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Note to self: I keep needing/using this tool to avoid IISRESETs during SharePoint development. Much faster…

An instructive Post by Ted Pattison. I’ve got to confess, I’m still getting used to the breadth of things you can do with features. I could spend weeks looking into this…

Okay, so this experiment appeals to the home scientist in me.

I’ve been meaning to post this for ages - Marus Ranum on why information security is an abject failure. And he’s right - the problem is the complexity of todays interactions, both at a protocol and language level.

To me, the problem is one of failure of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Applications and protocols haven’t been, and we’ve had more tacking together of technologies, and expansion of complexity of everything.

I mean, consider what languages you needed to know 10 years ago, and now:

Then:

HTML 3.2, JavaScript maybe, Perl if you’re brave, SQL if you’re a hero.

Now (Microsoft Stack only):

HTML 3.4, 4 (various favours), XHTML, XML, XSL, XPATH, JavaScript (much more complex), ASP.NET 2.0, C# or VB, .NET frameworks 1.1, 2, 3 and 3.5 (soon), ADO, SQL, CSS, ‘AJAX’

That’s just the languages and base technologies - never mind getting into a higher level of software (e.g. SharePoint). Or non-MS technologies - Ruby, Rails, Python, Java in various forms…

It’s similar in protocols…

Then:

HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP / POP

Now:

HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP / POP, SOAP, Web Services (plus various extensions), IMAP, Various Peer-To-Peer protocols, Various Instant Messaging protocols

(Yes, those are fairly high level, and from different levels of the stack - but still, you’re expected to know about them.) (And yes, I suppose you’d need to know a bit about TCP/IP and IPSEC)

Does that sound simple? Does my granny skateboard?

(Well, no, but that would be so cool).

Security will be impossible with such a complex, varied stack of technologies, and developers simply won’t be able to specialise enough to know how to make secure enough applications. It alarms me how wrong people are getting password storage alone - I mean, this stuff has been known since the 70’s. If they can’t get that right, how will they manage with a such a deep and varied set of tools?

More for my benefit than anyone else, but there is blog post on Joris Poelman’s (JOPX) blog about georeplication in SharePoint. The crux of it is, SharePoint 2007 doesn’t really do it. But you could implement your own using the Content Migration APIs - which Stefan Gossner goes into in parts 1,2,3,4.

However, if you are considering a system using georeplication, please remember you must have enough bandwidth. If your network can’t handle the traffic needed over it already, before adding georeplication, then you are buggered. Georeplication might reduce cross site traffic, but you still need the bandwidth to actually do the replication. And you’ll have to be able to live with slow replication. And, as mentioned above (and by Joris), it is a significant development exercise.

I’m sure someone will do it though. And I’m confident that Microsoft will do it for a future version of SharePoint. It’s too powerful a feature to not have in an enterprise app.

Previously I found (in ‘David’s Blog’) a way of using an HTTP Module in SharePoint to change the master page used by ‘application’ pages. I fiddled with it a bit and made it work properly.

Unfortunately, I’ve lost my code (HD crash) and David’s blog is defunct (I think it died when the SharePoint Blogs site died).

So, some links to similar relevant pages:

Liam Cleary has been looking at it

This page proved useful

And this is a description of the same sort of thing

Tags: Application Pages, Master Pages

Interesting - Deploying and Supporting Enterprise Search - interesting. Gives you an idea of the hardware necessary for a big system, and the sort of on-going administration required.

When building SharePoint workflow solutions you need to be very careful in only using it for small, single document-centric processes, and you need to try to avoid the ‘pain points’. For processes that push the boundaries of what workflow can do, you should consider redesign of the solution to reduce the workflow element or alternative products.

In a collaboration and publishing system like SharePoint, some sort of support for standard business process is essential. SharePoint workflow supports that for simple processes, but it is not enterprise grade workflow (yet). Indeed, out of the box it doesn’t work (at least, not fully). I’ll explain some of the issues with SharePoint Workflow later, but first I want to describe what SharePoint workflow is. Read more »

Tags: Workflow

Twospeakers at the user group meeting last night. The first session was an eye opener for me, one of those ‘thoughts crystalising’ moments. Read more »

Tags: Office, SharePoint Development, Suguk

Curious problem - I kept getting an error message “Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.” whenever I tried to open a document from our internal MOSS system. Strange.

Eventually figured it out from Geekette’s Blogette, and kbAlertz 833714.

We use Project 2003 still. This means two version of the owssupp.dll, apparently, under c:\program files\Microsoft Office\office11 and \office12

I followed the advice from the MS Knowledgebase article, but got the same error as all the folks at kbAlertz. In the end I tried just uninstalling MS Project Professional 2003 support - and low, Internet Explorer started letting me open documents from MOSS again. And, much to my surprise, Project 2003 web access works just fine - I guess it doesn’t use that dll.