It has detailed step by step instructions and the relevant steps to your O/S or env that are to be followed without fail. The link also provides insight into some of the exceptions you might encounter depending on which step you might’ve missed.

Help to some of the other errors that are likely to surface while running the SharePoint 2010 Configuration error is as follows –

Exception – Failed to create the configuration database. An exception of type System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException was thrown. Additional exception information: The data is invalid.
Resolution – This has two steps
Step 1: Make sure that the “Network Service” account has full access to the “14” directory under %commonprogramfiles\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions.
Step 2: Delete the registry key located under “SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0\Secure\FarmAdmin” Registry key and then run the SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard.
It is likely that this registry key is required to be cleared each time you run the wizard after an unsuccessful attempt:)

Exception – “An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException was thrown. Additional exception information :User cannot be found.”
Likely cause – The admin account that you are using for the install is a domain account and the workstation is not connected to the domain????
Resolution – Make sure your workstation is connected to the domain – use VPN if working remotelyJ and run the wizard again by clearing the registry key as advised above.

Hopefully this will come in handy for some of you.

I will revise this if I make further observations, and I’d greatly appreciate if you guys keep me appraised of any other issues that you guys might have come across:)

- Ratnakar

Realised that a number of people on the net are looking to do some of the things that I’ve done such as cleaning up the duplicates, removing the dead ones, recreating the playlists based on the folder structure on the server.

Here’s a snippet that recreates playlists based on the folders  (obviously in C#) - 

             iTunesApp app = new iTunesApp();
            var mainLibrary = app.LibraryPlaylist;
            var mainLibrarySource = app.LibrarySource;
            var tracks = mainLibrary.Tracks;
            var numTracks = tracks.Count;
            var numPlaylistsCreated = 0;
            var numTracksAddedToPlayLists = 0;
         
            var playlists = mainLibrarySource.Playlists;
             for (var i = 1; i <= numTracks; i++)
            {
   
            // get the track from the current tracklist                
            IITTrack currTrack = tracks[i] as IITFileOrCDTrack;
            // only work with files

         if (currTrack.Kind == ITTrackKind.ITTrackKindFile)
         {
         IITFileOrCDTrack file = (IITFileOrCDTrack)currTrack;
                if (file.Location != null)
                {
                    var p =file.Location;
        
                    var location = p; 
                 if ((location != null) && (location != “”))
                 {
                 FileInfo fi = new FileInfo(file.Location);
                       if (fi.Exists)
                       {
                           string dir = fi.Directory.Name;

                           if (app.LibrarySource.Playlists.get_ItemByName(dir) == null)
                           {
                              var currPL = app.CreatePlaylist(dir) as IITUserPlaylist;
                              numPlaylistsCreated++;

                              currPL.AddFile(location);
                              numTracksAddedToPlayLists++;
                             
                           }
                           else
                           {
                               IITUserPlaylist currPL = app.LibrarySource.Playlists.get_ItemByName(dir) as IITUserPlaylist;

                               IITTrackCollection iTracksInPlayList = currPL.Tracks;
                               if (iTracksInPlayList.get_ItemByName(currTrack.Name) == null)
                               {
                                   currPL.AddFile(location);
                                   numTracksAddedToPlayLists++;
                               }
                           }
                       }
                   }
                 }
         }

According to it’s web site (http://www.visualwebgui.com/) – “Visual WebGui (VWG) is an open source rapid application development (RAD) framework for Line-Of-Bussines AJAX & Silverlight GUIs. VWG cuts down development time (proven up to 90%) , without compromising on extensibility, scalability, performance, security or complexity.

Visual WebGui is the only framework that provides seamless integration to Visual Studio and the .NET framework and extends ASP.NET. VWG is unique and not more of the same (200 AJAX frameworks)! Visual WebGui replaces all of the ASP.NET methodologies which were designed for developing sites, with WinForms methodologies, which were designed for developing applications.

