Reza Alirezaei’s Blog

This month I had the opportunity to help the editorial team of the Microsoft’s YouShapeIT online magazine to prepare their issue.

YouShapeIT provides a  one-stop portal for all the best information so that an IT Pro doesn’t have to go hunting all over the internet and Microsoft for the best resources. I’m told that their site has target audience of 26 million and specifically in the  category of IT management (small “m” here or really infrastructure).

The theme this month is  Collaboration and the focus is on connecting people, processes, and information using  SharePoint products and technologies.  As you may notice the purpose of the site is to cut  through the clutter and point out the best sources of information.

Honestly If I am asked what is the best MS white paper that I have ever seen published for SharePoint? hands down , I would say working with large lists in Office SharePoint Server 2007 White paper. When I first read this paper (not even publicly available ), I was very impressed with the depth of the knowledge , accuracy of the tests and more importantly how the content was organized and presented to the readers. Very interesting and a must read paper IMHO!

I think there are three things that could make this article even better:

1) It doesn’t end with a proper conclusion! The thing is there are so much information presented to the reader throughout this paper, but one argument I often hear is that “Man, I felt dizzy when I finished reading it – too much information!” . It would be great if they could add bunch of statements at the end of the article to kind of conclude the core messaging of the paper. This will help the reader remember key points arising from this fantastic write up.

2) It is difficult to relate the presented best practices to WSS – this paper is written for MOSS 2007 as you can tell from the title! Albeit there are some attempts to draw a border between WSS and MOSS wherever required, but still after you finish reading this paper, it’s not easy to extract some WSS rules.

3) Not a big deal, but I think four of the data access methods could be named better! For example, SPList with DataTable or SPListItems with DataTable – Nope, sorry, it doesn’t ring a bell for me! Maybe they kind of had to adopt this naming convention because of how method names are shown in captions in various charts (short names), but readers often have to refer back to the actual code to recall what that specific data access is all about.

Click on the link below to download the PDF file containing all 20 key points  .

Download PDF

As I always mention in my presentations and articles (such as this one), I’m not too crazy about deploying everything to Bin folder (OverCASing). I believe There is a place for everything! Honestly , many stuff in SharePoint don’t work when executed from bin folder and more importantly, there are customers out there that don’t care (read it , they don’t want to pay for it !). I am not going to walk you through this discussion at all.

On the other hand, I know that there are many resources out there that talk about pros and cons of utilizing code access security in your solution packages and run your Web part assemblies (or your code in general) in a super sandbox mode, a.k.a Partially trusted environment. What I haven’t seen though is a complete explanation of what happens behind the scenes when you include code access security in your solution manifest file and what gets changes , where and when, a solution containing CAS settings gets deployed or retracted. I was mostly interested to see what happens when the solution package gets retracted.

Any Code that runs from the bin directory of an IIS Web application (SharePoint Web application is an IIS Web site all together) runs in a secure mode; therefore you have to explicitly give it the permissions it requires to function. Easiest solution (FWIW, the most stupid one ) is to raise the trust level of your Web application to full (in the Web.config file).The recommended approach is to elevate the permissions of the assembly by creating a new security policy file and point your web.config file to it. Thankfully, by using solution package concept, SharePoint provide a way for automating this process for ya.After you create a SharePoint Web application its Web.config looks like this:

Note: Only the sections of the web.config file that are related to this topic were included below.

[Xml]

[/Xml]

Read more…

 On 20th of January , I will be speaking at Professional Asscociation For SQL Server… So if you’ re around – please come by and say “Hi” to the former Vancouverite  🙂

Click here for more information and registration! Looks like if you can’t attend in person , PASS provide a live Meeting access as well.

Date:               Tuesday, January 20^th, 2009

Agenda:          5:30pm  – Pizza and Socializing

                           6:00pm – Sponsor Presentation by Idera via Live Meeting

                           6:30pm – Feature Presentation

                           8:00pm – Wrap up and draws.

Location:       Sierra Systems – 25^th Floor 1177 West Hastings Street (Vancouver)

LiveMeeting: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/join?id=GD36Q3&role=attend

See ya!

Here is the list of the SharePoint classes that I have documented on MSDN, Enjoy!