MS 70-331: Cliff Notes Edition

Here is the slides for my presentation at the BuckeyeSPUG user group.  In recap, I'm a big proponent of studying for a certification. Aside from the obvious benefits (career, job, etc), there is another hidden benefit: Knowledge.! In the process of studying you WILL uncover areas/features that you probably were not aware that they exists.

SharePoint Developer: How do I get started?

While there are many blogs and articles on different ways to get started.  The fact is that SharePoint is not just an application, it is a platform (it has all of requirements of PaaS).  One of the hurdles on getting started with SharePoint development is how do I write a Hello World! right?

As it turns out, just writing a hello world is not very complicated. If you are just starting up your career as a SharePoint developer, remember: It is not about writing the code, but WHERE do you write that code and WHERE do you execute that code that’s important (REST vs CSOM).

Before you can write your first Hello World, you will need to setup your SharePoint dev environment. One question that I get asked frequently is which version of SharePoint do I need? As of this writing there are 4 SKU for SharePoint 2013 (Foundation, Standard, Enterprise, O365) and 3 SKU for SharePoint 2010(Foundation, Standard,Enterprise).  Also there are many more versions of Visual studio (2010,2012,2013) [Express|Standard|Professional|Ultimate], and not to mention many versions of SQL server (2008, 2008R2, 2012, 2012R2). On top of that, the OS required makes an impact on your decision.  One of the best guides to get your dev environment setup correctly is from Andrew Connell –> SP2013 Setup Guide for Developers  However, following these steps will take some time.  If you are a web developer, be prepared to learn about PowerShell, Active Directory Services, DNS, Claims authentication.  Also, you will be force to learn more Admin stuff that you would want to know, From creating web apps to creating site collections, setting up managed service accounts, creating web apps for provider-hosted/auto-hosted apps, etc.

Fortunately for us, Brian  Keller has taken the time to do all of these steps and put together a virtual machine that is configured and ready to go.http://blogs.msdn.com/b/briankel/archive/2013/04/12/team-foundation-server-2012-and-project-server-2013-integration-virtual-machine-and-hands-on-labs-demo-scripts.aspx

The virtual machine contains the following pre-configured software:  (<--note:  pre-configured !!)

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Evaluation Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the “CONTOSO.COM” domain with DNS and WINS.
2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition with Analysis, Notification, and Reporting Services.
3. Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate Update 1
4. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise Edition
5. Microsoft Project Server 2013
6. Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 (32-bit)
7. Microsoft Visio 2013
8. Microsoft Project 2013
9. Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012 Update 1
10. Team Foundation Server Extensions for Project Server

Notice the bold items:  Visual Studio, SharePoint 2013 and SQL Server all ready and waiting for you to write your first hello world.!!

now, http://www.bing-vs-google.com a Hello World! (or follow this one Hello World… :) 

 

 

Welcome to the World of Tomorrow SharePoint Development…

SharePoint and Mobile development

I’m very honored to be accepted to speak at the Central Ohio Day of .Net in Columbus, OH. 

The name of my talk is: Writing an Offline LOB Application for SharePoint.  I’ll be demonstrating a typical Business Scenario.  An insurance company, takes a car accident claim, enters the information in their intranet and then send an adjuster out on the field to finish collecting some more information for the claim. The adjuster would go on the field with his WinRT device (suck it iPad). At the end of the day, these records would then be synched back into SharePoint where a workflow can then be completed.

I’m putting together a demo site at: https://demodayofdotnet-public.sharepoint.com/sites/dodn  (warning: Work in progress…)

Registration information for this event can be found at: https://cododn2013.eventbrite.com/

Event site: http://cododn.azurewebsites.net/

See you there.

SharePoint Saturday–Columbus 2013

History

I remember back in early 2012, Ricardo and I started talking about SharePoint Saturdays.  The main conversation was, hey with all of the SharePoint Saturdays around here, how come we don’t have a Columbus SPS event?  We decided that we wanted to bring an SPS event to the Columbus community. With Brian Jackett’s advice (lotsa work he said..), we started the quest…

 

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It takes a village

With the financials troubles that the original SPS organization had, we started having some difficulties getting started.  Our initial target date was going to be in February.  This target date would give us a gap between all of the SPS events that were going on around the time (SPS Cincy, Kentucky, Dayton, etc).  As we started looking for more information on what it takes to organize an event, that target date started to slip away. We got lots of good tips from Sean McDonough, Tony Maddin, and Brian Jackett.  All experienced SPS event organizers.