VWG provides the developer with an extremely efficient designer to design interfaces using drag and drop instead of hand coding HTML layouts.”

I am not advocating to use it or promoting it by any means as I myself haven’t used it yet but I must say I watched this webcast and I am now intrigued to have a dig at it when I get a spare moment.

Also there’s this rescheduled MSDN event (webcast) originally planned for 23rd July, register if you are keen as mustard as I am – http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032379516&CountryCode=US

Here’s a list of changes that have been made between Preview 3 and the current release Preview 4 -

• New Simple Membership Features in the Default Project Template
• New Filter Types for Authorization and Exception Handling
• New Output Cache Filter
• Changes for ASP.NET AJAX
• Namespaces in Routes
• New Interface for Enhanced Testability of TempData
• ActionInvoker Extensibility Improvements

As I highlighted in my previous post – Scott Guthrie has an excellent post with an example covering the new changes – http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/07/14/asp-net-mvc-preview-4-release-part-1.aspx

This is perfect for me in terms of timing because for the last few months I have been spending most of my time at one of our client’s place training/mentoring their application development team while trying to employ/adopt a long-term/future-proof Enterprise Development Strategy.

I was reluctant to introduce MVC yet to the team as it is still early stages. Although with some level of custom coding you can implement the core aspects of AJAX  etc, I wanted to wait until I check out Preview 4 – rightly so and as expected here comes an announcement from Scott that preview 4 has new features such as Caching, Error Handling and Security plus further additional support for AJAX.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/07/14/asp-net-mvc-preview-4-release-part-1.aspx

The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview is a preview of new functionality being added to ASP.NET 3.5 and ADO.NET. The release includes ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET controls for Silverlight, ADO.NET Data Services, Entity Framework runtime, and new features for ASP.NET AJAX.

Both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET controls for Silverlight have been updated since this release. The latest versions can be accessed at:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=111960.

It’s relatively a simple process – download the ROM Kit onto your PC from the PPC Kitchen’s site (http://ppckitchen.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=44:ppckitchen-released-apache&catid=1:latest-news) , get the updates, open up the default project file for your device, pick and choose the OEMs that you want on your mobile including the skins, wallpapers etc, connect your PPC to your PC, compile and run the project.

The amazing part is I neither had to do any registry hacks to connect it up to the exchange nor install the certificate to the root manually. Also, I realised that the device is much faster and stable.

The first improvement is for existing applications that use DetailsView, FormView, GridView, or ListView controls. The DetailsView and GridView controls have been extended to display fields by using templates instead of by using hard-coded rules that are programmed in the controls. These templates are part of the project, and you can customize them to change their appearance or to specify what controls they use for rendering. This makes it very easy to make a change in one place that specifies how to present dates for editing, as one example. FormView and ListView controls can implement similar behavior by using a DynamicControl control in their templates and by specifying which field in the row to display. Dynamic Data will then automatically build the UI for these controls based on the templates that you specify.

The second improvement is that the controls look at the metadata for a LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework data model and provide automatic validation based on the model. For example, if a column in the database is limited to 50 characters, and if a column is marked as not nullable, a RequiredFieldValidator control is automatically enabled for the column. (The controls also automatically support data-model-level validation.) You can apply other metadata to take further control over display and validation.

You can find more details here – http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/dynamicdata, and Scott Gu has a good post with an example here (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/04/10/asp-net-dynamic-data-preview-available.aspx) plus links to other useful posts about this topic.

his most recent one is about creating and using Silverlight and WPF User Controls – of course, the demo requires expression blend, but, you can always trial it!

As you probably know the current version available on CodePlex isn’t VS 2008 compatible – so if you have moved on to using VS 2008 and are looking to use the repository factory further then write to me (leave a comment), I will flick you a copy. The version I have was tweaked and compiled for VS2008 and it uses Partial Classes etc so it is indeed better than the previous release!!!

