Installing Standalone SharePoint 2013 Preview on Virtualised Windows Server 2012 RC with SQL Server Express 2012

Over the weekend I decided to try the new SharePoint 2013 Preview. According to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(v=office.15).aspx the minimum hardware requirement is

Single server with a built-in database or single server that uses SQL Server

Development or evaluation installation of SharePoint Foundation 2013 Preview

8 GB

64-bit, 4 cores

80 GB for system drive

Unfortunately the only hardware available to me is a 64-bit, 4 cores machine with 8GB RAM and since I am planning to run it on a virtual machine I can’t assign the whole resource to the VM

So I ended up allocating 5 GB and 3 cores to the virtual machine. So far the performance is okay (not great but acceptable).

So these are the step by step instructions on how to do it:
1. Create a new virtual machine with 5 GB and 3 cores.
2. Make sure you select "Accelerate 3D graphics".

3. Put the Windows Server 2012 iso location in the Installer disc image file.

4. Windows Server 2012 is not one of the options in the available operating system version so I used Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 instead.

 

5. Set the maximum disk size and whether you want to split into multiple files or keep it in a single file.

6. Setup the Network Adapter to use NAT: Used to share the host’s IP address. This is important because SharePoint 2013 requires an Active Directory (it will not work with just workgroup).

 

7. Let the installer installs Windows Server 2012.

8. Next what you need to do is add Active Directory Domain Services role and DNS Server role (AD DS depends on this role) plus .NET Framework 3.5 Features (needed by SQL 2012 Express). When installing DNS server you have to have your VM connected to the internet.

9. This can be done by going to Server manager -> Add roles and features

 

 

10. Then you have to promote the current server into Domain Name Server (make sure the administrator’s password is not blank, not your password).

11. Install the SQL Server 2012 Express.

12. Install the SP Pre-Requisite

13. Install SharePoint Server 2013 Preview and run the Product Configuration Wizard.

14. All 3 steps above should be straight forward. The key things are to add the active directory domain services role first and to install .NET Framework 3.5 before installing SQL Server 2012 Express.

Screenshots from SharePoint 2013:

I would probably update this post soon (when SharePoint 2013 finally released).

Have a great day.

Evan 

My Simple Rules for SharePoint 2010 Caching

I am always a fan and a true believer of caching.

So what is a cache?

A temporary storage area where frequently used data can be stored for rapid access.

Based on my experience developing and configuring SharePoint 2010 solution for many clients I have a few simple rules about caching in SharePoint 2010. The 4 different types of caching available in SharePoint 2010 and my simple rules for them:

1. Object Caching

- To activate: Site Actions – Site Settings – Site collection object cache.

- Default max cache size: 100 MB.

- Optimum cache size: depends on the server specification but I reckon 1 GB is the sweet spot.

- Default Duration: 180 seconds.

- Optimum duration: depends on the business but I reckon between 15-20 minutes is the sweet spot.

2. Output Caching

- To activate: Site Actions – Site Settings – Site collection output cache.

- Available profiles: Site Actions – Site Settings – Site collection cache profiles.

- Public Internet (Anonymous) profile:

     Default duration: 180 seconds.

     Optimum duration: depends on the business but I believe between 30-60 minutes.

     Default cacheability: ServerAndPrivate.

     Optimum cacheability: Public -> it means “always cache it if you can” in any server possible.

- Intranet (Collaboration Site) profile:

     Default duration: 180 seconds.

     Optimum duration: depends on the business but I believe around 15 minutes.

     Default cacheability: ServerAndPrivate.

     Optimum cacheability: Public -> it means “always cache it if you can” in any server possible.

3. Blob Caching

- Stores frequently used files in the disk instead of database.

- The setting is in the web.config.

4. HttpRunTime Cache

- General IIS cache used by ASP .NET.

- Use this caching method whenever possible.

- Generally used for 3^rd party services (Google Weather, Yahoo Finance and other services).

- It is also very useful to server content / list items which appear the same to everyone (such as utility links, reusable content viewer, etc).

SiteMap Providers static property issue

There is a time when we need to modify a sitemap provider object and then use it.

Scenario:

We need to build a sub navigation control but we don’t want to include pages

Example code:

PortalSiteMapProvider sitemapprovider =                    (PortalSiteMapProvider)SiteMap.Providers["CurrentNavSiteMapProvider"];

               

sitemapprovider.IncludePages = PortalSiteMapProvider.IncludeOption.Never;

The problem with the code above is:

1.       The SiteMap.Providers property is a static property. It returns the object reference to the single instance of the provider.

2.       Modifying the object permanently changes the value.

One way to avoid this issue is to save the value of the property temporarily and then rollback the value back.

Example code:

ortalSiteMapProvider sitemapprovider =

(PortalSiteMapProvider)SiteMap.Providers["CurrentNavSiteMapProvider"];

               

var tempIncludePages = sitemapprovider.IncludePages;

sitemapprovider.IncludePages = PortalSiteMapProvider.IncludeOption.Never;

sitemapprovider.IncludePages = tempIncludePages;

This simple workaround seems to work properly.

