So I get swamped at home (Jacksonville, FL) last week from Tuesday through Saturday thanks to Tropical Storm Fay... then it rains all afternoon on Sunday when I fly out to Seattle. I get to Seattle and it's raining for the two days I'm there, but it was nice when I flew out on Tuesday AM. On the way to San Antonio we stop in Houston where, sure enough, it was raining. Today (Wednesday), it poured in San Antonio...

On the way home tomorrow and I would put money on the fact it will be raining in Atlanta (layover) or in Jacksonville.

Can someone confirm the sun is still out?

Wonder what the going rate is for rain... Do you need rain? I now offer a daily billing rate (+T/E).

While I had no problem installing VS2008 SP1 on my virtual machines, I've been having a heck of a time installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 on my host OS ever since it came out. Since it shipped as an ISO, I simply mounted it using a virtual DVD drive. However every time I tried to install it, it would error out. I dug into the log file and found the following:

Patch (F:\vs90sp1\VS90sp1-KB945140-X86-ENU.msp) install succeeded on product (Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition - ENU). Msi
Patch (F:\vs90sp1\VS90sp1-KB945140-X64-ENU.msp) install failed on product (Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger - ENU). Msi

Ah... so it says it is failing to install the VS 2008 Remote Debugger. So I dug deeper in the install log to see exactly what the problem was:

MSI (s) (58:00) [18:10:00:665]: Product: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger - ENU -- Error 1303.The installer has insufficient privileges to access this directory: F:\Program Files.  The installation cannot continue.  Log on as administrator or contact your system administrator.

Error 1303.The installer has insufficient privileges to access this directory: F:\Program Files.  The installation cannot continue.  Log on as administrator or contact your system administrator.

Not enough privileges? I'm running an AD account that is in the domain Administrators group, I am in the local administrators group, Vista's UAC is turned off and I did the whole 'run as administrator' bit. Better yet, there is no such directory "f:\program files" ... the f: drive is my virtual DVD. So what gives?

Enter my awesome local MSFT DE, Joe Healy, who informed me that he'd heard of people having issues with some of the virtual DVD drives when installing SP1. Interesting how it wasn't affected using a mounted ISO for a virtual machine, but it was with one in the host VM.

At any rate, after copying the contents down to the file system and installing the service back from the disk, I had no problems. Thanks Joe!

One of my favorite ways to get support is customer-to-customer (aka: peer-to-peer). It's usually quicker but more importantly, there's tons of info in forums and other communities to usually find your issue and it's resolution from someone else having the problem. Let's face it, we aren't all that special and we aren't the first to see a bug. Like me right now having fits getting VS2008 SP1 installed.

Microsoft has offered up newsgroups & Web-based forums in the past. The Web-forums were quite effective but they had some performance and other issues. Thankfully the guys in Redmond responded. The MSDN forums got a huge revamp and are very slick now. I love the new UI but most importantly, they are much quicker... nice attention to performance in this iteration. The forums are also exposed as RSS feeds so you can stay abreast of the new posts in the forum. And like all forums, you can elect to get an email when there's activity on a post you are interested in.

he Got a question about SharePoint? Check the MSDN forums! First, search the history for your problem as someone else probably hit it before you. Then post! There are tons of brilliant people who are there to help you! Here's a few I frequent trying to answer questions as time permits.

» SharePoint - Development and Programming
» SharePoint - Enterprise Content Management (this is where your WCM questions should go)
» SharePoint - Workflow

Here are all the MSDN forums
» MSDN SharePoint Forums

FYI: Please post questions to the forums instead of submitting them to my blog contact page. I'd rather help people in the forums where the answers can benefit others down the road as well.

The folks who put on the Jacksonville Code Camp did one heck of a job pulling it off. They were able to, at the very last minute, switch it around to a different location due to tropical storm Fay & the fact is flooded the area of the original location. Great event!

I've posted my sample code & slide decks to the two talks I did at the Jacksonville Code Camp on my speaking page for those who are interested.

