Uninstalling and re-installing ADFS v. 2.0

I recently screwed up my ADFS v. 2.0 installation on a test environment by using a bad SSL (Service Communications) certificate.  Of course, the UI nor PowerShell offered any help in fixing this issue, therefore, I had to resort to completely uninstalling and re-installing ADFS v. 2.0.  It is recommended that you follow the steps below to perform a COMPLETE cleanup of ADFS. 

If you forget to perform one of the cleanup operations such as deleting the application directories from the IIS website, you will receive an error message similar to the following:

1. Go into Control Panel-->Programs
2. Uninstall a Program
3. Click on View Installed Updates in the left hand pane
4. Click on Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 listed under the Windows heading
5. Click the Uninstall button
6. When prompted for the confirmation, click Yes
7. Click Restart Later to postpone restarting the computer
8. Now it is time to clean up the IIS installation of ADFS
• Open up a Command Prompt window
• Type the following command at the command prompt: C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\appcmd delete app “Default Web Site/adfs”
• If the command was successful, it should indicate that the Web App was deleted such as the following message: APP object "Default Web Site/adfs" deleted
• Type the following command at the command prompt: C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\appcmd delete app “Default Web Site/adfs/ls”
• If the command was successful, it should indicate that the Web App was deleted such as the following message: APP object "Default Web Site/adfs/ls" deleted
•  Delete the ADFS folder from the file system (usually under C:\inetpub\adfs)
9. Now you should be able to restart the computer
10. After re-starting the computer, you can proceed with re-installing ADFS (and perhaps Update Rollup 2).
11. Once ADFS has been re-installed, you can proceed with the ADFS Configuration Wizard once more
12. Proceed through the ADFS Configuration Wizard as before
13. When you get to the step where you have to delete the existing ADFS database, check the checkbox to "Delete database"
14. If everything works correctly, the ADFS Configuration wizard should complete successfully (with perhaps some warnings).

Troubleshooting SSL Issues in IIS

If you are like me, you frequently use Self-Signed certificates.  Unfortunately, one of the problems with using Self-Signed certificates is that they frequently cause browser issues (especially with Internet Explorer).  Whereas other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome will actually provide detailed information about the errors discovered with the SSL Certificate, Internet Explorer in many cases will simply refuse to connect altogether (yet another reason to NOT use Internet Explorer).

Even though SSL certificates will probably continue to be the bane for Internet Explorer users for the foreseeable future, fortunately, there is a tool available to help you further troubleshoot these issues.

If you ever had to deal with troubleshooting SSL Certificates in the days of IIS 6, you probably remember the good old SSL Diagnostics tool published by Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=674

Unfortunately, Microsoft does not seem to have published and released a new version of SSL Diagnostics for IIS 7 and above.  But do not lose all hope just yet....  A clever Microsoft developer has released a version of the SSL Diagnostics tool for IIS 7 and above that can be downloaded from here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vijaysk/archive/2009/09/20/ssl-diagnostics-tool-for-iis-7.aspx

It functions in a similar manner as the old SSL Diagnostics tool by enumerating all of the IIS websites and providing details specific to the SSL Certificate configurations on each of them:

So if you are experiencing unknown issues presumably due to bad SSL certificates, you now have a tool that can help you troubleshoot those nasty SSL browser problems!

How to use PowerGUI for SharePoint PowerShell scripts

If you are looking for a better PowerShell IDE than the PowerShell window or PowerShell ISE, you should check out PowerGUI:  http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/powergui/m/bits/20439049.aspx

If you are using PowerGUI for SharePoint 2013, you are in luck! The latest version of PowerGUI supports SharePoint 2013. 

If you want to script for SharePoint 2010, unfortunately, the latest version of the IDE runs on the .Net 4.0 runtime and therefore and does not support SharePoint PowerShell commands.

However, there is a fix for this!