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The search for a Venue

Once I’ve got the rights of the SPS transfer to me (thanks to Jennifer Mason for a smooth transition) we started to look into step 1:  Find a venue. From Nicola Young, I’ve obtained the last invoices for SPS Columbus 2010-11. Yikes!  Obviously, the first choice was to use the MS Office at Polaris. Since we hold our user group meetings in there and it would be a lot cheaper to host the event in there.  Our initial target number was for 100-150 people.  The problem with the MS office is that it can’t hold that many people, and the logistics were not very easy to accommodate.  For instance we needed at least 4 rooms (IT Pro, Developer, End User, Misc tracks).    While the idea of having a venue where ALL of the logistics were going to be taken care of (food, parking, rooms, cleaning, etc) at OCLC was great, the size of the price tag was too big for us. Without having a way to do a financial disbursement (we are not a 501a), I’ve tried talking to OCLC into the possibility of splitting the invoice into 4-5 parts, so that we could go after sponsors to do a partial payment. This approach was not ideal for them.

At this point we got help from someone that made this event possible:  Michelle Caldwell.  Through her many/many connections, she was able to secure a FREE venue in the OSU campus.  Joe Roush (previous BuckeyeSPUG steering committee member) came to the rescue and get us a building: Ramseyer Hall, in the OSU campus.  While this building was a little bit too small for our 4 tracks, it was a free venue. Happy ending: Joe was able to upgrade this building to a different building: Campbell Hall, where we ended up having SPS.

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Speakers Talent

Now that we have a venue, our attention shifter on getting great speakers with great content to come and speak at our event.  Our committee grew with more volunteers from the community:  Shawn Vest, Terry Galentine, Syed Abbas, Ryan Dennis, Don Zielke.  We started promoting the event and got some speakers line up.  Once again, Michelle help us line up not just a gamma of great talent, but also the keynote speaker.!  80-90% of the great content that we had for SPS Columbus could be attribute directly to Michelle’s vast networking connections.  Because of the overwhelming submission that we’ve got, we decided to add a 5th track (Dev, IT Pro, End User, Bussines Value, Misc)

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Sponsors Wanted

With the speaker’s submissions and the task of sorting out the entries under way.  We also started focusing on getting sponsors to help us.  We identify sponsorships items that were a MUST for the success of the event (food and drinks, etc..).  QSI and K2 were the first ones that came to our help. Quick Solutions sponsored Breakfast and Coffee. K2 sponsored the t-shirts for the events.  K2 went even further and decided to provide the Speaker’s Polo shirt!  Cardinal Solutions sponsored the Gift to our speakers. Danilo from AvePoint sponsored drinks and snacks throughout the whole day. Craig Morton from  TekSystem step in and brought some prizes to give away at the end of the day.  One of the most important items in our list was the lunch for all attendees and speakers. This item took a little time to materialize, but at the end Quest (from Dell) came out and sponsored the lunch.  MetaLogix also came through and gave us another main prize to give out at the end of the day.

Among the list of items that we were looking to get a sponsor for was the Speaker dinner and SharePint.  While we were not able to secure neither of these, the speakers were kind to understand our situation and pay on their own.  The attendees were also very understanding of our limited sponsors-items (Parking for instance).

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Big Day is here!

Throughout this ordeal, we had other volunteers in the community that came to help. Getting to the OSU building at 6:30am was not an easy task, lots of passion for our community from Diane Neale, Dr. Miebi Akah, Samantha Orons (did I miss someone?).  Setup and tear down was easy thanks to them and the core SPS committee.

 

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Tally

While the event went as smooth as we could ever wished, there were a lot of personal time spent from everyone.  Zach Cochran not only spent a lot of time preparing for his talk, but he also worked with us and K2 to create all of the new logos we used for SPS.  Shawn Vest, was without a doubt one of the most “overused” members of the core team for SPS.  He scrubbed all speaker submissions, create the system to select speakers, contact hotels, helped me with the SPS site and our O365 site.  I think in total, the SPS steering committee had close to 10  2hrs-lunches plus lots of offline hours that we didn’t keep track of. 

