Bits & Pieces – A blog by Kannan Balasubramanian
Was searching for articles related to SQL Tuning for SharePoint 2013 and found one. Visit the following link to further read about it.
http://www.peters.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=75&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1
Recently out of normal development routine I was discussing with my development team regarding the IT side of SharePoint 2010.
One of the aspects we were discussing about was the “Disaster Recovery.” Being developers, “Disaster Recovery” was a mere term rather than an important IT aspect for them and I fastly realized it was slightly boring for them.
Post discussion I decided to give them some links so that they can refer when needed. Found out following were some of the links they can quickly read and understand.
Disaster Recovery for SharePoint 2010
Configure Disaster Recovery Farm with SharePoint 2010
SharePoint Server 2010 – 10 Steps to Disaster Recovery
The following is the fix for the error “HTTP Error 400. The request hostname is invalid” when trying to browse an IIS Express site using a different host name or IP address.
1. Exit the IIS Express instant currently running.
2. Open IIS Express’s applicationhost.config located at the following path C:\Users\<user>\Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config
3. Find the entry for a particular site (e.g “Test” running in port 6306) which you are developing.
e.g.
<site name="FlickrTest" id="10">
<application path="/" applicationPool="Clr4IntegratedAppPool">
<virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="E:\Projects\BB Apps\FlickrTest" />
</application>
<bindings>
<binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:6306:localhost" />
</bindings>
</site>4. Replace the following
bindingInformation=”*:6306:localhost” with bindingInformation=”*:6306:*”
5. Save the file.
6. Start a command prompt in administrator mode and run the following command.
netsh http add urlacl url=http://*:6306/ user=Everyone
7. Now debug the site again and you should be able to access the url using IP address or host name.
Microsoft on 18 May 2011, released an update KB2496898 to Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems to include support for the new Indian rupee symbol (₹). This update included font support, locale changes and keyboard support. With the Windows update, it is now possible to use alt code text entry to obtain the Indian Rupee symbol – Alt 8377.
Alt + 8377
Source: Wikipedia
Recently I was planning to format my 64GB USB Drive with FAT32 format as my Car Player doesn’t support another format and Windows 8 or Mac OS X had the only option being NTFS or exFAT.
So after little bit of googling found out that there is an utility available called fat32format here http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm.
If you want to know the default allocation sizes, check out the link http://support.microsoft.com/kb/140365
I was testing out my own WCF REST Service using Fiddler and was getting error response “The incoming message has an unexpected message format ‘Raw'”.
After spending time diagnosing the message the clue was, the WCF was getting a request with no content type.
My contract was specifically expecting the request format to be XML using the following attribute
RequestFormat = WebMessageFormat.Xml
Hence added the content type as “application/xml” and things went fine.
The following is an example of Fiddler’s request for a REST POST with composite data type
Type: POST
URL: http://localhost:1510/GalleryService.svc/RestService/GetDataUsingDataContract/
Protocol: HTTP/1.1
Request Header:
User-Agent: Fiddler
Host: localhost:1510
Content-Length: 198
Content-Type: application/xml
Request Body:
<CompositeType xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/Net.BinaryBits.Apps.BBGallery.WebService"><BoolValue>true</BoolValue><StringValue>String content</StringValue></CompositeType>
During our course of developing applications we might come across number of scenarios. One of the scenarios might be creating a .NET web service which can be exposed as SOAP and REST.
The following link explains with code on how to implement that.
Ever wanted to copy a list of files as text from Windows Explorer?
The following has been tested in Windows 8 Pro.
The following link helps to identify the current version of SharePoint deployed
http://www.sharepointdesignerstepbystep.com/blog/SitePages/SharePoint%20versions.aspx
For most of the people who are into IT of large organizations, it’s easy to learn SharePoint as most of these organizations have right infrastructure along with right software licenses.
But if you are an individual who want’s to learn SharePoint, especially 2013 in private, the options are next to none as everything from hardware to software are prohibitively costly.