1. Navigate to the PowerGUI installation directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\PowerGUI)
2. Look for the file called ScriptEditor.exe.config
3. Open up the file in a text editor of your choice
4. Find the supportedRuntime element for .Net 4.0
5. Comment out that line and save the file
6. Now, re-open PowerGUI Script Editor
7. From the File menu, select PowerShell Libraries
8. Select the checkbox next to Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
9. Wait for the PowerShell libraries to load
10. Once they are loaded, you should be able to begin creating PowerShell scripts for SharePoint!

Be careful with using SetSPN in conjunction with ADFS

I was recently messing around with ADFS and changing configuration settings and so forth based on this article:  http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/ad-fs-2-0-how-to-change-the-federation-service-name.aspx and the corresponding SetSPN article:  http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/ad-fs-2-0-how-to-configure-the-spn-serviceprincipalname-for-the-service-account.aspx

Of course, when I was making these changes, I was under the impression that the changes would be localized to ADFS--boy was I WRONG!!

After making these changes, silly me, I decided to go and run iisreset.  Suddenly, I could no longer access Central Administration and the Application Pool for Central Admin would not start.  So, SharePoint and Windows being what it is, I decided to re-boot the server to see if that would alleviate the problem.  

Of course, when I tried to log back into the system, I got the following error message: 

"The security database on the server does not have a computer account for this workstation trust relationship"

Unfortunately, since I was running a domain controller and ADFS on the same server, this left me with no ability to get back into the server to fix the issue!!  

Thankfully, the installation was on a VM and I had made a recent backup.  So all I had to do was simply restore the VM from a backup.  

However, when working with ADFS and SetSPN--Be WARNED of the consequences of your actions!!

Installation problem while installing SQL Server 2012 with Visual Studio 2010 SP1

If you are installing a single machine with both SQL Server Developer or Enterprise Edition as well as Visual Studio 2010, you may encounter an unusual issue with recognition of the Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack (SP1): http://samirvaidya.blogspot.com/2012/06/visual-studio-sdk-you-must-have.html

This actually occurs in the scenario where you install SQL Server 2012 with SQL Server Data Tools after you have already installed Visual Studio 2010 with SP1.  Since SQL Server Data Tools is its own version of the Visual Studio 2010 IDE, it removes the registry flag that indicates that SP1 for Visual Studio 2010 was installed successfully. 

Therefore, when you later attempt to install a program that has a Visual Studio 2010 SP1 dependency (such as the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 SDK), you will get a failure upon installation!!

So, if you want to avoid this error message, you can either install SQL Server 2012 before installing Visual Studio 2010 with SP1 or use the registry hack that I provided in the article above to work around this problem.

ADFS v. 2.0 and Windows Server 2012

If you currently use ADFS v. 2.0, you should be excited to know that ADFS v. 2.0 will be built into the next version of Windows Server--namely Windows Server 2012.  

Windows Server 2012 boasts new ease of use for setting up and configuring ADFS v. 2.0 as well as support for some of the new features in Windows Server 2012 such as Dynamic Access Control.

You can read more details here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831502

Sending e-mail from SharePoint 2010 via Gmail

As many SharePoint 2010 Administrators already know, you are unable to configure SMTP settings for SharePoint Outgoing e-mail.  Therefore, you can only configure SMTP to listen on the default SMTP port of 25, making it impossible to use other SMTP engines such as GMail.

Fortunately, several people have discovered a workaround of using Windows' own SMTP Server and configuring it to work with GMail as described here:

http://sharepoint-snippets.com/configure-sharepoint-to-send-email-through-gmail/

http://www.jppinto.com/2010/07/how-to-configure-iis-smtp-server-to-forward-emails-using-a-gmail-account/

You can then configure outgoing e-mail settings in SharePoint Central Administration by navigating to System Settings-->Configure outgoing e-mail settings.

NOTE: If you are working with a standalone/local installation of SharePoint, you will have to use the computer name for the SMTP Server (instead of localhost or 127.0.0.1).  If your SharePoint server resides on a domain and has an associated FQDN, you can use the FQDN for the SMTP Server name instead.

