I'm teaching my WCM401 Developing Publishing Sites with SharePoint Server 20007 WCM the week of August 4-7 at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Irvine, CA. There are still a few open seats available, so if you're interested, go here to get more info & register. There's a special 15% discount code available to people in the area on the SoCal .NET Events site that you can use when you register for the class.

While in California I'll be speaking at two user groups in the area. First on Tuesday, August 5th I'll be doing my session Don't Be a Tool, Be a Better SharePoint Developer Through Tools! @ the LA C# user group in Manhattan Beach.

Developers know all too well that development in a Microsoft SharePoint environment can be a challenging experience with so many moving parts. However, with the rights tools and shortcuts, you can mitigate the challenges and let the tools do most of the work so you can focus on the more challenging business requirements. In this session, we cover numerous shortcuts and tools, most without spending a penny, that will help you be the most productive SharePoint developer possible.

Then, on Wednesday, August 6th I'll be presenting my Structured Approach to Building MOSS 2007 Publishing Sites to the SoCal Dot Net user group in Buena Park.

“SharePoint doesn’t support source control.” “SharePoint doesn’t follow good SDL or change control processes.” “Developers have to use SharePoint Designer to create Publishing sites.” Heard these before? Guess what? All these myths are completely untrue. Unlike many traditional SharePoint projects, Publishing sites frequently require following an organizations change control process, software development lifecycle processes and integration within source control. Not only is it possible to follow all of these common development guidelines in SharePoint, it is a lot easier than you may think. In this session we’ll take a look at how this is possible by obtaining a better grasp of the inner workings of SharePoint, how you can make sure your development team leverages this, as well as some tips and tricks in how to achieve it.

Hope to see you there! Both events request RSVP so hit the user group sites to RSVP.

Last week Bob Fox announced the International SharePoint Professionals Association (www.sharepointpros.org). Best explained on the homepage...

The International SharePoint Professionals Association (“ISPA”) is the first independent, community-run, not-for-profit organization designed specifically for SharePoint Professionals. ISPA is a professional association dedicated to the promotion and global adoption of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies.  The Association provides support and guidance to the community  by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals and groups, resources, education and information.

Thanks to Bob, Darrin, Natalya & Chris for getting this up off the ground.

In case you missed it, last week Microsoft released something they call the Infrastructure Update for WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007. This update adds some search features to SharePoint that were introduced in the Search Server products, fixes a lot of performance and scaling issues and content deployment fixes. The whole thing is outlined on the ECM team  blog:

» ECM Blog: Content Deployment & the Infrastructure Update

The Infrastructure Update is not a service pack, but you could almost treat it as one. It includes previous hotfixes, including the ones for content deployment I blogged about previously.

I've seen a few people screw up the install or get confused about it. Here's the deal: make sure you have SP1 installed for both WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007 (links to it here). Then install the WSS 3.0 Infrastructure Update, run the SharePoint SCA (the configuration wizard you ran when you installed SharePoint... available from the Office Server program group), then install MOSS 2007 Infrastructure Update and run the SCA again. If you've installed hotfixes since SP1, no worries... they are all included in the Infrastructure Update.

I have seen where there is one thing that changed in the SharePoint pipeline and that it has affected [err... broke] some people's code. Dan Larson discusses this in a recent post.

BTW, if you're looking for a single list for where you can see what version of SharePoint cooresponds to a hotfix, or the other in which hotfixes are released, check out Spence's SharePoint 2007 Post SP1 Hotfixes page... a gem for me!

I wonder where Starbucks employees go when they need to "make a run" ? Everyone I know makes Starbucks Runs when they need a break or a boost in the afternoon. Wonder where Starbucks people go? One of the reasons for the "runs" is to get out of the office or just a break... so they have to get out.

Maybe Dunkin Donuts? Have a great weekend all...

When the first iPhone came out I dismissed it pretty quick because I was addicted to my AciveSync DirectPush on my Windows Mobile (WM) 6 device and because the ATT network it was tired to is just slow. All the while I switched my MP3 player over to an iPod Touch and fell in love with the UI & iTunes. Then, upon hearing Apple was adding support for 3G, a GPS receiver and ActiveSync support made me come back and check it out. I've read up, especially over the weekend and played with one in the local store. I also updated my iPod Touch to the 2.0 OS, the same one that the iPhone now runs on, to play with the new features. Suffice to say, I'm very impressed. The thing that I was really eager to see was the response from Microsoft. So far the only close competition that's been impressive is form Sprint... can't wait to see what WM7 has in store for us!

As a WM user for years now, I've known I could download & install apps via my laptop and also surf the web on a browser, but it never felt like a natural experience. I just felt like I always had to get through a bunch of stuff. I know many will disagree... it's just my experience. But when it comes down to it, I've loved WM overall and loved the email experience.

What gets me is just how well information is surfaced to the user in the iPhone OS. after installing the phone, I was pretty surprised how quickly I pulled up a map & setup directions from my house to a friend in my address book. While I don't have it on my iPod Touch, I got to play with SMS on the iPhone in the store... and I love the experience. It brings me back to the days of my Palm based Treo where I could see the whole dialog as it progressed... not just the last message at a time like WM does.