Now thanks to Microsoft’s Windows Azure, you have all the things needed to proceed with your learning at relatively low to moderate pricing. Even you get a 30 day trial.
The following are the topics I have covered to get you started and pointers to ponder before starting.
Setting up in Azure
You can visit the link Step-by-Step: Build a FREE SharePoint 2013 Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services by Keith to deploy a SharePoint 2013 lab environment and even expose the site to internet.
This setup requires the following.
You have to note that this environment doesn’t have Visual Studio available for development. But as Keith mentions there is an option to setup a development environment.
If you want to run Visual Studio on a VM within Azure, I’d recommend preparing a new VM in your virtual network from the Windows Server 2012 platform image. You’ll likely want to customize it a bit to act more like a development client environment – check out my prior article at blogs.technet.com/…/step-by-step-building-a-free-windows-8-app-dev-lab-in-the-cloud-with-windows-azure-virtual-machines.aspx for the steps. This article if primarily oriented towards setting up a Windows 8 App Development environment on Azure, but a full copy of Visual Studio with SharePoint development support could easily be substituted at the end of the article instead of using Visual Studio Express.
Hope this helps!
Keith
Billing
At the time of writing this article the charges would be mostly towards the 3 VMs. The following is my assumption.
“When the VM’s are shutdown, the computing for related Cloud Services & storage would not be added.”
Take this with a grain of salt.
Hence the computing will be as following.
No more de-provisioning the VMs
When Windows Azure was rolled out one of the issue for most of the people was that, even after the VM’s are shutdown, your computing will be accumulated and charged. The reason behind that is, until unless the VMs were de-provisioned, the fabric resources or resources which the VM’s use will be reserved.
Previous to this enhancement being available, the Azure platform maintained fabric resource reservations for VMs, even in a shutdown state, to ensure consistent resource availability when starting those VMs in the future. And, this meant that VMs had to be exported and completely deprovisioned when not in use to avoid compute charges.
Hence user’s use to de-provision the VMs so that they are not charged when the VMs are not in use.
But during the June 2013 TechEd conference an enhancement was rolled out, called “VMs that are shutdown from the Windows Azure Management Portal will no longer continue to accumulate compute charges while stopped!“
Hence from the time of posting this article, all you need to do was shutdown the VM from Azure Portal instead of running De-Provision PowerShell script and your computing will not be accumulated. That is your VM will be in “Stopped (Deallocated)” status.
But it has some after effects like when the VM is started again it will have new Dynamic IP.
“Deallocated” means that the VM configuration is no longer being actively associated with fabric resources, such as virtual CPUs, memory and networks. In this state, the VM will not continue to allocate compute charges, but since fabric resources are deallocated, the VM could receive a different internal IP address ( called “Dynamic IPs” or “DIPs” in Windows Azure ) the next time it is started.
Missing Items
CONTOSO\Administrator
In the article “Step-by-Step: Build a FREE SharePoint 2013 Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services” Keith would have not mentioned about creating the user “CONTOSO\Administrator“. Do that at the time of creating the service accounts.
Joining the server to domain contoso.com
In the article “Step-by-Step: Build a FREE SharePoint 2013 Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services” Keith would have mentioned the DB & SP App servers to be joined with contoso.com.
If you are not a Windows Server administrator or don’t have experience, then you may not know how to join a server to an existing domain.
It’s very simple, read the heading “Change server name or join a domain” at How to perform four common tasks in Windows Server 2012
Pointers
When you visit the above links, don’t forget to go through the comments posted. Those comments have lot of useful queries from various users as well as replies from Keith.
Oh by the way, it took me not more than couple of hours to setup and configure SharePoint 2013 in Windows Azure and it’s awesomely easy. The only thing which took time was SharePoint configuration Wizard. It took nearly 10 minutes!.
So what are you waiting for, start messing with SharePoint 2013 !