Ditching the Tablet: Windows 8 Revives Netbooks

Soon before Windows 8 tablets became available I wrote about my selection process, focusing on some of the key decisions that helped narrow my choices. This was largely a consideration of WindowsRT on ARM vs. Windows on Atom vs. Windows on i-Series processors. My first few weeks with this device have been a mixed bag. I’ve now returned the tablet, replacing it with a Netbook. I can’t say I saw any of this coming, so I thought it might be good to write about the issues I faced between the time that I decided on a Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro and when I finally returned it after eight weeks. I’ll also revisit my criteria with some hands-on experience under my belt and consider how Ultrabooks/Netbooks with touch compare to ARM/Atom tablets for price/functionality/components, and how Windows 8 itself is disruptive to hardware refresh patterns. Although this post roams a bit, I hope it’s joined up by some common threads of unexpected/disruptive effects of Windows 8.

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SharePoint 2010 Development Environment Performance: SSD, i5 vs. i7, WEI and Sandy Bridge

Late last year my colleagues and I tried to distil the tasks that impede SharePoint developer productivity. Then I ran those tests on EC2, Hyper-V and VMware Workstation, with the latter two virtualisation technologies running on a desktop, an older laptop and a newer laptop. In this post I hope to shed a bit of light on some follow-up testing that I’ve squeezed in to the odd hour here and there over the last six months. Unfortunately hardware availability and my schedule have not aligned to produce a further round of comprehensive tests and since I can’t see that occurring in the immediate future I’m going to fill in some gaps here with a couple of additional concrete findings, particularly regarding i5 vs. i7 testing and the impact of SSD on first page load times after application pool recycles. I’ll also talk less rigorously about a few related issues.

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People Search Result Organisation Browser Link Doesn’t Respect Alternate Access Mappings

My colleague Anthony Clegg and I have recently been working on a project together, for which I’ve designed and delivered the infrastructure, while he’s been delivering the solution. As part of my design, I extended the SharePoint Web Applications from the default HTTPS zones to new HTTP zones, exclusively for crawling. This approach has been around for some time, but there’s a new wrinkle on the SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search Centre People Search results page, which I’ll discuss here:

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Office Web Apps Infrastructure Considerations

I’ve recently been involved in a somewhat unusual client engagement, in that I was designing and delivering the infrastructure without knowing the shape of the IA or solution architecture. Obviously, this imposed some restrictions on what we could define, but it also meant that I had to handle some aspects of the engagement that would normally be taken care of by other colleagues. To that end, I suppose some of these considerations aren’t purely infrastructure-specific, but they could be in an engagement like this one and they’re things that infrastructure people should understand. Hopefully it’ll be useful for solutions people as well.

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SharePoint 2010 Development Environment Performance Test Results

Drum roll please! At long last, I bring you the results of a great deal of testing. Here’s the background:

I’ve said my preamble in those posts, so I’ll cut to the chase here.

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SharePoint 2010 Development Environment Performance Tests

As I indicated in my last post, I’ve been plundering the depths of SharePoint development productivity in recent months. Understanding the context established in that post is pretty essential to understanding what follows here. In a nutshell, I’m trying to improve system performance for current users of our SharePoint development environment. This is not as simple as examining the Windows Experience Index on a number of laptop models. I needed to consult with our users to identify which tasks are slow for them and devise tests that would allow me to measure system performance on different physical and virtual systems. In this post I will describe the systems, the tests and the testing process before reviewing the results.

The Tests

The 21 tests that we settled on were the result of discussions with a number of the core developers, consultants and architects at Content and Code, plus a few tests that I threw in to confirm/disconfirm some of my suppositions, such as the impact of the User Profile Service Connection on first page load time. All 21 tests were run three times for each permutation of hardware candidate and virtualisation technology. We also tested on Amazon EC2. I will discuss the testing process in more detail in a moment.

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SharePoint Development Productivity and Virtualisation Technologies

In the near future, I’ll be discussing the results of the SharePoint Development productivity testing that I’ve been working on for some time. A key part of the background to that story is a choice to virtualise SharePoint, and within that, a choice of virtualisation technology. In this post I’ll be reviewing the problem in advance of a more detailed discussion of the productivity gains and losses with some of these technologies/approaches.

For clarity, I will quickly state the problem as I see it. SharePoint 2010 system requirements and practitioner mobility requirements are inherently at odds. What guidance exists for this unique problem space tends to regurgitate preferences/allegiances rather than comparing technologies and ratifying assumptions with real-world tests. At best, you get system performance indices for a single laptop model, but these results may vary when any hardware component is changed.

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User Profile Service Connection and Slow First Page Load

I’m presently running some quite methodical SharePoint 2010 development environment performance tests, as we’re finding that the Dell XPS M1330 we’ve been using for the last few years doesn’t really cut it in some scenarios. This has been an on-going issue for some time where I work, but it’s only recently been prioritised at the top of my workload. That it is now my top priority should give some indication how important these issues are for any company that spends significant time customising SharePoint. I’ll be discussing this wider project in more detail once I’ve finished my testing in the next couple of weeks, but for now I wanted to share a provisional finding about connecting Web Applications to the User Profile Service Application.

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Bit Rate Throttling Fix Released

A couple of weeks ago I posted information about a Fix For Bit Rate Throttling W3WP Crashes in SharePoint 2010. A few hours ago, Jack Freelander from IIS.NET announced that IIS Media Services 4.0 has been released, including this fix. This is just a quick post to update that the fix has passed Beta, in case anyone was waiting on the final release before diving in.

I still have yet to find the time to test this myself, but I’d be very keen to hear about your experiences – good or bad. Failing that, I hope to get back to this in the next couple of weeks.