Notes from Tech Ed 2011 India - 2

TFS: Continuous Global Delivery, presented by Vinay Badami and following notes were taken from the session.

• Supports client installations- Windows Vista, Windows 7
• Supports 64 bit architecture
• Supports Java development within Eclipse(using Team Explorer Everywhere 2010)

Build Automation

• Integrate early, integrate often
• Continuous integration
• Builds on every Check-in
• Gated check-in - Only if build succeeds the code gets checked-in to the source code repository.
• Rolling builds to control frequency.

Branches and visualization

• Visualize integration across all branches
• Track the branches and change set.

Integrates with other version control systems and bug tracking systems using TFS Integration platform

Notes from Tech Ed 2011 India - 1

"Design,Performance and capacity factors for successful intranet and internet SharePoint sites" session was presented by Sanjay Narang from MCS and following notes were taken from the session. All credit goes to Sanjay for enlightening the full house.

RPS- Request per second 
An indicator to express the number of request served by the web farm irrespective of size of the request

Points to note while tracking the load of the server

1. All Users - Total user base of the application
2. Active users - Total users who are currently using the application
3. Concurrent users - Total users who are currently using the same functionality concurrently(Given the nature of HTTP's disconnected architecture this'll be very few)

(Image from Microsoft Technet)

RPS Calculation

1. Take IIS logs from all the servers in web farm
2. Take from a peak hour traffic of a day
3. Use tools like Log parser to query the log files collected.(how to use Log parser ?)
4. Avoid requests for for image,CSS,JS while calculating RPS.
5. Avoid Http 401's also

Decision point

1. Average RPS on a day
2. Average RPS in  a peak hour
3. Max RPS in a peak hour
4. Average daily concurrent users
5. Peak concurrent users in peak time

Dataset

The size of data stored in a system is called as Dataset, typically in SharePoint world we call it as Content Database and its size

Points consider while planning for Dataset

1. Content Database size
2. Temp DB Size
3. Transaction Log size
4. Space required for full backup
5. Number of documents and versions in content db's
6. Number of metadata associated to the documents
7. Number of other list items (need to calculate the size of the list item too)

Performance and Reliability

1. Server availability - Overall uptime of the system
2. Server responsiveness - A Farm's time taken to serve the request
3. System resource utilization - CPU utilization and available memory

Boundaries and limits

When you plan for the capacity planning and management, it is essential to keep a tab on the product boundaries and limits

1. Content Database size - 200 GB
2. Site collection size  - Max 100 GB
3. Site Collection per Content database - 5000 Max/2000 recommended

General recommendation of Servers

• One WFE server per 10k users
• One SQL instance per 4 WFE servers
• 3-5 WFE Cores per Sql Core
• One DC per three WFE servers
• 2-4 GB memory per CPU core

High availability - points to consider

• Hardware/Software load balancers
• Cluster/Mirror of Sql server
• Service applications associated to the app
• Search target, dedicated/distributed

Sql Server memory recommendation

• Small - 8 GB
• Medium - 16 GB
• To handle up to  2TB of data - 32 GB
• To handle data from 2TB to 5TB - 64 GB
• To handle more than 5 TB - Go for new instance of Sql server

As there is no perfect tool (yes there is a tool called HP Sizer is available)to tell you what kind of Farm is required for your purpose, it requires a careful assessment of all these points and the requirement is necessary to arrive at a conclusion. It is always recommended to do oversizing rather than undersizing(Want to know your servers are over sized/undersized, use performance monitor counters to gather data and analyse).

I guess most of the points were taken from this Technet Article. Nevertheless for those who need full set of information please go through that link. I don't find the deck presented from Tech Ed site, will provide a link when it's available.

List does not exist error

While adding a new list view web part to a homepage , stuck with the following exception.

List does not exist The page you selected contains a list that does not exist. It may have been deleted by another user.

After some fiddling, found Web.Id for a LVWP is required to resolve this issue. After providing the WebId for the ListViewWebPart, web part adds to the page perfectly.