Note:
There’s one issue with this version of the Repository Factory that I would like to highlight -
If you encounter an exception of type ’System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException’ it is because the code generated web.config entry for the repository interface will look like the following:

<add interfaceType=”CustomerMgmt.DataAccessLayer.ICustomerRepository, DataAccessLayer” repositoryType=”CustomerMgmt.DataAccessLayer.BusinessLayer.CustomerRepositoryArtifacts.CustomerRepository, DataAccessLayer”/>

instead, this is how it should have been:

<add interfaceType=”CustomerMgmt.DataAccessLayer.Interfaces.ICustomerRepository, DataAccessLayer” repositoryType=”CustomerMgmt.DataAccessLayer.BusinessLayer.CustomerRepositoryArtifacts.CustomerRepository, DataAccessLayer”/>

I will correct and repackage the project but for now modify the web.config mannually.

Note: This issue is now resolved in the new version of the package that I created.

A refresh for VS 2008 was released a few days ago to address the following feedback that the team had received:
- The tool should remember the information provided so it does not have to be provided each time the source code is generated.
- The next version should focus less on the data access and business logic tiers and more on the service interface.
- Help those who want to modify the Service Factory source code; doing this is not a straightforward process.
- Wizards are okay some of the time, but a visualization of the services is a better experience.
- Services should be designed in a technology-independent manner.

More information can be found here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-nz/library/bb931187(en-us).aspx

New In This Release

The February 2008 release of the Web Client Software Factory is an update to the June 2007 release. These are the major changes:

• Added new Guidance Assets. These allow a developer to quickly, conveniently and easily learn, evaluate, and implement different components of the factory without having to use it in its entirety. These assets also contain functionality you can use on your existing ASP.NET Web sites.
• Added user interface responsiveness guidance. The guidance includes documentation, Web controls, QuickStarts, and a new reference implementation that demonstrate how to incorporate Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX and AJAX Toolkit technologies in your Web applications to provide a richer user interface experience. A new recipe to enable Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX in an existing Web application has been incorporated into the guidance package.
• Added support for the Model-View-Presenter pattern in user controls and master pages. The Composite Web Application Block includes a new Dependency Injection mechanism that facilitates the implementation of the Model-View-Presenter pattern in Web controls and master pages. The guidance package also includes new recipes that help developers create master pages and user controls that implement the Model-View-Presenter pattern. By using the Model-View-Presenter, developers can extend the testability surface to user controls and master pages.
• User controls can be reused across modules. Developers can build Web pages made up of user controls from different modules.
• Updated the Composite Web Application Block. The main changes include the following:
  • Improved performance
  • Support for services registration through configuration
  • Support for type mapping for dependency injection
• Updates to the Add Business Module and Add Foundational Module recipes. These recipes now include a new option to create a separate project for the modules’ public interface.
• Updated the patterns documentation topics. The main changes include two new pattern description topics, Inversion of Control and Module Interface Separation, and updates to the Model-View-Presenter topic.
• Included additional guidance for several technical concepts. The technical concepts covered are views testability, modularity, autoComplete, validation, and search. The guidance consists of documentation, QuickStarts, Web controls, and How-to topics.
• Added support for Visual Studio 2008 to the guidance package.
• Added support for dependency injection on ASMX Web services. This allows developers to inject services and dependencies into traditional Web services and JSON services which are accessed through AJAX calls.

To keep on top of the news and the updates on Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices, keep an eye over this link – http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/practices/default.aspx

More details about extending the Visual Studio can be found here – http://www.visualstudiogallery.com/ExtensionDetails.aspx?ExtensionId=df3f0c30-3d37-4e06-9ef8-3bff3508be31 and visit the VSX Developer Center at http://msdn.com/vsx

The current recommendation according to Microsoft’s Patterns and Practicses is to use the Data Access Guidance Package that comes with the current version of the Web Service Software Factory – From what I read, the next version of the Web Service Factory might not feature the Data Access Guidance Package as well but will be released separately.