However, if you have Mcafee VirusScan v. 8.8i running on your server as well, be sure to disable the Mass Mailing setting as well otherwise your e-mails will never be sent out!!  http://samirvaidya.blogspot.com/2011/03/mcafee-virusscan-can-block-sending-of-e.html

Thoughts on SharePoint 15

For those of you who have not yet worked with Windows Server 2012, you should know that .Net Framework v. 4.5 is being shipped out-of-the-box with the OS.

In addition, .Net Framework v. 4.5 ships with built-in support for Windows Identity Foundation (vs. add-on support for Windows Identity Foundation in .Net v. 3.5 and v. 4.0).

1. Therefore, given the above information, it is highly probable that SharePoint 15 will be built-on .Net Framework v. 4.5 in order to leverage the new WIF capabilities. 
2. Also, since .Net 4.5 currently only supports Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012, there is a high likelihood that Windows 2008 will no longer be a supported platform for SharePoint 15. 
3. Since Claims are becoming ever more prevalent for providing security overall, including on the Windows Server 2012 platform (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj134043), it is likely that the preferred platform for deployment of SharePoint 15 with Claims-based authentication will be Windows Server 2012.
4. Since Claims-based authentication is only supported with the release of SQL Server 2012, it is likely that the preferred database platform for the deployment of SharePoint 15 with Claims-based authentication will be SQL Server 2012.

Below is the current roadmap/release timeline for Microsoft's various products:  http://rcpmag.com/articles/2011/02/01/the-2011-microsoft-product-roadmap.aspx

UPDATE: You can check out the Hardware and Software Requirements for SharePoint 15/2013 yourself here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(office.15).aspx

If you want to download SharePoint 2013 Preview, you can get it here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/evalcenter/hh973397

How do I find the Start menu in Windows Server 2012?

After first installing Windows Server 2012, like most Windows Users, I was completely lost in trying to find the well known Start menu.

Fortunately, after watching a WebCast on Windows Server 2012, I was able to see how to find the Start menu on this brand new OS.  There are 3 ways to accomplish this:

1. You can point your arrow at the very top right hand corner of the OS to get the Start menu to appear
2. You can point your arrow at the very bottom left hand corner of the screen (where the Start menu used to be) to get the Start menu to pop up.
3. If you are using a Windows based keyboard, you can simply press the Windows key on your keyboard.

The thing that I dislike most about this overall experience is that it requires an EXTREMELY high degree of mouse precision.  The menu does not appear as soon as you are in the general vicinity, but rather requires a great amount of EXACTNESS.  Therefore, in many cases, I had to fail at numerous attempts before I was able to get it to successfully appear.  In addition, if a portion of that screen is cut off and not visible in your current view, you also will not be able to access it.

To me, that just seems like too much wasted effort.  Even though most of the functionality you can want is in the new Server Manager, it certainly does not include ALL of the required functionality (including getting to Internet Explorer). 

You can even click on the Windows Key + X to get another menu to appear with another common set of operations. 

However, to me, wasted effort is wasted time.  So while Microsoft may have made Server Manager much better than it was in previous releases, they have added additional effort to perform any tasks that I need to accomplish OUTSIDE of Server Manager.  In my opinion, it is just better to bring back the old way of getting to the Start menu.  By and large Server Administrators will continue to manage their servers from desktops and laptops and touch screens are probably a secondary or very minor concern for most enterprise organizations.

Just my 2 cents....

VMWare Tools on Windows Server 2012

While attempting to build a Windows Server 2012 virtual machine using VMWare Workstation 8.04, I noticed a particularly problematic issue while installing VMWare Tools on the resultant installation.

As soon as I began installing the ThinPrint drivers which are included with the "Typical Install", I completely blue-screened and bombed out the entire OS!!  I could not even get the server back up after several re-boots of the server.

However, there is a new required VMWare Workstation setting with Windows Server 2012 (thanks to Matthew McDermott for discovering this setting) that allows the VMWare Tools to successfully install!