It's been a long week being preoccupied with tropical storm Fay. Usually you keep a close eye on these things for a few days and then they are gone. But this one... this one was REAL annoying. This one did everything it wasn't expected to do including stalling out for almost two full days dropping more than 30" of rain on Melbourne, FL (a few hours south of me in northeast Florida, about half-way between Jacksonville & St. Augustine). Then it just hung out... took forever to get out of here and dumped a ton of rain and wind on us. Check out this animation of the radar of the storm and watch how it just stalls out just as it enters the Atlantic on the east side of Florida. Anyway... I'm behind on just about everything because every 3hrs you're looking at the new advisory to see how to evaluate your plan. As such, I missed a slick new white paper on MSDN...

» MSDN: How to Optimize SharePoint Server 2007 Web Content Management Sites for Search Engines
Learn techniques to create Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Web content management (WCM) sites that are optimized for search engines, and what to avoid to help improve search ratings.

So I'm trying to setup ISA on my home network... but not as a firewall. There are just two things I want:

• VPN server - I've got stuff hosted inside my home network that I'd like to gain access to while remote, but not expose it. Such as source control, network shares, personal WSS sites used for organization and storage of stuff... etc.
  • So basically all I want is to connect using the OOTB Vista client connection, using my home AD login, and be assigned an IP on my private network and act like I'm at home. Nothing special... just like how many companies do it. I don't want to have to install some client.
• Domain forwarding - think port-forwarding, but not port based, rather domain based. When I browse to http://foo.[mydomain].com, I want it to go to my house and have ISA route it to the correct server based on the domain. Port forwarding is not what I want.

While ISA does a lot of other stuff (firewall, filtering, etc), I don't want all that... at least not now. All of the clients on my current network will still get IPs via DHCP from my router and go out the way they do without ISA. ISA will only handle inbound stuff (once I get it setup, I'll modify my router to forward all traffic to my ISA box which will forward from there).

While there are other options out there, I know I can do this with ISA and I really want to use it. Partially for some hands on experience. I suspect what I'm trying to do is pretty simple... it just isn't for me. :) First priority is VPN, then domain forwarding.

So why post this? Well, I'm not very good with ISA and so far I've been unable to get it to work. Right now I'm just trying to establish a connection from my laptop to the ISA server on my trusted LAN... not from the outside. Regardless... no success. So, I'm looking for someone who can help me set this up. We'd have to communicate via email and I really want to understand how this work, not just be a keyboard monkey doing what I'm told. To compensate you for the time, I can offer up a free MSDN Team Suite Subscription.

If you're interested in helping, please contact me by leaving a comment. For this one blog post, I won't publish the comments and leave them moderated for your privacy. I'll contact you directly so make sure you leave your email. For those who are interested, you can see how far I've gotten with the VPN setup by downloading this file and looking at the images and the dialog I've had with a friend who's been helping me with this.

[Update 8/22/2008 @ 9a] Thanks to everyone who's responded... I've got a few people helping so I think i'm good for the moment.

MSDN has just published two chapters from my Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development book in their entirety. Enjoy!

• Chapter 14: Authoring Experience Extensibility
• Chapter 20: Incorporating ASP.NET 2.0 Applications

We're right around the corner from the next Jacksonville, FL Code Camp. It's next Saturday, August 23, 2008. If you're going, make sure you register & check out all the great sessions & speakers @ http://www.jaxcodecamp.com.

I'll be presenting two sessions related to SharePoint:

• Introducing Features! A Deep Dive into the New "Feature" Infrastructure in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Structured Approach to Building SharePoint 3.0 Sites

See you there!

The Jacksonville Office Geeks is a user group / special interest group that covers developer topics surrounding the 2007 Microsoft Office System, based in Jacksonville, FL.

It's been a few months since we've had a Jacksonville Office Geeks (JOG) meeting. We've got a few reasons for this. First, its no surprise we haven't had a great response with the JOG meetings. We've decided to move away from a monthly meeting schedule in an effort to possibly get a bigger attendance. Secondly, with only one or two exceptions, John Holliday and myself are the only two who are presenting at the meetings. Unfortunately our work travel schedules are not incredibly flexible and sometimes neither of us can present that month. If you'd like to present, you're more than welcome to. Please feel free to contact us via either of our blogs.