The Data Access Guidance Package is fairly impressive with the features like Command Factories, Entity Factories and allows to create a flexible Framework for your Data Access Needs.

There are other Data Access Packages/Tools available if you wish not to use Microsoft’s Data Access Guidance Package inconjunction with the Web Client Software Factory – here’s a list of few – NTiers, NHibernate, WilsonORMapper, TableAdapters, ActiveRecord…

thoughts/comments?

Microsoft® Silverlight™ Streaming by Windows Live™ is a companion service for Silverlight that makes it easier for developers and designers to deliver and scale rich media as part of their Silverlight applications.

The service offers web designers and developers a free and convenient solution for hosting and streaming cross-platform, cross-browser media experiences and rich interactive applications that run on Windows™ and Mac. Combined with the ability to create content with Microsoft® Expression Studio and other 3rd party tools, Web designers and content publishers wishing to integrate Silverlight applications into their online properties can enjoy complete control of the end user experience.

more to come on this topic…so watch this space =)

Here’s an excerpt from Luke’s C# demo at TechEd 2007 which covers things like Auto-Implemented properties, ‘var’ – Local Variable Type Inference, Collection Initializers, Object Initializers, Lambda Expressions etc

If you are a C# enthusiast…I would suggest you subscribe to his feeds at: http://blogs.msdn.com/lukeh/

using System;

//using System.Linq;

using System.Collections.Generic;

class Customer

{

    // C#3.0 Feature:  Auto-Implemented Properties

    public string CustomerID { get; set; }

    public string ContactName { get; set; }

    public string City { get; set; }

}

public delegate TResult Func<TArg, TResult>(TArg c);

static class Query

{

    // C#3.0 Feature:  Extension Methods

    public static IEnumerable<T> Where<T>(this IEnumerable<T> source, Func<T,bool> filter)

    {

        foreach (var item in source)

            if (filter(item))

                yield return item;

    }

    public static IEnumerable<TResult> Select<TSource,TResult>(this IEnumerable<TSource> source, Func<TSource,TResult> selector)

    {

        foreach (var item in source)

            yield return selector(item);

    }

}

class Program

{

    static void Main(string[] args)

    {

        List<Customer> customers = LoadCustomers();

        // C#3.0 Feature:  Query Expressions

        var query = from c in customers

                    where c.City == “London”

                    // C#3.0 Feature:  Anonymous Types

                    select new { c.CustomerID, c.ContactName };

        // C#3.0 Feature:  Lambda Expressions

        //var query = Query.Select(Query.Where(customers, c => c.City == “London”),

        //                         c => new { c.CustomerID, c.ContactName });

        //var query = customers.Where(c => c.City == “London”)

        //                     .Select(c => new { c.CustomerID, c.ContactName });

        foreach (var item in query)

            Console.WriteLine(“{0}, {1}”, item.CustomerID, item.ContactName);

    }

    private static List<Customer> LoadCustomers()

    {

        // C#3.0 Feature:  ‘var’ – Local Variable Type Inference

        // C#3.0 Feature:  Collection Initializers

        var customers = new List<Customer>()

        {

            // C#3.0 Feature:  Object Initializers

            new Customer { CustomerID = “ALFKI”, ContactName = “Maria Anders”, City = “Berlin”},

            new Customer { CustomerID = “ANATR”, ContactName = “Ana Trujillo”, City = “México D.F.”},

            new Customer { CustomerID = “WOLZA”, ContactName = “Zbyszek Piestrzeniewicz”, City = “Warszawa”}

        };

        return customers;

    }

}

My favourite topic clearly –  “Windows Communication Foundation”.

Due to the hectic schedule and the urgent deliverables at hand I couldn’t attend all the sessions. But for me clearly the stand-out sessions were the WCF ones by Justin Smith. His sessions were very useful, relevant and to-the-point. I had a chat with him after one of his sessions and I was humbled by the command that he had on the subject. For those who are working or about to embark on a project that involves WCF, I strongly recommend you keep a very close watch on his blogs or subscribe the feeds.