1. Open up the Windows Server 2012 VM in VMWare Workstation
2. Click on Edit Virtual Machine Settings
3. Select the Display icon
4. Select the checkbox next to "Accelerate 3D Graphics"
5. Now go ahead and install VMWare Tools.
6. You should now notice that the VMWare Tools install properly and provide the same functionality as VMWare Tools on earlier OS releases such as Windows Server 2008 R2!

NOTE: This issue has been resolved with the release of VMWare Workstation 9.

Visual Studio SDK--You must have Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SP1 installed

If you are attempting to install Visual Studio 2010 SP1 SDK, you may encounter the following error message even after insalling SP1:

Error Type: Microsoft.VisualStudio.Sdk.Setup.MissingPrerequisiteException
Error Message: You must have Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SP1 installed on your computer before proceeding.

Well, as it turns out, this is isolated to a single registry flag.  For some reason, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 does not always set this registry key on systems, which subsequently causes the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 SDK installation to fail.

Since I was installing Visual Studio 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 (a 64-bit OS), I had to examine the following registry key path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\DevDiv\vs\Servicing\10.0\SP

Before SP1 is installed, this key is set at the value of 0. 

After looking at another installation where the installation of Visual Studio SP1 SDK actually worked, I discovered that this registry key needs to be set to a value of 1.

After changing the registry key to a value of 1 (using the Decimal value selection in RegEdit), I was able to successfully install the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 SDK!!  Hooray!

Microsoft.Net 3rd Party Control Vendors

I was just browsing through MSDN magazine the other day and I was wondering what other .Net Control/Component Vendors that are in the marketplace.

Now, of course, there are probably thousands (or even millions) of smaller component vendors, but I would imagine that the biggest players in the market would probably have sufficient revenue to take out full page ads (sometimes even multiple full page ads) in MSDN Magazine, so in any case, here they are:

1. Infragistics  http://www.infragistics.com
2. Devexpress http://www.devexpress.com
3. Telerik http://www.telerik.com
4. ComponentOne http://www.componentone.com
5. ComponentArt http://www.componentart.com
6. Xceed http://www.xceed.com
7. GrapeCity http://www.GCPowerTools.com
8. Spreadsheet Gear http://www.SpreadsheetGear.com
9. Syncfusion http://www.syncfusion.com

Perhaps in a future blogpost I can begin posting reviews of each of these individual control vendors.  So far I have only used controls amongst these following vendors:

1. Infragistics
2. Devexpress
3. Telerik
4. ComponentOne

Creating a Linked Server to a Universe database in SQL Server 2012

If you ever have to work with the Universe database from Rocket Software and you are a Microsoft developer  used to the niceties of using a standard RDBMS like SQL Server, chances are that you want to simplify your life by connecting to the Universe database by adding it as a Linked Server in SQL Server.

The MSDN Documentation for creating a Linked Server can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa259589(v=sql.80).aspx

As you can tell from the documentation, if you are using an ODBC-based provider/ODBC Driver, you will need to either provide a System DSN or an ODBC Connection String to the database.  Well, by taking a quick look at connectionstrings.com (http://connectionstrings.com/ibm-universe), there does not seem to be an up-to-date connection string to indicate the ODBC Drivers now produced by Rocket Software (Universe was recently acquired/sold to Rocket Software from IBM).

Therefore, given that I have very little experience with the Universe platform and had absolutely no idea what the ODBC connection string meant, I opted to use a System DSN instead.  Since I had just installed the 64-bit ODBC Driver, I was simply able to type odbcad32.exe at the Run command to open the following dialog:

Note that I checked the checkbox for "Save Password" just so that I did not have to deal with re-configuring the user credentials while creating my Linked Server.

Finally, I used SQL Server Management Studio to create my Linked Server as follows:

Since I was using the OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers, my Product Name was "MSDASQL" while my Data Source was the name of my System DSN--in this case "UNIVERSE".

After clicking OK, my Linked Server was successfully created!!