We have scheduled two more meetings for the rest of 2008. Both RSVP sites are up for both meetings:

• September 2008 Meeting: Enterprise Content Management - Document Retention
  Document retention is an important part of content management.  SharePoint provides out-of-the-box support for managing document retention using the built-in expiration policy feature of the information management policy framework.  The built-in expiration policy feature includes the ability to define expiration formulas based on document metadata, but there are many scenarios in which the expiration date depends on conditions external to a given document.  In this session, we'll explore the information management policy architecture in detail and learn how to extend the expiration policy feature by writing custom document expiration formulas that calculate the expiration date based on data pulled from elsewhere in the SharePoint farm.
• Date: Thursday, September 18, 2008; 6p-8p
• Location: Bank of America, Building 500, 9000 Southside Blvd; 2nd Floor; Sea Oats room
• Meeting Location: http://floridaofficegeeks.org/JOG/Pages/Meeting%20Logistics.aspx
• RSVP Required: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=130639
• November 2008 Meeting: Creating & Debugging Custom Timer Jobs in Windows SharePoint Services
  SharePoint introduced the concept of timer jobs, or scheduled services, that run within the SharePoint platform in WSS v3. These timer jobs are used by SharePoint for numerous things such as cleaning up old sites (aka: dead Web cleanup), sending user created alerts and disk quota warning notifications. Developers can also create their own timer jobs that run on a configurable schedule and within the specified scope. Come learn how you can create custom timer jobs as well as the various deployment/installation options. You'll also see how to create a compelling administration interface for managing the timer job and configuration data the job needs in order to function.
• Date: Thursday, November 20, 2008; 6p-8p
• Location: Bank of America, Building 500, 9000 Southside Blvd; 2nd Floor; Sea Oats room
• Meeting Location: http://floridaofficegeeks.org/JOG/Pages/Meeting%20Logistics.aspx
• RSVP Required: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=130641

Hope to see you at the next two meetings!

Last month I blogged my saga of building a rig dedicated just for hosting virtual machines. So far I have been incredibly happy with the hardware. In the last week I've been going through the process of consolidating physical machines into virtual ones. Today I have a physical machine that acts as my (a) home AD domain controller, (b) SQL Server, (c) file share and (d) host for virtual machines. For all that stuff it works great, except it's a bit limited in size (trying to put virtual machines & a file share on 250GB requires some tradeoffs) and it only has 4GB RAM so it can only host one or two VMs at a time. I added two more drives to my Windows Home Server and moved all the files over. I've also created a virtual machine that acts as my DC for my AD and added it to the farm (after a few days I'll shut of the old machine for a few days and make sure everything is still logging in before removing it from the domain and decommissioning it for my brother.

In the last post of my build out series, I mentioned I was using VMWare's free Server 2.0 RC1 (VMS2) product as my virtualization solution. I wanted to use ESX, but had trouble finding a RAID controller that ESX would recognize. I tried HyperV, but I just didn't like the administration/management story. I've had a few questions about using VMS2. So far I love it (and see that Reza does too). VMS2 runs on top of an OS... for me that's Windows Server 2008 Standard (x64). No it won't be as fast as HyperV or ESX because they have hypervisors that allow the VMs to run closer to the hardware, but so far I've been very pleased (in fact impressed) with the performance of my VMs.

In VMS2 you then do all management via a slick Web client as shown here:

(click to see a bigger picture)

Creating new machines is a snap. First I've downloaded a bunch of install disks as ISO's and put them in a "datastore". Once I create a VM, completely through the Web interface, I can pick the VM and attach it to a physical drive or an ISO:

(click to see a bigger picture)

Now, when working with VMs on another machine, I like to connect to them via RDP. However during the install process, that is not available. So from the Web client, I can launch a remote client (or via a shortcut I put in my Favorites list or on the desktop) to the VM and interact with it until I get RDP going (or if I just want to connect from the outside):

(click to see a bigger picture)

Finally it also has the ability to startup/shutdown machines in a specific order when the host machine is shut down or turned on. You can tell it to start the next one after the VMWare Tools load in the host machine, or put a delay on them. Great for me as my DC is on this one.

(click to see a bigger picture)

All in all, I'm real happy with VMWare Server 2.0 RC1. Looking forward to the official release!