From what I gather, WCF is considered to be the best written framework that Microsoft put together so far. Also, the SDK for WCF is quite comprehensive and a good place to start.

I will add a couple of posts covering the goodies that were mentioned by Justin during his sessions…and may be link or two to his powerpoint slides.

TechFest – The theme was great, Evermore was great…but I felt Townhall wasn’t the best choice, it was small, resonant and pretty much faded the good performance of Evermore.

• Implicitly typed local variables, which permit the type of local variables to be inferred from the expressions used to initialize them.
• Extension methods, which make it possible to extend existing types and constructed types with additional methods.
• Lambda expressions, an evolution of anonymous methods that provides improved type inference and conversions to both delegate types and expression trees.
• Object initializers, which ease construction and initialization of objects.
• Anonymous types, which are tuple types automatically inferred and created from object initializers.
• Implicitly typed arrays, a form of array creation and initialization that infers the element type of the array from an array initializer.
• Query expressions, which provide a language integrated syntax for queries that is similar to relational and hierarchical query languages such as SQL and XQuery.
• Expression trees, which permit lambda expressions to be represented as data (expression trees) instead of as code (delegates).

you can download this from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=8450EFF5-24AD-44C3-AB91-1ED88EF2F4F0&displaylang=en

Visit http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/bb725993.aspx to get an idea of what to look out for.

I got to play around with it during the Tech-Ed 2007 in New Zealand and it’s awesome.

1.    Created a new publishing site (the publisher)

2.    Created a custom content type

3.    Created a custom page-layout based on the custom content type, checked-in, published, approved so that the page-layout is usable

4.    Created a new page based on the custom page-layout created above

5.    Edited the page, checked-in, submitted for approval, approved so that it is available for the users

6.    Created a new web  application and a blank site (“the subscriber”) using STSADM #### make sure you use STSADM instead of creating a site collection using Sharepoint Central Admin. The purpose of this site is to subscribe to the content published by “the publisher” site.

7.    Because the source site is of Publishing type a quick deploy job is created. Leave this alone and create a new job with pretty much the default settings

8.    Then select the job, right-click and run the job now.

9.    Go to the destination site and you will notice that the custom content type, page-layout and page along with the content is published.  

So far all hanky dory but I hit a roadblock at this stage, as soon as I customise the page-layout on the destination site and go back to the source site, change the content republish and run the deployment job, it overwrites the page-layout that I modified on the destination site.

I thought of changing the styles on the destination site that this page-layout uses but the style itself is inline within the page.

I also tried to checkout the page-layout on the destination site so that it won’t be overwritten by the source and quote rightly the deployment job failed with an error ( this is what I would expect )

Option 2 using site variations – it works!

1.    I created a new publishing site (the publisher)

2.    Created site variations, and the site variation labels, and then the hierarchy (one being a source and the other being the destination)

3.    Then created a custom content type

4.    Created 2 custom page-layouts, one for source and other for the destination with each one deriving from the custom content type created above.

5.    When creating the page-layouts make sure you set the variation labels property accordingly (Source for the first and the destination for the other)

6.    Change the destination page-layouts to use different font type for the body (just to display with a different look and feel)

7.    Check-in each of the page-layouts, publish, submit for approval and approve so that it is available to create pages.

8.    Created a page on the source site deriving from the source site page-layout, check-in, submit for approval and approve

9.    You will notice that this page is available on the destination, now edit the page, change the page layout to be the second one (that you’ve created for the destination site)

10.  Also, the subsequent versions of the page when published from source site will use the destination page layout(same content displayed differently on source and destination which we couldn’t achieve using option 1)   

For those who want to know how to create page-layouts, customise them using sharepoint designer, create variations, variation labels, associate page-layouts to variation labels and  so on….drop me a line.  

I had less than 5 minutes and so had to be very brief but am happy to help if you leave a comment or a question.