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Jeff Dalton Profile |
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| Blog Title |
Adventures In SharePoint Land |
| Blog Description |
This is a place to record my journey with SharePoint. I realized that I was learning a lot of stuff that other people would probably like to know about (and that I would like to refer back to... I'm getting kinda old and my memory is fading.) |
| Blog URL |
http://sharepoint-journey.blogspot.com |
| RSS Feed |
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AdventuresInMossLand |
| Validate Feed |
Validate this feed: feedvalidator.org or validator.w3.org |
| Feed Last Checked |
Jul 30, 2010 11:06:36 AM EST. |
| Realtime Update |
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| Landed Here |
Jun 06, 2008 |
| Location |
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| Posts: # / 1st / Latest |
35 - Mar 04, 2008 - May 30, 2010 |
| Total Hits |
487 |
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Application hangs caused by calling System.Diagnostic.PerformanceCounter
Jeff Dalton
h2Summary/h2 pRecently we had several IIS application hang crashes caused by thread locks.#160; The threads were locked by calls to a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.performancecounter(VS.90).aspx" target="_blank"Sytem.Diagnostic.PerformanceCounter.NextValue/a.#160; What we found was that under certain circumstances calls into this routine can block a thread for up to 21 minutes.#160; The circumstances all deal with failures to read the registry due to contention [read].
Posted: Sun, May 30th '10 |
Unhandled Exceptions that can Crash your IIS Application Pool
Jeff Dalton
p/p pRecently my team discovered some nastiness with unhandled exceptions inside our custom SharePoint code.#160; Specifically we found that unhandled exceptions inside of SharePoint.Publishing.LoginRunningOperationJob can result an IIS Application Pool crash.#160; /p pThe reason is because this class puts the delegate code onto a separate thread that when aborted can leave the Application Pool in an unstable state.#160; Which can (and does) result in an Application Pool recycle (which is bad fo [read].
Posted: Sat, Feb 6th '10 |
Exciting year to be in IT
Jeff Dalton
pI’ve been in IT for a little while now and I have to say that this is the most excited I’ve been since 2000.#160; Why, well because of all the great stuff Microsoft plans to ship this year.#160; /p pHere is a short list of what has me so excited./p h4Silverlight 4/h4 pI know I’m late to the Silverlight party since a lot of people felt like version 3 was a good product for developers.#160; Well, I’m late on purpose.#160; I remember taking a look at Silverlight 1 and 2 and thinking, hmmmm [read].
Posted: Sun, Jan 24th '10 |
Tapping into the hidden SharePoint API using Reflection
Jeff Dalton
h3Summary/h3 pThe SharePoint API provides a very rich experience for software developers as almost everything that can be done with the SharePoint user interfaces can be done through the API.#160; One could argue that the SharePoint API has contributed to SharePoint’s overall success./p pAnyone that has used a href="http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/" target="_blank"Reflector/a to view the internal works of the SharePoint API knows that there is a lot of really interesting functionali [read].
Posted: Sun, Jan 17th '10 |
Internet Explorer Discussion Toolbar and SharePoint Publishing Sites.
Jeff Dalton
h2Summary/h2pThe Internet Explorer Discussion Toolbar will probe your web site to see if it is using SharePoint (or Front Page Server Extensions). If it finds that you are using SharePoint then it will enabled the toolbars discussion feature which will most likely result in an Access Denied or some other error message to the user./ppWhile this is a very minor thing you may want to consider blocking access to the URLs Internet Explorer Discussion Toolbar uses to determine if a site is using Share [read].
Posted: Tue, Jan 5th '10 |
SharePoint Saturday Charlotte
Jeff Dalton
This past Saturday I had the privilege of presenting at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte Event along side some top talent in the SharePoint community. It was great to finally meet some of the people I follow on Twitter (too many to name). Also, big kudos to Dan Lewis @danlewisnet, Brian Gough and all of the #SPSCLT Volunteers, you guys/girls rock!!! As promised here the slide deck from my talk about Performance Testing with SharePoint. I was hoping for a little bigger turnout, but [read].
Posted: Mon, Jun 22nd '09 |
Big Thanks to Office / SharePoint Teams for TAP Airlift
Jeff Dalton
I had the privilege of attending the Office 14 TAP Air Lift this week in Seattle. This is my second time coming out to to a SharePoint Air Lift and I must say they never disappoint. While I cannot share any information from the Air Lift I can say it is exciting times to be working with SharePoint. I really want to extend a big thank you to Microsoft for hosting a great event. The folks in Office / SharePoint development teams have some big deadlines in front of them. [read].
