Where is my iisapp.vbs in Win 2008 Server ?

In sharepoint development iisapp is one of the script which I use heavily to find the application pools running and to recycle a single application pool. This is the usual case in doing development against Win 2003 & IIS 6. While starting the development in Win 2008 server soon it showed me that I'm dealing with a different web server.

Hit the command line console and gave iisapp, it replied that it is not an internal command or invalid command. IIS 7.0 gotta new administration console command called appcmd.

Giving the command "%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe list wp" provides me the information about the running application pools in IIS 7

Yet another tool to learn in a SharePoint developer's life ....

WCF Activation HTTP-Non HTTP Activation fails with Fatal error 0x80070643

Last night while preparing a Windows Server 2008 for the evaluation of SharePoint Server 2010 beta, I've installed all the prerequisites of SharePoint 2010, installed the roles, beta preview binaries and some hotfixes etc. I just wanted evaluate .NET 4.0 beta 1 along with SharePoint 2010.

While adding the features for my server such as .NET Framework 3.0, WCF activation, Window process activation service and desktop experience. Except WCF activation everything wen t smooth. My Server restarted dozen times saying "Configuring updates were failed reverting changes".

After sometime go-ogling the web resulted in the following Microsoft Connect article saying that the .NET Framework 4.0 is the culprit and uninstalling this will resolve the issue. But no luck even after uninstalling .NET Framework 4.0 and .NET 3.5 SP1.

At last I've uninstalled all the prerequisites of SharePoint 2010 related hotfixes, CTP's and beta previews. Now the WCF Activation feature installed like a breeze and finally succeeded in setting up my evaluation copy.

But a beta binary set installation which blocks a Server feature installation is not so good and as usual Microsoft doesn't provide any useful reasonable error message. Moral of the story is build is your box in a clean slate, Add roles and features required to the server and the add up your hot fixes,CTP's and betas.

Hope it helps some one

Are you planning to practise SharePoint 2010 with zero set up and configuration

Download the pre-configured Hyper-V SharePoint 2010 Evaluation and Demo Virtual Machine (~1.8GB) along with the SharePoint 2010 Walkthrough Guide for a chance to get hands on with SharePoint 2010 with zero set up and configuration.

but take a look at the system requirements, it might soar a bit

System Requirements

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2008 R2

Additionally you will need:

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Hyper-V role enabled.
2. Drive Formatting: NTFS
3. Processor: Intel VT or AMD-V capable
4. RAM: 8 GB or more recommended
5. Hard disk space required for install: 50 GB

How to get NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users group using .NET object model

Yes obviously I can hard code a string constant for the value and use the string "NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users but I hate hard coding values if the object model is rich enough to provide me a way.

Following method will return NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users group as a string

public static string GetNTAuthenticatedUsers()
{
return new SecurityIdentifier(WellKnownSidType.AuthenticatedUserSid, null).Translate(typeof(NTAccount)).Value;
}

Global Assembly Cache goes empty

While doing the development on a SharePoint machine, it is frequent to deploy the dlls in GAC and resetting the IIS or recycling the application pool. one day the GAC goes empty and all of us sudden we are not able to deploy the library to the GAC. It had a solution of restarting the development machine but this issue is frequent among the team members

Solution for this is to navigate to Start-> Run - >services.msc and find "Indexing services" stop/restart the service and reopen the assembly window. There you go . .. .

Fix : Location.href not working in IE 6

We recently tried to do a post back of a page based on a user input in a text box, the postback will be triggered by a ASP LinkButton. ASP Linkbutton renders as an anchor tag with the href populated with javascript:WebForm_DoPostBackWithOptions. So the challenge is to set the window.location to the javascript:WebForm_DoPostBackWithOptions

window.location= javascript:WebForm_DoPostBackWithOptions .. . ..

The location can be a URL too, in our case it is just a post back script

It works like a charm in IE 8 but it doesn't even show a sign in IE 6. We tried many variations window.location=, window.location.href= ,window.location.href.assign but nothing worked out.

After few hours of googling and surfing the web we found that we need to add the following line to get it worked in IE 6

window.event.returnValue=false;

At last the final code looked like this

if (evt.keyCode == 13)
{
window.event.returnValue = false;
window.location = 'http://www.google.com";
return false;
}

hope this helps someone .. .

Silverlight on Symbian platform

While Adobe is still struggling to get it Flash to iPhone platform, Microsoft released silverlight for Symbian platform. this will enable Nokia S60 5th edition to display silverlight content. As Microsoft already enable Silverlight in its mobile operating system now it is extending the technology to another open source smart phone platform.

check out the Nokia beta labs here