Reza Alirezaei’s Blog

As a member of the SharePoint Summit 2010 board of directors and on behalf of the rest of the team, I am extending this invitation to all members of the SharePoint community to submit their session proposal to us at the following address:

http://www.sharepointsummit2010.com/call_speakers.asp

This is a great opportunity for you to showcase your expertise and knowledge of SharePoint with your peers that are also interested in SharePoint technology. The selection committee will pick speakers based on the following criteria:

1. Subject quality
2. Presentation content and relevance (Preferably SharePoint 2010)
3. Innovative aspect

The deadline for submissions is January 15th, 2010 Dec/01/2009!

Location : Montreal (12-14 April , 2010)

SharePoint, SharePoint 2010

Issue:

• Environment:A medium server farm.
• Identity:A brand new custom domain account with no special permissions assigned.
• Action : Assigning the domain account as the application pool identity when creating a new Web application.
• Error Message: Invalid Username or password.
• Point of confusion: The same credentials work like a champ when logging to a test box in the domain. I can also add the user to a SharePoint group.
• Event Log and ULS Log : Nope,nothing!
• Googling (mmmm...Binging) : No dice!

Steps to find the real error:

• Tried a simpler password by taking out the "!" because I was aware of some issues with usual culprits -%,&,$ etc used in app pool password.
• Added  the user to a test site and tried to login - Yup... the user can NOT login to any SharePoint sites ; so there was something wrong! DUH!
• Checked the Event log and that was where the following nasty little error rears its ugly head all over.This event was generated when actual logon request of the last step failed not when the central admin "Create or extend Web Application" was throwing "invalid username or password". It was generated on the WFE where access was attempted.

Resolution (or Workaround!):

• Deleted the account and recreated it.

SharePoint

One of the neat features introduced in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (Read it Windows 7 Server!) is the support for native VHD boot right out of the box. This feature allows you to setup multi-boot scenarios on your machine a lot easier and safer than the traditional way of provisioning multiple OS partitions on your hard drive - something that we all have been doing for a long long time! All you need to do is to make a VHD as a bootable drive that contains its own OS (Win 7 or Win 2008) and then make your computer to boot from it. Snazzy!

Ever since the beta bits of Win7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 came out, some folks have written great blog posts, tweets and articles that walk you through the steps to prepare a VHD image for native booting and everyone is approaching this from a different angle - see References section later in this blog post.

The problem is that if you are not an administrator or you have no familiarity with the tools included in Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 or WAIK , it's quite challenging to follow most of those articles that are filled with technical or administrative jargons and involves lots of commands, utilities( For example WIM2VHD or PowerShell script) and various tools. Too much complexity for a dev guy, IMO!

My requirement for the use of native boot from vhd thing is so simple:

Scenario: SharePoint Dev,Demo and Validation Machine

Goals:

1. To build a common , reusable SharePoint image that can be immediately used for dev, demo & testing purposes.
2. To build this image using available user interfaces (i.e. Hyper-V Manager) with minimal use of command line and funky scripts or utilities.

Background: People who have worked with me know me as a person who loves virtualization! I run Windows Server 2008 on all my computers and don't do anything except in virtual machines. However, in order to test my applications (for performance,stability and etc), I'd rather be on a real hardware.Although, there are techniques to even virtualize test resources, the safety net of having everything up and running and fully tested on a real box always gives me an extra level of comfort before any attempts to deploy my stuff to a customer's environment.

Additionally, I do a lot of presentations, so that would be nice if I could demo on real hardware too with no emulation layer that may degrade the performance of my presentations. By leveraging native boot from VHD, now I can have either Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 as my main OS and spin up extra bootable VHDs and multiboot them in a blink of an eye.

I think the ability to boot from VHD (natively) is like having a heap of computers sitting around at your disposal! Use them when you need them; otherwise leave them in your garage or throw them in the garbage bin if you will.

All right, enough talking. Let's just go ahead and get busy.

Read more...

SharePoint, SharePoint 2010

Still working out on session details, but so far, it's confirmed that I will be presenting one session in the Developing For Microsoft-Based Platform track at Techdays Canada 2009. My session is titled Developing and Consuming Services for SharePoint.

Try to buy your ticket while the early-bird deal is still in effect! The regular Price is $599 , but They're offering $299 for early registrants <-- oh boy, it's well worth the cost! Here are the dates, cities and venues information:

For more information , please visit Techdays 2009 official Web site here.I will update this post about other sessions I will be presenting at a later date when I get the full details. Looking forward to seeing you'll there!

SharePoint

I just came across this blog that is promissed to be focused on SSRS integration and SharePoint. Awsome Idea and so needed!

Bookmark it NOW: http://blogs.msdn.com/prash/default.aspx.

SSRS, SharePoint