Jukka on SharePoint

Windows Phone, Web Services and EndpointNotFoundException

patonki — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 12:22:00 GMT

I wanted to share once again one little piece of information that i bumped into while developing a software for my Windows Phone.

I was trying to figure out how to test whether a web service was online so i created a simple "isAlive" method that returns a Boolean. Of course if the web service is offline the method will not respond. Actually the whole end point will throw an exception.

There was no useful info on the web so with trial and error i noticed this behavior.

I made a user control with Visual Studio & Expression Blend which indicates whether the service is online or not:

The code itself is quite straight forward. But the thing that did not cross my mind at this point was that the request is asynchronous which means that there is no place for a try catch except the proxy class (reference.cs) of the Web Service. Obviously I do not want to touch that class since it is auto-generated.

So what happens if the service is not alive?

The service proxy class will throw an EndpointNotFoundException. This is the one that you are unable to catch and go around. But guess what.. This happens only in the emulator and you can actually continue debugging by hitting F5.

So here’s what you can do about it:

Check the e.Error from isAliveCompletedEventArgs and if that is null you did not hit an exception and vice versa.

The phone itself does not throw the exception visible at all so with this approach you can handle the situation. Different story is should you test for overall data connectivity before making the first call.

Happy coding!

Error during SharePoint SP2 install

patonki — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:06:00 GMT

I just installed (x64 MOSS with SP1 & Feb cumulative update installed) WSS SP2, MOSS SP2, WSS fi-fi LP SP2, MOSS fi-fi LP SP2 and didn't run the config wizard until the end and this is how things went:

Try #1

psconfig -cmd upgrade -wait -inplace b2b

Three steps went through and then Error. Feature '20477d83-8bdb-414e-964b-080637f7d99b' is not installed in this farm. Few little searches inside 12-hive and it seemed to be "PublishingTimerJobs" -feature.
No panic at this point. This is sharepoint so why not install the feature via stsadm.

Try #2

stsadm -o installfeature -name PublishingTimerJobs
psconfig -cmd upgrade -wait -inplace b2b

Whee. Everything works :)

Hope this helps if someone hits the same issue.

How to configure ssl for whole site with output caching enabled

patonki — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:05:07 GMT

I ran into a new situation which i haven't thought about before. What if you have a public facing anonymous sharepoint site and you want to add a ssl cert for the whole site + you have output caching enabled with VaryByHeaders set to User-Agent. Most of us would handle this situation by inserting the ssl cert to the extended anonymous iis website.

Situation: Cache flushed, first user hits https://www.contoso.com and then the second user goes to http://www.contoso.com and gets all the links pointing to the https site. This is because IIS + output caching is related to one IIS website at the time (one w3wp.exe process). Here's how to go around this issue.

Extend the website once more and put it with the same host header as the anonymous site but map it to port 800. This is because IIS does not allow two websites with same port & host header (obviously). Then add the

SSL cert to this new website. The picture below describes why.

Port 800 never get hits but the website responds to the https requests.

Windows 2008 Server and Sharepoint 2007 on my laptop

patonki — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 08:32:00 GMT

This is something that have been annoying me a lot since i joined Microsoft. I installed Vista Ultimate on my laptop and used Virtual PC 2007 to run my MOSS environments. There's nothing bad about it, don't get me wrong. But i'm used to check little things; where to find files under the 12hive for example, check something from the object model by launching visual studio and so on. Ok, ok, all of these might have been reached by copying the 12hive to the vista machine and so fort - No thanks. And the VPC thingie is not the fastest way of doing these things. It takes a while to boot the image.

So. Now that longhorn reached its latest build I made the desicion. I'll go back to the model where i have a local MOSS and laptop running on a proper server OS. One step closer to practise what you preach :)

Few basic things to do:

Install Windows Server 2008 (i used the x64 version)
Add the IIS Role to the server and check all the necessary features (frameworks, inet mgr etc.)
To make it look like Vista you'll need to add the Desktop experience feature and then after the installation you need to do start -> run -> services.msc -> Enable "Themes"-service and start it. And then go to Control Panel -> Personalization -> Themes and switch it on.
Install SQL Server 2005 + SP2
Install MOSS
And please, while installing - the only port you'll need is for central admin. For other sites use port 80 and host headers.
Something that I did, was to install it with my domain credentials. I know, it will be a pain in the dark hole when it's time to change password, but hey, we did the same thing back at sps 2003 times ;)

After a clean boot my machine is consuming about 1.3Gb of RAM. Not bad at all. I didn't enable hyper-v because then you'll loose sleep mode and that's not nice when using a laptop platform.

Maybe i'll get back with you after some time and see how things have been going on with this setup.

Do it!

Fastest way to create a list schema

patonki — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:48:10 GMT

Feeling frustrated, feeling like you can't make to the deadline, million lists schemas to create and so much other things to do.. Sounds familiar?

Well.. Some of the people i've talked with does not recognize this method most of the time (yep, making a long story short):

1) Create the list using the UI, add the content types or fields, tune up the settings etc.

2) Open Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions

3) Select the list you created and extract the schema!

4) Remove the commented lines from all the files (usually on the second row: dunno why)

5) Make a feature of it

6) Rule the world

List definition and property DisallowContentTypes

patonki — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 13:32:00 GMT

Be careful with this property. If you set it true in the list definition, there is no easy way to set it back to false after the list has been populated.

SPList object has two properties AllowContentTypes which is ReadOnly and ContentTypesEnabled, which you cannot set to true if the list is created as stated above.

If you do an export of the list and look at the Manifest.xml you can see that there's a property called Flags which has this number combo without any sense. After some reverse engineering i found a point that this string begins with number "137" if the DisallowContentTypes is set to true.

Do not touch the database. :)

If you want to change that, you'll need to modify the Manifest.xml and package it back to a new cab and do an import with it. (Remove the existing list before import). I cannot provide any guarantees that will not break anything but it seems to work.

There's also one interesting property in the ImportSettings class. Setting RetainObjectIdentity to True will keep the GUID's as in the source list. Nice little feature if you have data in other lists that depends on the guids of this lists items.

Enjoy

How to access fields in a listitem through object model?

patonki — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:17:00 GMT

 

In a nutshell :

SPContext.Current.Web.Lists["Documents"].Items[0]["Title"].ToString();

Locale & variations

patonki — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 21:32:00 GMT

Today i was figuring out how to detect which locale is in use on a site with variation labels.

Here's a little codeblock to demonstrate it:

// code in assembly Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing

PublishingWeb pWeb = PublishingWeb.GetPublishingWeb(SPContext.Current.Web);

// returns LCID
string curLocale = pWeb.Label.Locale;

// code

Easy :)