Visual Studio 2012 and the death of Moles

Microsoft has recently published their edition comparison of features for Visual Studio 2012:

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/11/en-us/products/compare

This is their original feature comparison for Visual Studio 2010:

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/product-comparison

As you can tell from the comparison chart, they have added a few features to the Premium edition which were not available before such as Lab Management capabilities and some of the newly added features such as PowerPoint Storyboarding.  However, on the whole, the Professional edition continues to get the short end of the stick with a very nominal set of features added to the Professional edition with the Visual Studio 2012 release vs. the prior Visual Studio 2010 release.

Most notably, the newly integrated Fakes framework for isolation testing in Unit Testing is reserved exclusively for developers with an MSDN Ultimate subscription.  With the Visual Studio 2010 release, Pex and Moles was available as an integrated add-on for MSDN Premium and Ultimate subscribers while Moles could be downloaded independently for free from the Visual Studio Gallery.

Of course, Moles is no longer being actively developed (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/moles/) thereby leaving any developers that were previously using it with Visual Studio 2010 Professional high and dry to choose another alternative mocking framework.

Did Microsoft make the right decision to bundle Fakes exclusively with Visual Studio Ultimate or should Fakes be provided with Visual Studio Professional edition as well?  Perhaps it should be provided as a free download similar to Moles?

Let Microsoft know what you think and let your voice be heard!

http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2919309-provide-microsoft-fakes-with-all-visual-studio-edi

Free SharePoint Admin Toolset

Idera currently offers a free toolset for SharePoint Administrators which fills in many of the gaps in the tools and reports provided out-of-the-the-box by SharePoint 2010.

You can download the free Idera SharePoint Admin Toolset from here: http://www.idera.com/SharePoint/SharePoint-admin-toolset/

Below is a screenshot of the various useful tools that it offers:

The Idera SharePoint admin toolset essentially works by installing itself as a separate Web Site in IIS containing   Web Services which then polls the SharePoint Farm for information.

The actual toolset is a client/server application which requires the distribution and installation of an MSI to all necessary SharePoint Administrators.  

Reviewing installed ODBC Drivers on a 64-bit OS

If you are working with a 64-bit OS, you will encounter a problem which was not typically faced in the days of 32-bit OSes--namely, that you will have a separate set of 64-bit ODBC Drivers vs. a set of 32-bit ODBC Drivers.

So, when you type odbcad32.exe at the Run Command, you are ACTUALLY opening up the 64-bit ODBC Drivers that have been installed on the machine and NOT the 32-bit ODBC Drivers.

The 32-bit drivers can actually be found by typing the following path at the Run Command: \windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe.  Therefore, if you are looking for drivers such as MS Access and Excel, you will only find these ODBC Drivers available in the 32-bit ODBC Drivers area.

Finally, if you want to dig into the details of the 64-bit ODBC Drivers and the 32-bit ODBC Drivers you can find their corresponding registry locations here:

64-bit ODBC Drivers: COMPUTER\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI

32-bit ODBC Drivers:

COMPUTER\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI

You can read more about 64-bit ODBC DSNs here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942976/en-us

Using Active Directory Web Services in C#/Visual Studio

I recently had a need to communicate with remote Active Directory stores and since most organizations do not want to open their Active Directory repositories directly through the firewall (usually over port 389), Active Directory Web Services is ideal to accommodate this scenario.

Unfortunately, as I quickly discovered, the documentation surrounding Active Directory Web Services (ADWS) is extremely sparse.

These were the only 2 articles that I discovered on it through a quick Google search:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd391908(v=ws.10)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adpowershell/archive/2009/04/06/active-directory-web-services-overview.aspx

After digging through the Powershell blog, I also came across this article:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adpowershell/archive/2009/10/05/how-to-view-soap-xml-messages-to-and-from-ad-webservices-and-powershell.aspx

However, none of the articles provided any comment or guidance on how to use ADWS via C#/.Net!!