Posted: Thu, Jun 4th '09 |
More Lessons learned from Performance Testing SharePoint
Jeff Dalton
Abstract Performance testing with SharePoint, or any web based application, can be quite tricky. Recently my team launched an upgraded Corporate Web Site based on SharePoint 2007. The launch was quite challenging mainly due to mistakes made during performance testing Lessons Learned from Intranet Launch. This post is dedicated to the lessons learned from the performance testing of Corporate Web Site. Background Prior to launch we ran through our performance test scenarios 3 ti [read].
Posted: Sat, May 16th '09 |
Lessons Learned from Launch of Intranet on SharePoint 2007
Jeff Dalton
Abstract This post provides some lessons learned from the launch of our Corporate Intranet. After about two weeks of poor performance and stability issues we stabilized the site and resolved most of the issues. The lessons learned here are common and I'm sure our team was not the first (nor the last) to make these mistakes. Background Our Corporate Intranet supports about 21 Business Area / Business Units (BA/BUs). When I say Intranet I am referring to a content publish [read].
Posted: Sun, May 3rd '09 |
I'm Back...
Jeff Dalton
It's been a while since my last post. I've been heads down in the middle of our corporate rollout of SharePoint 2007. Specifically I have been working on project to upgrade our content management system from MCMS 2002 / SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007. Exciting stuff and every day presents new challenges. We just recently went live with our Intranet and now are starting work on Extranet and Internet sites. [read].
Posted: Thu, Apr 30th '09 |
Managing Key-Value Pair Settings in SharePoint
Jeff Dalton
Recently my team discussed various ways to manage application configuration settings in SharePoint. We wanted to avoid using Web.Config files for Key-Value Pair data because of the complexity of managing this data in SharePoint. SharePoint contains a decent API (SPWebConfigModification) for managing web.config settings across the farm. It works pretty good, but we have had some trouble with it in certain situations. If you are interested in a good article on SPWebConfigModification check out [read].
Posted: Sun, Jun 1st '08 |
Creating a SharePoint Web with the API
Jeff Dalton
I have been working on a application that provides a repeatable way to create sites. This application is very similar to the SharePoint Test Data Population Tool. One of the first tasks was to create new web applications. A quick look at the API and I thought well this is simple enough. First instantiate a new instance of SPWebApplicationBuilder. Set some properties on my object and then call create. Use the SPWebApplication.Provision() method and I am done. Well that is not exactly true. [read].
Posted: Wed, May 21st '08 |
What is going on in MOSS Land
Jeff Dalton
It has been a while since my last post. I have been heads down working on a large project for my employer. The project is to convert my employers existing MCMS/SharePoint 2003 solution to SharePoint 2007. When this project is over my employer will have one of the largest SharePoint sites in the world. Stay tuned, I am sure there will be many existing adventures to post about. [read].
Posted: Sun, May 18th '08 |
Adventures in extending the Publishing.Fields.LinkValue class
Jeff Dalton
Recently I was working on a SharePoint application that required me to extend the out-of-box Publishing Link field. In the end I found an acceptable solution, but it took a little while to get there. Inheriting from LinkFieldValue The first thing I tried was creating a new link field value class that extended the LinkFieldValue class. The LinkFieldValue class is not sealed so I thought I would be able to work with it. LinkFieldValue inherits from the HtmlTagValue class. HtmlTagValue is mor [read].
Posted: Sun, May 18th '08 |
Problems with XMLNS and SPWebConfigModification
Jeff Dalton
Recently I posted an article that discussed the SPWebConfigModification. I meant to add some information about problems with XML Namespaces and SPWebConfigModification. One of the first problems my team encountered with SPWebConfigModification was failures when working with configuration settings that overrode the default xml namespace (xmlns). The problem arose when we tried to apply the webconfig modifications needed to for the Enterprise Library. Below is a sample entry from the c [read].
Posted: Fri, May 2nd '08 |
Creating a Feature to update the Web.Config
Jeff Dalton
I just wrapped up a feature that will update the web.config with custom settings. I did it by creating a feature receiver that loads web.config modifications from an xml configuration file and then applies them using the SPWebConfigModification class. The entire process is straight forward. There are few subtle nuisances to SPWebConfigModification that make it tricky. Creating New Web.Config Changes Below is some sample code from my Feature. The ApplyWebConfigChange is responsible for creating [read].
