SharePoint 2010 meta-data service

Spent some time to understand SharePoint 2010 meta-data service and the steps to activate it. The meta data service works as the rest of the SharePoint services by creating a service proxy in your farm. Besides, in order to make this available for your site collection, you need to grant site app pool service account permission to the newly created meta-data service. Otherwise, you would get an error message telling you that the service proxy is unavailable.

Then, you can start adding users to be term store administrators for managing and approving document keywords for tagging. They can be built in hierarchical structure to mimic your organizational chart. This tree structure can be used as site menu for navigation. Moreover, these keywords become available instantly in search box. Nice!

SharePoint 2007 does not have this feature. In my opinion, it is hard to claim your site as a content or document management system without a customizable meta-data search-engine. ;)

Enable & Deploy SharePoint Sandbox solution in farm running on Windows 7

Curious about SharePoint 2010 sandbox solutions. Started an empty SharePoint project and selected to deploy it as a sandbox solution on the prompt. Created two simple web parts (not visual web parts), and also added a feature event receiver to create a list at root web, then activated the feature. Got through solution built step successfully, but got an error message during deploy - "Error occurred in deployment step 'activate features' the sandboxed code execution request was refused because the sandboxed code host service was still initializing". 

Back to MSDN, and found this useful link to help me verify if my sandbox solution is ready in my farm, or not.

To summarize

In your central admin,

1.    go to your System Settings -> Manage Services On Server, and make sure "Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service" is showed as started. If not, start it.
2.    go to Manage Applications -> Site Collection -> Configure Quotas and Locks, and scroll down to the bottom to check that your sandbox solution resource quota has a value in field "Limit maximum usage per day to". The default it 300.

 If the daily quota is exceeded, the sandbox solution in your farm will stop executing.

After above steps, deployment went through fine. 

Below are the things I learned about Sandbox, and are worth of noting down.

• It is only good, if you need this solution to be ran in one site collection. You cannot run it across multiple site collections.
• Sandbox solution runs in its own process - SPUCHostService.exe, SPUWorkerProcess.exe, instead of w3wp.exe. 
• For artifacts that require to be deployed to the SP 14 (GAC) folder, sandbox solution usually does not work. However, learned lately that the Visual Web Part (the one that adds ascx file to the GAC) can now be used in Sandbox solution w/ Visual Studio SharePoint Power Tools. For application pages (aspx), they still cannot be used in a sandbox solution.

I also read about using full-trust proxy to allow a sandboxed solution call to a trusted assembly outside the sandbox. Sounds like a work-around here. Overall, not super impressed by this Sandbox feature in SharePoint.

SharePoint 2010 Search 101

SharePoint 2010 has three different types of searches. SharePoint foundation server search, SharePoint server search and SharePoint FAST search. The FAST search requires additional license = $$$.

Not sure how FAST search works. For SP foundation and SP Server searches, each has its own web app pool. By default, the app pools are named as GUID (yike). The search also has their own backend databases. One for crawl, one for application, and one for property store.

Here is a link to get search related PowerShell cmdlets.

Here is a microsoft link to show you how to remove URL from search, if needed. This can be very useful, when you want to hide any sensative information from searching.

After I installed my SharePoint 2010 and started all the services, I got errors in my event log to tell me that "The mount operation for the gatherer application has failed because the schema version of the search gatherer database is less than the minimum backwards compatibility schema version supported for this gatherer application." After done some research online, I found out that I needed to upgrade to SharePoint SP1. Here is a useful Micorosft link with some detailed steps for the upgrade. In order to find out if your environment requires an upgrade or not, you can run this PowerShell command - "(get-spserver $env:computername).NeedsUpgrade". If it returns TRUE, time to upgrade. After install SP1, need to run "psconfig –cmd upgrade –inplace b2b -wait".

All above just touched surface of SharePoint search. It is a BIG topic on its own. I recalled the days I served as server engineer to install TREX to crawl and index SAP documents. It was not an easy task. New to SharePoint 2010 search. I guess that the fun / pain has just started...

Lessons learned to install SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 Home Premium

The whole motivation to install SP 2010 server on my home laptop is to learn this product and experiment. It turned out to be a bumpy ride, and worth of noting down the steps. Besides, I am a strong believer in knowledge sharing. :)

First, there is a very good online reference to help you start the fun – "Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008" http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869.aspx). In this document, it didn’t mention the specific version of Windows 7 x 64 as the required operation system. I assumed that Windows 7 Home Premium x 64 will do, and in the end, it worked. Also, please take every prerequisite step listed in this reference seriously.