ListViewWebPart lvp = new ListViewWebPart();
lvp.ListName = Web.Lists["Tasks"].ID.ToString("B").ToUpper()  ;
lvp.ZoneID = "Center";
lvp.Title = "Tasks List";
lvp.WebId = Web.ID;  
SPFile homePage = Web.GetFile("default.aspx");
SPLimitedWebPartManager webmngr = homePage.GetLimitedWebPartManager (PersonalizationScope. Shared);
webmngr.AddWebPart(lvp, "Center", 3);
webmngr.SaveChanges(lvp);

Happy SharePointing :)

Free alternatives for Redgate Reflector

Recently my Reflector time bombed and refused to open. As a SharePoint developer, this is one of the crucial tool in my toolbox to peep in to SharePoint binaries. Finally it seems like Redgate  betrayed .NET community for not keeping this little tool free and alive.
In search of an alternative for this great tool by Lutz Roeder, found some interesting projects.

ILSpy - a promising open source alternative.developed by SharpDevelop team.
Monoflector- uses Cecil,MEF
Resharper 6 Decompiler - Resharper is planning to provide a free stand alone decompiler,
Kaliro Explorer - bunch of other tools like Moss explorer, calendar sync are also available along with this
DotNet IL Editor - It can disassemble and debug the assemblies

Still wondering why this functionality is not integrated in VS 2010 ?

Adobe integrates Acrobat Reader X with SharePoint

Adobe's X series PDF editor and reader Acrobat X and Reader X now tightly integrates with SharePoint. We need to provide the OpenControl key in the DocIcon.xml and clients should use Acrobat X or Reader X to leverage.

Now it provides additional options like Edit Document, Check-in,Check out,Discard check out for PDF documents.

If I say Edit Document, PDF automatically opens the document in Reader X and also asks whether I want to check out

It also provides a UI cue for the checked out document too

Once the documents are checked out in MS Office suit, the document library page automatically refreshes to show the checked out icon but here that refresh is not happening.

How to configure SharePoint for this ?

• You need to add the following lines in DocIcon.xml 
  
  • You can find DocIcon.xml in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML

AdobePDF.png

• Right click and save the above Acrobat PDF icon to your machine in the name of AdobePDF.png and copy it to folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES
• Now do an IISRESET and let IIS load these new resources.
• Repeat all the steps in all of your web front end servers

All these steps remain same for MOSS 2007, just change the \14\Template\XML to 12\Template\XML while doing modifications to DocIcon.xml and copying the AdobePDF.png file

SharePoint 2010 Approval workflow, a marvel

Way back our team built a multi stage approval workflow with serial and parallel flow options for MOSS 2007. Recently stumbled upon the SharePoint 2010 approval workflow which eventually showcases all these functionalities right out of the box. This is one of the huge improvement in SharePoint 2010

Lets see what are the configurable parameters it allows us to configure

Approvers
Accepts multiple users who are in the capacity of approving the content ,seperated by semicolons

Order:
Determines in which order the execution goes whether serial or parallel, technically in which order the tasks created to the Approvers

Flow of a Serial workflow

Flow of a Parallel workflow

Expand Groups

If checked and groups entered in approvers section will be expanded and tasks will be created for individual users else only a single task will be created for the whole group. Any user from the group can approve or reject

Request

A comment text which will be sent to the approver via email and approval screen also

Due Date for all Tasks

Final date on which all approvals should be completed

Duration per task

Amount of time for each task is due, works along with Duration Units

Duration Units

You can choose days,months or years in this drop down, works along with Duration per task

CC

Want to keep an additional person in approval loop, this is the place to go

End on First Rejection

Any approver rejects the document, workflow gets stopped and document rejected

End on Document Change

Some author changes the original document while the approval in progress, now the whole workflow gets terminated if the original is modified.

Enable Content Approval

Changes the content approval status of the library based on workflow approval

Microsoft Tech Ed 2011 India March 23-25

Microsoft Tech.ed in Bangalore, for more information and registration
http://www.microsoft.com/india/teched2011/