Hope this helps J

SharePoint 2010 Broken Page Menu Ribbon (Keep on Loading)

My ribbon page menu suddenly stopped working this afternoon. Clicking the page menu gave me the loading icon without any progress.

After some investigation I found out that the code which I added this morning is the problem.

        String.prototype.startsWith = function(str){

            return (this.toLowerCase().indexOf(str) == 0);

        }

Apparently “startsWith” is a reserved word so changing the function name into another name fixed the problem.

A friend of mine told me “SharePoint keeps you young by forcing you to learn new stuffs almost everyday”.

And he is right J

SharePoint 2010 Fields or Columns Naming Problem

I was hammered by a bug found by our client. They were trying to reorder fields of a custom list and for some reason SharePoint threw the following error.

After hours and hours of investigation I finally found out what the problem is.

There were spaces in the name property of the fields. In theory SharePoint should have converted the spaces into “_x0020_” and everything should be okay. However reordering fields of this custom list produces the error above.

SharePoint does not like:

  <Field ID="{176C37CB-99E2-4730-8B61-C994151094B8}" Name="Field 1 With Spaces" StaticName="Field1WithSpaces" SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3" Group="FESA.SPS2010.Internet" DisplayName="Field 1 With Spaces" Type="Note" NumLines="10" RichText="TRUE" Description="Field 1 With Spaces" RichTextMode="FullHtml"></Field>

  <Field ID="{DC7451BC-BF4C-43F1-B443-E297190C008A}" Name="Field 2 With Spaces" StaticName="Field2WithSpaces" SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3" Group="FESA.SPS2010.Internet" DisplayName="Field 2 With Spaces" Type="Note" NumLines="10" Description="Field 2 With Spaces" RichText="TRUE" RichTextMode="FullHtml" />

But it likes:

  <Field ID="{176C37CB-99E2-4730-8B61-C994151094B8}" Name="Field1WithoutSpaces" StaticName="Field1WithoutSpaces" SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3" Group="FESA.SPS2010.Internet" DisplayName="Field 1 Without Spaces" Type="Note" NumLines="10" RichText="TRUE" Description="Field 1 Without Spaces" RichTextMode="FullHtml"></Field>

  <Field ID="{DC7451BC-BF4C-43F1-B443-E297190C008A}" Name="Field2WithoutSpaces" StaticName="Field2WithoutSpaces" SourceID="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3" Group="FESA.SPS2010.Internet" DisplayName="Field 2 Without Spaces" Type="Note" NumLines="10" Description="Field 2 Without Spaces" RichText="TRUE" RichTextMode="FullHtml" />

So the lesson is not to have any spaces (or any invalid characters) in the name of the Fields.

Have a great day everyone.

Robots.txt prevents SharePoint 2010 search crawler from crawling sites

As per our operation manager’s request I added robots.txt on our preview server to prevent Google’s bot or Bing’s bot from indexing our client’s preview sites.

Original robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Effectively it should stop all legitimate bots from indexing preview sites. However this also stopped SharePoint 2010’s search crawler from crawling the sites. Any full crawl gave me 0 results.

The solution is to allow SharePoint 2010’s search crawler but to disallow other bots.  Now how do we find the user agent string for SharePoint 2010’s crawler?
If you go to Registry Editor and open the following:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager\UserAgent
You will find the UserAgent string used by SharePoint 2010’s crawler.
So all I had to do was edit my robots.txt to allow that particular user agent to index our SharePoint 2010 sites.

Updated robots.txt:
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows NT; MS Search 6.0 Robot)
Allow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Hope this helps :)

Updating external content type for SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Service

Our client submitted a request to update their existing External Content Type used for BCS. The request was so simple: rename Address field into Department and add 1 extra field. I thought this should be easy.

So I updated the employee model and redeployed the solution. But for some reason the changes didn’t get reflected in the content type. I have tried everything from resetting IIS, clean solution, rebuild solution, even copy and paste the dll directly to the GAC without any result.

After further investigation I found out that the type descriptor (which you can see from BDC explorer or by opening the bdcm file in notepad) are not automatically updated.
So that is the lesson, the type descriptors needs to be updated manually.

Printing in SharePoint 2010 without header, navigation and some other elements

I am pretty sure most of you know about this but perhaps just never thought about it.

Being able to print is one of the most essential requirements of a website. Eventually user want to be able to print the content of a page but perhaps without the header, navigation or some other SharePoint’s element.

This is one simple trick that does the job for me on hiding those elements.

/* Print styles */

@media print

{

    .contentSkip, .s4-notdlg,

    #stuffNotToBePrinted, #s4-ribbonrow, .header, #header

    {

        display: none !important;

    }

}

Just add the above styling to your style sheet (obviously you need to add the things you want to hide to the above css style) and those elements should be hidden.

Have a nice day J