Couple things to point out that deviated my experience from this reference.
1) It mentioned about that "Chart Controls" and "SQL Server Analysis Services – ADOMD.net" are not required if you are going to install SharePoint Foundation 2010. This didn’t work for me. I downloaded SharePoint Foundation 2010 and skipped these two, and I still got the error - "Set up is unable to proceed due the following error(s): This product requires Windows Server 2008 SP2 and above…". After I installed these two prerequisites, and ran the setp.exe, instead of the SharePointFoundation.exe, I finally saw the lovely installation page.

2) Another thing that worth of mentioning is that – IIS 7 on Windows 7 Home Premium does not have Windows Authentication and Digest Authentication to allow you select as shown in this online reference. I thought this could be the roadblock, and it turned out to be fine (so far). :)

Please also be aware that the enterprise edition allow you add excel service, access service and visio services and etc… comparing to the standard one. You may want to compare two versions to understand which one fits your needs better - http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/pages/editions-comparison.aspx

On the installation first page, I chose to install “Stand along”, instead of “Server Farm”. Then, towards the end of the installation, I got a lovely error by digging into this log file – "SharePoint Server Setup.log" file in your appdata's temp folder – "…dbwrap.exe' failed with error code: -2068643839. Type: 8::CommandFailed.". Researched the internet, blogs and forums, and found this reference – http://sharepointjungle.com/2010/03/06/install-sharepoint-2010-on-windows-7/. I didn’t find the same registry entry mentioned in this article, however this reference gave me some hint that the error could be around the SQL server connections. What I did is to enable the SQL server browser. Then I re-ran the SharePoint installation in the repair mode. It no longer choked, and ran all the way to the end, and gave me a successful message finally. YEAH!

However, it is not working yet. I tried to open the SP admin central page, and got a blank page. I went back to google. It turned out that I needed to turn off site anonymous authentication and turn on basic authentication instead. After this, I finally saw the SharePoint Central Administration page with all the nice icons / pictures. It was Saturday 11:30 PM. My husband said that I – "looked like lost the entire day." Being a geek's husband, he is used to me pulling my hairs all day long starring at my computer. Lol.

In a few months, I was able to build SharePoint sites using PowerShell. It is much easier to have a reusable script at hand without repeating the lengthy process described above. :o)

Dependency Injection (DI) – How and Why

There are two ways to implement dependency injection (DI) – through the class's constructor or its property setter. In class's constructor or the setter, instead of passing in a concrete class type parameter, use an interface. This way, you can later pass in different class objects that implement this same interface. The decoupling between the class constructor / setter and a concrete type provides the needed flexibility and scalability.

With this design, your classes are more unit-testable. You can create a mock class to implement the same interface as the real one, and pass in the mock object to the constructor or the setter. In the mock class, instead of connecting to a physical database server, you can set sample values as you wish. However, this would not eliminate the necessities to do your integration testing by connecting to the real database later.

Overall, the usage of DI will make your class handle less and less dependencies with concrete types, thus make it much more scalable.

understanding NULL Pattern

It is easy to miss a NULL check in our code especially when the code is not fully tested. Will it be nice to call one object's property or method without checking if the object is NULL or not without throwing NullReferenceException? The answer is to implement NULL pattern.

How?

Creat an interface for your real and null-check classes. In the real class, do real implementations. In the other null-check class, put in same signatures as the real one, but with no code, or return some default values. The callers would interact with the interfaces only. If the object is null, by calling its method, the null-check class will just do nothing or return default values. As a result, your code would have lot less IF tests for NULL references, and look more elegant and compact. 

However, doing null pattern will create more work initially. 

Here is the useful reference where I learned all about this - http://sourcemaking.com/design_patterns/null_object

understanding AJAX timeout settings for .Net application

Why bother? If you use the default Ajax timeout setting, which is 110 seconds (or 90 seconds for .Net framework 1.0/1.1), users may get the timeout error, especially when they are using the web application with a slow network connection.

In order to set the AJAX timeout settings, you would need to check three things in your code

1) add below code in the web.config file - for example to set it to 10 minutes (600 seconds).

- <httpRuntime executionTimeout="600" maxRequestLength="40960"/>

2) this above executionTimeout setting only applies if you set the "debug" attribute in the <Compilation> tag to "False" in the web.config. Here is the reference

- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e1f13641.aspx

3) you would also need to set AsyncPostBackTimeout in the aspx page (or the site.master page) to match with the setting in the web.config file.

- <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server" AsyncPostBackTimeout="600">
...
</asp:ScriptManager>

This is one type of hidden bugs, if your developer's or QC's network speed is faster than your end-users. :)

Of course, you would also need to watch out the timeout settings for your website and web services, if any.