Well, after hours and hours of research and investigation, I finally came up with this article: 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd357379(v=prot.10).aspx

Fortunately, it offered one crucial piece of information: it indicated that ADWS had a Mex endpoint!! (net.tcp://localhost:9389/ActiveDirectoryWebServices/mex)

Well, once I had that piece of information, I could finally create a Service Reference to it in Visual Studio:

Once I clicked OK, Visual Studio was able to generate the resultant proxy class and I could then begin using it in my C# class file.

Now as to figure out how to properly use the API, it does not seem that there is any nice .Net Framework-style documentation and code samples, but I did find some protocol examples which provide WSDL Input and Output:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd303811(v=PROT.10).aspx

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to decipher by simply examining the SOAP input messages, but you can get somewhat of a feel for the required parameters.  For example, for the ChangePassword method, the method signature is the following:

ChangePassword(string Server, string AccountDN, string NewPassword, string OldPassword, string PartitionDN)

Now if you look at the AccountManagement examples, in the SOAP request, you will see the following parameters:

1. Server-ldap:389
2. AccountDN-CN=Guest,CN=Users,DC=fabrikam,DC=com
3. NewPassword-Password2
4. OldPassword-Password1
5. PartitionDN-DC=fabrikam,DC=com

So while the API documentation is definitely far less than perfect, it is workable (with a lot of effort!! :-( )

After finding this article (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/zh/winserverDS/thread/4e442df5-7f38-4f3d-9bb0-329bfc7db324), I was also able to get this code working correctly for me:

 NetTcpBinding tcpBind = new NetTcpBinding();
            ADWSSvc.AccountManagementClient acctMgmt = new ADWSSvc.AccountManagementClient(tcpBind, new EndpointAddress("net.tcp://localhost:9389/ActiveDirectoryWebServices/Windows/AccountManagement"));
            acctMgmt.ClientCredentials.Windows.AllowedImpersonationLevel = System.Security.Principal.TokenImpersonationLevel.Impersonation;
            var adPrincipal = acctMgmt.GetADGroupMember("ldap:389", "CN=Domain Admins,CN=Users,DC=corp,DC=claimsauth,DC=com", "DC=corp,DC=claimsauth,DC=com", true);
            foreach (var item in adPrincipal)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(item.Name);
                Console.WriteLine(item.DistinguishedName);
                Console.WriteLine(item.SamAccountName);
                
            }

Hope that helps for all of you venturing out into the world of ADWS!!

New productivity features in Visual Studio 2012 RC

Now that Visual Studio 2012 RC has been released, I have started delving into some of the new features that have been introduced in Visual Studio 2012:

1. The new file preview feature is definitely handy since it allows me to simply highlight each of my files in Solution Explorer to view the code.  If I need to edit the code, I can just jump directly into the code and start editing away!
2. I can finally easily search for files within my solution by using the new Search Solution Explorer address bar.  Of course, notably absent is the ability to find the currently open file (for example, from a debug session) in Solution Explorer.  Fortunately, 3rd party extensions have offered this functionality in the past.
3. After more than 4 years of waiting for this feature, VS 2012 finally introduces the ability to right-click on a .config file and select "Edit WCF Configuration".  I no longer have to manually browse to my .config files to add and edit WCF Configuration information!
4. Even though I could search for Assembly References through the aid of the Visual Studio Power Tools/Productivity Tools, I can now search for assembly references as part of the native IDE's Assembly Reference dialog.  One less extension to worry about installing in order to be productive....
5. When browsing for Reference Assemblies in Visual Studio 2010, every single project that required that reference assembly (such as the Microsoft.IdentityModel DLL) required me to re-browse for it each time.  Visual Studio 2012 now has a "Recent" option which remembers recently found reference assemblies.  Therefore, after adding it to one project, the next project that needs it can simply select it from the "Recent" list.  What a huge timesaver!
6. The new Quick Launch search bar makes it very easy to find commands that would normally be buried deep within other menus.  I can simply search for a command such as "Source Control Explorer" and Visual Studio will give me the various commands corresponding to my search criteria.  This is an especially nice timesaver for commands which have no predefined shortcut keys.
7. In the past, I have always had to rely on separately downloading Pex and Moles to use mock objects in my Unit Tests.  Fortunately, Visual Studio 2012 RC now includes "Fakes" to replace Moles as the mock library of choice.  You can read more about Fakes here:  http://www.peterprovost.org/blog/tags/fakes
8. Even though the PowerPoint Storyboarding feature exists outside of Visual Studio, it is still a handy feature for prototyping new screens (especially for SharePoint).

