Author: Tristan Watkins

WordPress 3.0 is here (here)

I’ve just put my cowboy hat on and did a WordPress 2.9.x -> 3.0 automatic upgrade (after backing up the database with the WordPress Database Backup plug-in). It completed very quickly and the site seems to be running much faster now. The theme will take some time to get right but I opted to put the new Twenty Ten default theme in place because the layout options are nice and I wanted to get to grips with it ASAP. So far so good. All of the old functionality seemed to keep working, even though much of it is not 3.0 certified yet. I just needed to replace my widgets after switching to the new theme, but that was expected/normal. The cowboy hat’s back in storage again now until I decide to do some other ill-advised stuff upgrade my music site.

Recovering from Hyper-V Virtual Machine corruption

I was recently working with a Hyper-V VM that had a large branch of snapshots that I wanted to clean up, in order to conserve disk space. This was a SharePoint 2010 development VM which I’d configured specifically for a project, so I didn’t need all of the earlier snapshots. The environment has two VMs (one domain controller, everything else on the other), so I deleted all of the snapshots that I needed to get rid of on the first VM, one-by-one. From previous experience I knew that I could delete multiple snapshots before the initial merge operation completed. Hyper-V creates a queue of the merge operations that need to complete before the virtual machine can be restarted again. I left myself with only the latest snapshot and moved on to the second virtual machine to do the same. At this point I got a little too clever and started deleting the second snapshot before the first snapshot deletion was queued. It usually only takes a few seconds to complete but I jumped the gun and Hyper-V Manager threw two errors (4096 and 16410) regarding Virtual Machine file access when I tried to delete the second snapshot.

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Office Web App default cache size is 100 GB

Earlier today I noticed some fairly innocuous commentary in the Features that influence the size of content databases section of the Storage and SQL Server capacity planning and configuration (SharePoint Server 2010) TechNet guidance:

“If Office Web Apps are being used, the Office Web Apps cache can significantly affect the size of a content database. By default, the Office Web Apps cache is configured to be 100 GB. For more information about the size of the Office Web Apps cache, see Manage the Office Web Apps cache.”

100 GB? Surely that can’t be right. So I followed the link and found that:

The Microsoft Word Web App and Microsoft PowerPoint Web App generate a series of images to create a rendition of a document that is viewable in the browser. If Microsoft Silverlight 3 is installed, XAML is used to create the rendition. Creating the rendition can consume large amounts of computer resources. To reduce resource consumption, the Word Web App and PowerPoint Web App store the renditions in a cache, created as part of a SharePoint content database. Renditions in the cache are then used for future requests of a view of the same document. In an environment where most documents change infrequently, but are viewed regularly, maximizing the space dedicated to the cache or the expiration period, can improve performance and reduce resource consumption. In an environment where most documents frequently change, you can optimize performance by reducing the space that is dedicated to the cache, or by reducing the time documents are stored in the cache.

So… make sure to plan SQL database disk space accordingly (nb: this is an update to the original post – I originally thought this was front-end disk space). Also note that you can pin the cache to a specific site collection’s content database. Either reduce the cache size (instructions in that link above) and adjust according to performance needs or invest in SQL storage accordingly.

And don’t forget to plunder the enormous investments Microsoft are making in SharePoint 2010 documentation. It’s the only way you’ll find out about all of these considerations.

Publishing a network-isolated virtual machine with RemoteApp

To understand the development environment design choices that this article pertains to, it may be worth glancing at the design section of my SharePoint development series before diving in, if you haven’t already followed those posts.

Cloning isolated VMs vs. scripted installation

One of the challenges we’ve always faced with SharePoint development has been the tension between cloning actually identical environments versus automating the deployment across distinct environments (or worse, repeating the installation manually). In the first case we save time by eliminating reconfiguration and this ensures a consistent experience for each user. This is particularly beneficial for software development. These benefits can also be obtained by scripting installation/configuration/deployment but there’s a considerable overhead associated with developing and testing those scripts. As SharePoint 2010 is still quite new and we’ve been working on projects for some time now, we didn’t have the luxury of waiting for those refinements and we needed to take advantage of these efficiencies as we had done with SharePoint 2007 projects.

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MAC duplication issues with captured VMs and WDS

I’ve previously reported problems with MAC duplication on Hyper-V host external network connections on Windows Server 2008 R2, which I’ve never fully resolved, although we have been successfully working around the issue as detailed in the first link above.

A couple of weeks ago I was working simultaneously on my Windows Server 2008 R2 laptop with Hyper-V (the same laptop build that’s been previously mentioned) and a Windows 7 x64 build that I was using for testing, when I noticed severe but intermittent network problems on both machines. After a fair amount of head scratching, I noticed that the two laptops had duplicated MAC addresses. Blatantly that shouldn’t happen, as the whole point of a MAC address is to provide uniqueness. The most perplexing issue was that the addresses conflicted across two different operating systems. However, it happened. Both wired adapters on the two machines had the MAC address 00-21-9B-DC-8E-0B. I uninstalled the wired adapter on the Windows 7 machine and scanned for new hardware. When the device reinstalled the problem went away. Continue reading “MAC duplication issues with captured VMs and WDS”

How Azure improved Groove -> Microsoft Sync Framework

This Microsoft case study reveals how Microsoft’s SharePoint WorkSpace revamps Groove for 2010 using the Microsoft Sync Framework, an Azure technology that can also be used for systems integration – not just off-line synchronisation. This should yield a more reliable synchronisation experience, improve scalability and customisation. It’s worth a quick read. Oh, and did you know SharePoint WorkSpace is also a part of Office 2010 Mobile?

Superflows are here, with authoring in due course

Tony Soper, a Senior Technical Writer for Microsoft, has been revealing some interesting new content recently. Both System Center Configuration Manager and Forefront Threat Management Gateway (the successor to ISA) have, “Superflows”, which are described as, “a new Content Type”. After poking around for a bit I found this 8 minute podcast from 2008, where Tony interviews Doug Eby from the SCCM team about Superflows in more detail. They’re, “an interactive flowchart”. A Superflow can ask questions (about an environment, for instance) and a resulting flow will be targeted based on those answers. In the podcast they say this will be extensible in future and that there will be authoring support of some sort, so it will be interesting to see how this sits beside Visio, Visual Studio and InfoPath as a form/flow technology. I’ve asked Tony for more information about that on his blog and was told to watch that space for an eventual release date. I’d recommend this anyway, as his blog is a trove of good information, particularly around Virtualisation.

PDF iFilter performance benchmarks, in which FoxIt performs nearly 40x better than Adobe

I’m not usually keen on re-posting other blog entries here, but I think this is quite important. Jie Li from Microsoft has been releasing some good guidance on SharePoint 2010 recently. In his most recent posts he’s been looking at FoxIt’s PDF iFilter 2.0 and comparing performance against TET and Adobe. Both TET and FoxIt are optimised for multicore processors while Adobe will only use a single CPU. This has massive performance implications. In his tests a full crawl too 13 minutes with FoxIt versus 8 hours+ with Adobe. http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2010/02/09/pdf-ifilter-test-with-sharepoint-2010.aspx