Whats The Point Of Sharing?

This post has now moved to my new blog located at: http://www.sharepointanalysthq.com/2010/06/06/content-type-publishing-in-sharepoint-2010/

Enjoy!

So I have installed SP2010 on Windows 7 and here is my guide to help you in your jouney (since it took me a couple of times to get it right)

What I suggest is that you do the below:

1. Read ‘Setting Up The Development Environment for SharePoint Server‘ BEFORE attempting anything

I skimmed through it and had some trouble but here is the general overview of the article. It actually is a little fiddly so try and do all the steps in order, I was so excited I just rushed through it :

1. Extract SP2010 to a folder
2. Change the \files\Setup\config.xml file to add the following line

<Setting Id="AllowWindowsClientInstall" Value="True"/>

3. Install the many prerequisites that you need, in summary

   • Microsoft Sync Framework

   • SQL Server Native Client

   • Microsoft Geneva Framework Beta 1 Runtime for x64

   • ADO.NET Data Services v1.5, which is required to support the REST service that is available at http://localhost/_vti_bin/ListData.svc. Choose the Runtime Only installer.

   • Chart Controls (this is not required if you are going to install SharePoint Foundation 2010).

   • SQL Server Analysis Services – ADOMD.Net (this is not required if you are going to install SharePoint Foundation 2010)

4. Enable all the windows features that you need, which is a lot. But let this be a warning!! If you are doing this manually the picture in the Microsoft Documentation is incorrect!! You need to enable the Windows Communication Foundation Non-HTTP Activation like in the below picture:
   

   MS Article is incorrect, you need to have this enabled!

5. Install SharePoint but DON’T run the Configuration Wizard yet!
6. Install Install SQL Server 2008 KB 970315 x64 (which is actually 2 files both over 150mb)
7. Then run the configuration Wizard.
8. Most probably you will get the infamous ‘AllowInsecureTransport’ Error which is really common then install the fix here
9. Then install Visual Studio 2010 Beta (Dont do this before, I had some weird stuff happen!)
10. Enjoy SP2010
11. For an up to date listing of all the issues that Microsoft knows about in terms of SP2010 Beta check out the SharePoint Developer Documentation Blog

Common Errors

Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileException: Unrecognized attribute ‘allowInsecureTransport’.

This is because you haven’t installed the hotfix indicated in step 8 above. This is the most common error so install it and see what happens.

Failed to create sample data.

An exception of type Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileException was thrown. Additional exception information: The content type text/html; charset=utf-8 of the response message does not match the content type of the binding (application/soap+msbin1). If using a custom encoder, be sure that the IsContentTypeSupported method is implemented properly

This is most probably because you followed the Microsoft article and tried to enable the feature manually. In the article the picture is incorrect. You need to enable the Windows Communication Foundation Non-HTTP Activation Feature.

/_vti_bin/ListData.svc is returning 404

Make sure that you have ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 installed.

So with all the new features of SharePoint 2010 the question should be asked what drove these features? Customers, certainly. The online community, most definitely. Industry groups, of course!

In the end though it is the customers that drive new features but the largest customer of SharePoint is… Microsoft.

With all the new features many of these have been driven directly by Microsoft pushing SharePoint online. Which ones you ask well…

Sandboxed Solutions

Makes perfect sense for hosted solutions. Give people just a little rope but not enough to hang themselves. By limited what a sandboxed solution can do SharePoint online can limit the damage that a stray web part may reek! Also it means less code reviews to get solutions up to SP Online which was a nightmare.

No downtime when patching systems

Once again with probably 500 servers this is a brilliant move on SP Online! Also it will save the poor infrastructure guys from having to come in on weekends as well!

Separation of Services

This is also another great move. Why waste all of the unnecessary services that are part of the SSP when you can save on power and processing by only giving clients what they need. By the way I think that it is a great move for all of SharePoint in general since the SSP thing just didn’t really work.

REST Services and Client Object Model

Once again why waste processing power using Web Parts on the server when all of this can be transferred to the client instead? I think that REST services and Client OM are great advances, I know that I will be using them.

Pushing of SilverLight

Once again the ultimate way to get more processing power for free…push this to your clients. Plus I really like SilverLight so its all good

Now don’t think that I am being sarcastic but I have to say Microsoft are really starting to smarten up and I for one applaud them!

So another one in my “What Every SharePoint Consultant Should Know” series, this one about basic server roles. This really isnt my strength so I thought that this might help me and hopefully you.

Web Front End (WFE)

What does it do?

Contains IIS and is responsible for rendering pages to users. Contains the Web Application that distributes content to users.This involves fetching content from the SharePoint databases and “look and feel” from the database and file system and then rendering, caching (depending on settings), and returning the page to the user.

How do I configure it?

When installing SharePoint on a server you can choose “WFE Only” but keep in mind that this will only allow you to run a subset of services on the server.

When would I use it?

When you install SharePoint at least one server needs to be a WFE/Application Role. So you need one server at least in the farm to have this role, you have no choice.

Index Role

What does it do?

This role is responsible for crawling content and building up an index. Now you may think that the index server crawls all the content but this is NOT the case. The Index roles managers the crawl, performs crawls for items external to the fame (File Shares, Web Sites, BDC) but makes requests to Query or WFE’s to crawl internal content.

How do I configure it?

If you choose the Search Indexing role you can create a query server by simply check the “Use this server for indexing content” option and uncheck the “Use this server for serving search queries” option (the opposite of creating an Query role)

When would I use it?

This is a very intensive process and it is suggested that you put this on a separate server if you can, in many cases this is the first role to offload.

Any thing else I should know?

Some people create a WFE/Index role on a box for a couple of reasons which make a lot of sense, see this post from Joel Oleson which explains it in more detail. As mentioned above if you put he WFE/Index role on the same box the server won’t need to request content from other WFE’s or Query servers and can crawl local content locally, thereby reducing bandwidth.

Another thing is that the Query/Index role cannot be split on a WSS farm, you only get the Search role which runs both services.

Query Role

What does it do?

This role is responsible for taking users search queries and performing keyword searches on the local copy of the index that it stores and passing metadata queries to the database to return results back to users.

How do I configure it?

If you choose the Search Indexing role you can create a query server by simply unchecking the “Use this server for indexing content” option and checking the “Use this server for serving search queries” option.

When would I use it?

If you have a high number of search queries being performed then consider having the query role as a separate server.

Any thing else I should know?

Yes!! The infamous Query/Index problem!!!! If you have ANY server on a farm with BOTH the query and index roles on the same server the index WILL NOT get propagated to other query servers. SharePoint assumes that if the roles are on the same server that you know what you are doing and dont need to propagate the index. You have been warned