Posted: Thu, May 1st '08 |
Instrumentation & Logging for SharePoint (Part 1)
Jeff Dalton
Recently I have been defining how the development team will implement Instrumentation and Logging for SharePoint. I looked at a lot of different options and settled on the built-in .Net Framework diagnostic routines. Logging For logging I decided to use the System.Diagnostics.TraceSource class. This class was introduced with .Net Framework 2 and is a marked improvement over the original System.Diagnostics.Trace (my opinion). Out-of-Box System.Diagnostics has trace listeners fo [read].
Posted: Tue, Apr 29th '08 |
Test Driven Development with SharePoint
Jeff Dalton
Lately I have been doing quite a bit of development inside of SharePoint. I am a big fan of Test Driven Development so naturally I wanted to carry over one of my favorite development techniques to SharePoint. I wanted to share some of the obstacles I ran into along the way and techniques I used to overcome them. Before I go on I want to point out that I am using Visual Studio 2008 for my development environment. Missing Method Exception One of the first problems I encountered was a Missing M [read].
Posted: Thu, Apr 24th '08 |
Creating a Rendering Template that supports Edit and Display modes
Jeff Dalton
I have been working on a Field Control rendering template that works for both Edit and Display modes. Along the way I learned quite a few things. First I am not covering the steps to create a SharePoint field control. You can find a walk-through for creating a custom field control here. DefaultTemplateName is not used in Display mode. The first problem I ran into was the rendering of my control in Display mode. I had put in an override for the DefaultTemplateName property in my control. The [read].
Posted: Thu, Apr 17th '08 |
Publishing Pages List Template ID
Jeff Dalton
The Publishing Pages List BaseTemplate ID is 850. It is not listed in the SPListTemplateType enumeration. [read].
Posted: Tue, Apr 15th '08 |
SharePoint Community Kit Wiki (or Lipstick on a Pig)
Jeff Dalton
Recently the development team at work started using a Wiki to keep track of information that is important to the team. Since our company has standardized on using SharePoint for Collaboration solutions we used the Wiki featured delivered from Microsoft (via the Community Kit for SharePoint). I must say I am very unimpressed by the SharePoint Wiki. I don't want to take anything away from the community effort that developed the Wiki template for SharePoint. I'm sure the community has done the b [read].
Posted: Mon, Apr 14th '08 |
FieldID class
Jeff Dalton
I came across a very useful class in the Publishing library. Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.FieldId The FieldId class contains a list of commonly used field ids. I like it because it gives me an easy way to reference fields without having to worry about Internal Name vs. Display Name. Since this is in the Publishing library you will have to have SharePoint 2007 to take advantage. Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Field,Publishing [read].
Posted: Sun, Apr 13th '08 |
Missing Method Exception (or why my Unit Tests would not work with my SharePoint project)
Jeff Dalton
I'm using some test driven development concepts on a little SharePoint development project. I noticed that I kept running into a really strange error every time I added a new Method to my SharePoint project. Whenever I would run my new Unit Test I would get a System.MissingMethodException error saying that the method in my SharePoint project could not be found. Turns out that the problem was caused by the fact that the Unit Test project was loading my SharePoint assembly from the GAC. So for me [read].
Posted: Sun, Apr 13th '08 |
Six hours later...
Jeff Dalton
I finally figured out why my Feature would not create my Site Columns and Content Types. I mistyped the ElementManifests statement in the Feature definition. Instead of using the ElementManifest tag I used the ElementFile tag. Uggg... Rookie mistake. I didn't look closely at my Feature file because I was sure I had screwed up something in the element file that contained by Field definitions. Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Features,Mistakes [read].
Posted: Fri, Apr 11th '08 |
Load Testing SharePoint (Lessons Learned) (Part 2)
Jeff Dalton
In part 1 I discussed the setup of my load testing environment and tests. In part 2 I want to focus on the tests runs and what configuration I had to make to get them to work. Bottlenecks oh Bottlenecks, wherefore art thou Bottlenecks Right out of the gate I ran into trouble. My tests showed a bottleneck at 4 requests per second. The CPU was running @ 25 - 35% no matter what user load VSTS used (remember I was using goal based testing that would keep loading users until the goa [read].
