So in their wisdom it seems you can no longer do InfoPath development in Visual Studio with the new versions. Here's a little snippit from the infopath blog showing how to do Source Control with InfoPath 2010, code behind and TFS. Should be fun, just hope those files don't go out of sync...

 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/infopath/archive/2010/06/10/using-tfs-for-source-control-in-infopath-2010.aspx

Well SharePoint Foundation has arrived, it's there on the download pages, which maybe explains why I couldn't find it on MSDN. The Search Server 2010 link is still the beta, but I'm sure that will update soon too.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=49c79a8a-4612-4e7d-a0b4-3bb429b46595

Time to get it installed I suppose, ditch the beta VM, spin up a new VM and start installing. Just in time for a new starter as well, we'll let him loose on this and see how he gets on - it's here now so why use old technology for his induction?

A good little posting on SharePoint abbreviations from the beginning to 2010 by Todd Bleeker over on his blog...

 http://sharepoint.mindsharpblogs.com/Todd/archive/2010/01/09/Abbreviating-SharePoint-Products-and-Technologies-2010.aspx

I have been some trusty Windows Server 2003 VMs from Virtual Server 2005 across to Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper V this week and without fail each of them has given me the boot message "At least one service or driver failed during system startup. Use Event Viewer to examine the event log for details."

Now I expect this when network adaptors have yet to find their drivers as all sorts of things fall over, but even once the devices were all happy and working the prompt persisted - checking the event logs showed that the Parallel port driver service failed to start - I didn't think you could get parallel ports on VMs! :)

Anyhow, thought I'll check the services MMC and disable it - but it was not to be found there. A quick search later revealed some posts suggesting I tweak registry values to stop the service ; but I don't like doing that sort of thing, especially when this one is a DC. So fiddled around with command line options for services and found that the answer is one line in a dos prompt thus:

 sc config parport start= disabled

Simple, by the third VM I managed to remember it without looking at the help!

I came across an interesting post from Mark Arend today whichi nicely lists out all the Moss Timer Jobs with a description of what they do along with some assembly info, catch it here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/markarend/archive/2008/09/06/list-of-moss-timer-jobs.aspx

It was posted a while ago. But hey this way I'll find it again easily.

IainW

I came across a blog post  today by Christophe Fiessinger, he outlines a performance comparison between running SharePoint VMs on a Seagate Momentus 7200.3 and a Samsung SSD SATA 3.0Gb/s (Solid State Drive). The warm up time for the web applications were between 2 and 10 times quicker, now that's a lot of wasted time cut out from a developer's day or waiting in a demo situation.

Then, I also spotted the following from Doug McCutcheon with a video clip on youtube and links to discounted Dell laptops for demoing. Looks good, hopefully they'll make the deals available in the UK too.

Over on the SharePoint Team blog they have published details of an update that resolves the product expiration issue with SP2. A quick quote from their blog:

The update can be applied before or after Service Pack 2 installation.  If the update is applied prior to installing Service Pack 2 it will prevent the expiration date from being improperly activated during installation of Service Pack 2, if it is applied after Service Pack 2 it will remove the expiration date incorrectly set during installation of Service Pack 2.

Also they plan on releasing an updated SP2 package that doesn't exhibit this problem, time to update my slipstreamed install sources...

I was customising a people search result web part this week and couldn't figure out why the mobile phone field was not rendering in the results. I could see it was in the AD properties, was making it through user profile import and then helped it through to managed metadata in the search results, I even checked the raw XML for the search results which showed it there as well. So I was down to checking my XSLT, I had camel cased the name of the field in my select code, as is my habit with coding to make it easily readable, but the XSLT was looking to match the case returned by the search results which was all in lower case.

A quick crrection and refresh and they all appeared as they should. Another little puzzle solved...

I often go to execute a stsadm command and find it is not in the path on the server I am working on, so I looked for a while of a way of adding it permanently through powershell and then realised it's a straightforward task with .NET code. The following will add the BIN folder within the program files structure to the PATH environment variable at local machine level so that all users will benefit.

   1:  $envpath = [environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path","Machine")

   2:  $binpath = $env:Programfiles + "\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN"

   3:  if ($envpath.contains($binpath) -ne $true ) {

   4:  $envpath = $envpath + ";" + $binpath

   5:  [environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path",$envpath,"Machine")

   6:  Write-output "BIN Path added."

   7:  }

   8:  else

   9:  {

  10:  Write-output "BIN Path already added."

  11:  }

I have added a check to not add it if it is already present as the traditional method of using

SET PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN

ends up with multiple copies of the BIN path in the variable and only applies for the current session.