Well, that is all for now, but I imagine that I will be adding to this list as I further explore all of the various new features and capabilities Visual Studio 2012 has to offer!

Pre-pidding an Office Web Apps Installation

If you have to install Office Web Apps on multiple servers in a SharePoint Farm and you use the GUI interface, one of the most annoying and time consuming steps is definitely having to enter the Product Key each time you perform an installation on each of the SharePoint servers in the farm.

Fortunately, Office Web Apps follows a similar file structure to the actual SharePoint media.  That is to say that they have store all of their configuration information in a Files directory directly on the root of the media and then are further subdivided into the various installation types such as Setup, SetupFarm, SetupFarmSilent and SetupSilent.

Within each directory is a single file called config.xml (just like SharePoint!!).  When you open up the config.xml file, you can edit the file and add the following element:

<PIDKEY Value="(Your Product Key)">



You can then save these individual config.xml files with this new element. Once this is saved, you can simply use an ISO editing tool such as UltraISO to save these files back to the Office Web Apps ISO media. (http://samirvaidya.blogspot.com/2012/03/slipstreaming-sharepoint-2010-easy-way.html)

Now when you install Office Web Apps on your SharePoint servers, you will no longer be prompted for the Office Web Apps Product Key!

Visual Studio 2012 RC--First Look

Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate was just released yesterday for MSDN subscribers.

Below are some screenshots from the installation:

Based on reading this article and looking at the screenshots, I almost had the impression that the RC looked better than it actually IS!:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/05/08/visual-studio-11-user-interface-updates-coming-in-rc.aspx

As you can tell from the screenshots, though, they have added some splash of color to the otherwise gray and bland interface that was present in the Visual Studio 11 Beta.  However, the Solution Explorer and New Project dialogs are still relatively devoid of color.  Even the toolbar icons have barely visible color, so while the minor addition of color is an improvement over the beta, it is still barely noticeable.  

I am actually surprised that they did not add color to the folder icons in Solution Explorer since this seems like an obvious area to add color.  

I think the biggest shock to me was the complete grayness of Source Control Explorer when connecting to Team Foundation Server!

Navigating source control trees is one place where I really heavily rely on color to distinguish content and this is a huge disappointment to me!  I am really not sure how other developers can tolerate working in Source Control Explorer with Visual Studio 2012 RC...

You can vote on the feedback items related to the Visual Studio 2012 RC here:

http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2623017-add-some-color-to-visual-studio-11

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2819619-leave-vs-2010-theme-and-the-theme-editor-extensio

Upgrading a SQL Server 2008 Express installation to SQL Server 2012 Express

If you have previously installed SQL Server 2008 Express (just the database engine) that is often included with  installations (such as Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010), and attempt to upgrade to SQL Server 2012, you will encounter the following error message:

Therefore, you will have to install SQL 2008 SP2 or later (current release is SP3) before you can upgrade to SQL 2012.  You can download SQL 2008 SP3 from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27594

Therefore, after installing SQL 2008 SP3, you can then proceed with the SQL Server 2012 installation.

Since I was performing an upgrade from SQL 2008 SP3 to SQL 2012, I naturally chose the Upgrade option in the SQL 2012 Dialog even though I was installing SQL 2012 with Tools.

Unfortunately, however, the Upgrade is simply that--an UPGRADE.  Therefore, ONLY the Database Engine is upgraded and the tools are not installed.

After the database engine was upgraded, I then had to re-run the SQL Server 2012 with Tools installation and instead choose the "New SQL Server stand-alone installation or add features to an existing installation" option.

After choosing this option, I was finally able to choose the installation of the Management Tools as well as install LocalDB.