Posted: Mon, Apr 7th '08 |
Musing on CrossListQueryCache class
Jeff Dalton
Summary The SharePoint CrossListQueryCache class provides a highly scalable way to run site wide queries. It provides all the power of SPSiteDataQuery without the performance implications. However it has some major gotchas that you should be aware of before using. I'm always looking for ways to improve application performance (and with SharePoint I have more opportunities than time). I was focused on some code we use to pull list items. This code is in the critical path for our runtime perfo [read].
Posted: Sun, Apr 6th '08 |
Load Testing SharePoint (Lessons Learned) (Part 1)
Jeff Dalton
I want to share some experiences from a recent load testing exercise I performed with SharePoint. I am working on a web content management project that requires A LOT of customizations to SharePoint. The team needed to understand how these customizations would perform and scale. So I dusted off my limited knowledge of load testing with Visual Studio Team Test and went to work. First I established my testing environment. I started by setting up my test agent. I was able to commandeer an old R&a [read].
Posted: Sun, Mar 16th '08 |
SPTD (no its not a venereal disease, but can cause hives)
Jeff Dalton
Test Data Load Tool is a nifty little utility for creating data in your WSS or SharePoint site. You can download the tool at CodePlex http://www.codeplex.com/sptdatapop. The tool provides a repeatable way to create test data for your SharePoint sites. It is extremely cool and even with the warts it is worth the time to sit and learn it. If you are a tester for SharePoint solutions you need to add this one to your bag of tricks. If you are a developer you will appreciate the base framework and [read].
Posted: Sat, Mar 8th '08 |
Zune Wiener
Jeff Dalton
I was one of the lucky Zune winners at SPC2008. Yeah! I never win jack so I'm in shock. [read].
Posted: Fri, Mar 7th '08 |
SPC 2008 Day 4
Jeff Dalton
This was the final day of SPC 2008. It was a great conference and I'm really glad I came. The day started with a session from Russ White in PSS. He was talking about how MSFT PSS troubleshoots SharePoint problems. The title was a little misleading since Russ spent about half of the talk providing best practices for capturing information about the problem (nothing to do with SharePoint). The actual SharePoint data was a little lite. Would have been nice to focus on SharePoint. Next I went to T [read].
Posted: Thu, Mar 6th '08 |
SPC 2008 Day 3
Jeff Dalton
We'll today was chock full of activities. It started with an excellent keynote from Greg Lemond. His story was extremely interesting. And finishedwith a crazy night of XBox games. The sessions were not as great today (which doesn't mean they were not good, it means I didn't learn as much as I did on day 2). The Branding sessions from Heather Solomon opened my eyes to the fact that there are no short cuts in learning to brand SharePoint. Takes a lot of time and patience to dig through the CSS. [read].
Posted: Wed, Mar 5th '08 |
STSADM Find Tip
Jeff Dalton
Got a great tip from Shane Young @ the Microsoft SharePoint 2008 conference. Basicly you can pipe the output of stsadm to find command to filter the list. stsadm -o find "exec" This is great! I can't tell you how many times I've poured through pages of help output to find commands. Thanks Shane! [read].
Posted: Tue, Mar 4th '08 |
SPC 2008 Day 2
Jeff Dalton
The sessions I went to today were excellent. The day started with a session by Ben Robb on automating build process of SharePoint solutions. Ben's build routine actually generated an install.bat file that contained the proper STSADM commands. This is a really interesting idea. Next I attend an excellent session by James Petrosky about Performance / Optimization Strategies for MOSS. I learned about the 3 types of cache options (very similar to existing Content Management Server cache options) a [read].
Posted: Tue, Mar 4th '08 |
SPC 2008 Day 1
Jeff Dalton
I'm at the SharePoint 2008 conference in Seattle. I'm excited to be here because I have been looking for opportunities to connect with the larger SharePoint community. I'm not sure how much technical details I will get out of the conference, but there is a lot of energy and excitement. The first day started out with a great keynote from Bill Gates. His enegy for technology and how it can drive business value is incredible. I was also really impressed with his passion about the Bill Gates Founda [read].
Posted: Tue, Mar 4th '08 |
Hello World
Jeff Dalton
We'll I've been telling myself to start contributing to the SharePont community. So here it is... [read].
Posted: Tue, Mar 4th '08 |
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