I’ll blog next on how you can host your own SPS event on a Shoe-string-budget… http://spsevents.org/city/Columbus/2013/agenda.aspx

RT 8.1 update–Windows Store not working with multiple profiles

Now that I have take the plunge and update to the 8.1 preview, I have been showing all of the features of the 8.1.  Logging as a different user takes a while.  It needs to apply all of the updates to the new profile.

However, whenever you try to access the store with this profile, an error message shows up: “We weren't able to connect to the Store. This might have happened because of a server problem or the network connection time out. Please wait a few minutes and try again.”

Looking everywhere on the web, I’ve followed this article and download and install this app from Microsoft. After a reboot, it still didn’t  work.  Went to the PC Settings and perform a windows update.  It said that it found some fixes, applied them, reboot.  Still the market place is not working.

I’ve noticed that there is a message when you open the store. However, it quickly gets hidden by the error message.  The message is something about your account. Sign in with a Microsoft Account. Weird, since this account was working properly prior to the update to 8.1. 

Fix:  Click on PC Settings, Accounts, Your Account.  You will see the that it is now requiring to verify this account.

Once you click the Verify, it will ask you to type your password,

Type in your password, and you will be all set.  Now, go back to the Windows Store and it will work.

Note: you will need to do this step to every user profile you have on the RT

How to start/stop Hyper-V machines with PowerShell

Being a Hyper-V fan, I try to keep all of my VM’s named and line up correctly.  The problem is that with so many versions of SharePoint, SQL, OS.  The management of those VM’s can get a bit tricky.  For instance, I have 3 SharePoint farms that I might need to run at one point or another.  The problem that I had, was that I wanted to start a farm or a set of vm’s with a single script.  Well, trying to start up all of your vm’s at once creates a problem when you try to start a SharePoint farm.

The dependencies for SharePoint is that the SQL server needs to be up and running as well as the Domain controller.  For the SQL Server to start, it needs the Domain controller to be up and running.  So somehow, you need to start the AD, wait for it to be up and running before starting the SQL, and then finally when both are running, then you can start your SharePoint server.  This sequence does not allow you to get a cup of coffee while all of the vm’s are starting.  You need to monitor the state of each server before  moving to the next one.

The workflow will be something like this:  AD –>  SQL –> SharePoint

Now, enter PowerShell.  With PowerShell, I have several scripts that will perform this workflow correctly.  If you are still running Windows Server 2008-R2 as your desktop machine (and who isn't, right?), you can download the Powershell Management Library for Hyper-V in Codeplex.  This module is necessary, even if you are running PowerShell v3.

Here is my script to start up the VM machines.  Noticed that I’m using the HearBeatTimeOut.  This parameter waits for the OS to be up and running before the next command is executed!

Import-Module "C:\Program Files\modules\HyperV\HyperV.psd1"

start-vm "DemoAD" -HeartBeatTimeOut 300
start-vm "DemoSQL2008" -HeartBeatTimeOut 300
start-vm "DemoWFE1" -HeartBeatTimeOut 300

and the script to stop them.  It is always nice to use the reason parameter. This parameter is needed so that I don’t have to explain WHY it was shutdown when starting the VM’s.

Import-Module "C:\Program Files\modules\HyperV\HyperV.psd1"

shutdown-vm "DemoWFE1" -force -reason "end of day"
shutdown-vm "DemoSQL2008" -force -reason "end of day"
shutdown-vm "DemoAD" -force -reason "end of day"

now, where is that cup of coffee… :)

A new chapter…

I like to announce that I have taken a full time position as a SharePoint dude for HMB.  I’ve interviewed with them a couple of years back.  But the planets had a different lineup and we did not connect. HMB is well known for being involved in the local developer community (.NET, StirTrek, VStudio 2012 Launch, etc)  They are a local company that has been in business longer that any other local consulting company I know.  I’ve personally known many of the people that work there. BTW, Sue “Johnson” is a great recruiter.  Of course, I also get the privilege to sit right next to Rick and ask him questions about how to be a YouTube video rock star …. lol.
One of the first questions that I’ve asked was: How many people has left your company(voluntarily/involuntarily) in the past year?  The answer was a number in the single digits (one hand)… Try asking this question, the next time you are in an interview ;) #Refreshing
The fusion between technology and culture is just perfect, and I’m very glad to be part of this mix. Actually, the real reason for me joining HMB, is so that I can be part of the “Deploy It Maybe” sequel…