the e-mail that InfoPath Form Server sends that is breaking the e-mail enabled document library when it tries to import it. In addition, no errors were logged to the event manager (which they should be as SharePoint should not silently drop messages but have a proper rejection mechanism in place)
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While virtualization is a huge boon for development it comes with its share of issues too, generally they revolve around disk space and memory. For example, I keep a separate Windows XP development virtual machine for each of the clients I am currently working on a project with. This is especially helpful when they provide VPN access as I can just load the VPN software in the VM and not have to deal with it messing up my normal (or other client) connectivity (in fact, I now refuse to load any VPN software unless I put it inside a virtual machine) On the server side, we have SharePoint Portal 2007 images for each project too. We generally do development within this environment and then transfer it to the actual client site for User Acceptance Testing. Again, this became extremely valuable when moving from MOSS beta 2 to MOSS beta 2 TR as we were able to test various migration scenarios and determine which would provide the best chance of success. These virtual machines can get extremely large and unwieldy. My base Windows 2003 R2 base image was around 2GB and grew quickly as SQL or SharePoint was added so I was very interested and highly sceptical when I read about a product that can help reduce the size of those images from Invirtus. Invirtus claims they can reduce the size of virtual machines by up to 80% for both Microsoft Virtual Server/Virtual PC and VMware. Since I was sitting in London Heathrow Terminal 4 waiting for my flight (and of course not allowed anything to drink) I thought I'd download the free evaluation and run it on my Windows 2003 R2 base image of 2GB and see what it could do. There are two versions, one allows you to control exactly what optimizations you wish to run, the other runs them all automatically and I do mean automatically -- the product comes as a mountable ISO image so you simply mount it from within the virtual machine session and it takes over so you can go on to doing other things. Invirtus warns you it can take some time for the full optimization to run (based on your hard drive speed and how much memory you are allocating to the virtual machine). When it was done and I also read their help file about other tweaks and optimizations I ended up with a base image that was 50% smaller (1GB) which made me very happy! I've since used it to optimize all my base images and while the amount of space saved varies (since I'm pretty good at manually optimizing images already) I've definitely seen reductions each time. I highly recommend checking this product out (and the guys there tell me that if you use the coupon code CC0130 you can get a 30% discount and no, I don't get anything in return for that!)
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If you haven't seen it yet and you have any interest in SharePoint technologies, let me highly recommend you go check out the new SharePoint web site What is SharePointKicks.com?
sharepointkicks.com is a community based news site edited by our
members. It specializes in Microsoft SharePoint technologies, including
web parts, tools, development, configuration, customization, and use of
Microsoft SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Services.
Individual users of the site submit and review stories, the most
popular of which make it to the homepage. Users are encouraged to
'kick' stories that they would like to appear on the homepage. If a
story receives enough kicks, it will be promoted.
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We’re starting client engagements of Office 2007 SharePoint Services Beta 2 which will (hopefully) come to fruition around the time that MOSS RTM’s. Of course, that date has now become less certain but I’m confident that we are talking a delay of weeks not months.
When dealing with beta products it is imperative that you have full control on the development environment with an ability to roll back, take snapshots and quickly rebuild when things go awry. My environment of choice is to use Virtual Servers (using either the Microsoft Virtual Server or VMware Server products). VMware has the advantage of being able to take a push-button “snapshot” of both disk and memory state for rollback and 64-bit guest and host support. Virtual Server has “undo disks” which can be used to provide somewhat similar functionality however.
My virtual development environment for solutions consists of three virtual machines. A development workstation (I'm a big fan of doing all development in virtual PC especially when working with multiple clients it provides a needed level of isolation), a front-end server and a back-end server. The servers have their own virtual isolated private network and access is provided through remote desktop. To map from the private network back to a production network (e.g. for remote desktop or to publish the web server) I’ve found the PortTunnel application run on the host server provides a very robust and flexible solution.
Lesson Learned #1: When creating your guest machines, use Sysprep not other tools such as Sysinternal's Newsid. If you don’t, the setup will fail with a strange error “This access control list is not in canonical form and therefore cannot be modified” which you can find in the 2007 Microsoft Office Servers Beta Known Issues/ReadMe
The initial configuration of each machine is as follows. I expect this list to evolve over time!
Virtual Developer Workstation(s) (OFFICEDEV)
Windows XP SP2
Windows Support Tools
Windows Server Administration Tools
SQL 2005 Client Components
Visual Studio 2005
Visual Source Safe 2005
Visio 2003 for Enterprise Architects
Office 2003 Professional (Word, Excel, InfoPath)
Office 2007 Professional Beta 2 (Word, Excel, InfoPath)
SharePoint Designer 2007 Beta 2
Notepad++
While we are looking at deploying Office 2007 SharePoint Services you might notice I have Office 2003 installed. That’s because I don’t yet have a client who is looking to deploy the client side applications and so testing and development will need to be done against Office 2003.
Virtual Front End Server (MOSSFRONT)
Windows 2003 R2 Member Server
IIS 6 w/ASP.NET 2.0
Windows Workflow Foundation
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Complete Install
Virtual Back End Server (MOSSBACK)
I plan to use this environment as a template to get up and running with clients faster. We will host the development environment while the QA and production environments will be hosted on-site.
As the host server running these environments is sitting in a secure environment off of Peer 1’s network with a very large pipe as long as the client has a decent Internet connection this should be an effective solution to the many issues with developing on beta software.
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