One more thing that I was really impressed with: AppStore. I've always been able to download applications for my WM phone... and you could get them from all sources. However Apple has just nailed the experience. Finding an app, either from the device, iTunes or the browser is a piece of cake. Installing them (only available from the first two, not the latter) is also a piece of cake. I picked up the Facebook & WeatherBug app right off the bat. With WeatherBug, I can quickly check out the radar for my area, or any are in the US. I know, I could do this on my current phone. Maybe it's just the novelty of a new toy that's impressive... dunno... but I don't think so.

The keyboard did trip me up at first. I constantly complained about it and not being able to type my name quickly. I saw a video and read something about how to get used to it so I gave it a shot. After playing around a few times I just took a stab at writing an email as fast as I could, not stopping to fix errors. Results were impressive! So I timed myself writing the same thing on my WM phone & iPod Touch... a dead tie! Now THAT shocked me. <insert foot in mouth />

The only thing I'm not completely sold on is the email experience. At first Apple seems to have been a little unrealistic in a typical business user case. I have tons of folders... easily over a hundred. What I like is that I can now get email in ANY folder, not just the ones I configure to sync (like in WM). As I browse to it, the folder is sync'd ondemand. Would be nice if it fetched it ahead of time. The other disadvantage here is that there's no exploding/collapsing of the folders. Yes, that means I have to see ALL of them. That really sucks. And guess what, sent items is at the very bottom (least I assume it is... I haven't been able to scroll that far :P). For some folders I frequently access, I'd have to move them up towards the top... which is unfortunate. There are plenty of other Exchange ActiveSync issues on the iPhone, covered quite well here. He also complains about lack of document storage on the phone. Not an issue for me as I don't touch that in my WM phone.

I'm seriously considering the switch. If I can deal with the email (thankfully something I get to test out on the iPod Touch via a WiFi connection), I might switch to the iPhone. With the exception of email experience & battery life, it is very appealing.

Last week I got a call from the local Apple store that my replacement MBP was in. This was to replace my lemon MBP where the keyboard & trackpad kept dying on me. Finally they caved and cried uncle giving me a brand new machine. Cool thing is that this is one of the Penryn based models that gives me multitouch on the trackpad (ala zoom via pinching the trackpad) and a motherboard that can handle 8GB (albeit not officially).

This time I elected to pave the machine the moment I got it. Went with a small 50GB partition for Leopard, 100GB partition for Vista x64 and the remaining 35GB for Windows 2008 x64.

Yeah... that's right... I cut over to Vista x64 to see all my RAM. I only had one app that gave me fits and that's a printer driver that acts as a fax machine for me. It's unfortunate, but not a terribly big deal.

The other big change was to follow Spence's steps to setup triple boot. Now I can have Windows Server 2008 x64 running off the bare metal. I only expect to use this for presentations and demos. Only trouble I had here was getting Bluetooth to work. Spence talks about it on his blog, but it didn't work for me (the part where you add the three unknown devices). Thankfully a comment on Gil's blog post by "Chris" explains what worked for him, so I tried it and it worked for me (scroll down to a post on 7/72008 @ 10:38p).

Now... if only the WHS PP1 would release so I could add my new install to my WHS for backup!

Little public-service-announcement here. A few months back I created a Twitter account and followed a few friends. I gave it a chance... but personally I think Twitter is a grand waste of time. I know, many people disagree, but for me, it's like walking into a bar at happy hour and hearing every single conversation at the same time. That's not a positive... that's a negative. It's too much effort to get anything of value.

So if you happen to find me on Twitter, you can follow me, but you'll be standing behind someone who isn't going anywhere. As my last twit said it:

Follow me if you like... but you'll be standing around going nowhere. Not using Twitter anymore as this is just a grand waste of time. -AC

In part 1 of this series I explained the reasoning and background on why I'm building a virtualization rig. In that post I included my experience with trying to get an OOTB Dell PowerEdge 2900 III. In part 2 I discussed the parts, buildout and price list. In this post I want to talk about the setup, install and performance testing.

Burnin: Testing power & heat (and fans)

Setup of the vRig was a piece of cake.. hardware wise it wasn't bad at all. Installing Windows 2008 Server was a piece of cake too... instantly seeing the 1.5TB RAID10 setup. Now I had two things I wanted to test: performance of the box and heat. I am very sensitive to the fact I'm not running fans on my CPU heatsinks so I wanted to stress those guys out big time. Using some tools that Jeff Attwood blogged about (CoreTemp & Prime95) & BurnInTest that Shane told me about, I stressed the CPUs out for 12 hours straight. The cores never got above 67% of the temp threshold of their max rating... and just to confirm, I put my bare fingers on the heatsinks which were barely warm. The RAM on the other hand got quite hot and I'm considering getting a memory cooler, but I'd like to get something other than the ASUS cooler as I'm concerned about the fan noise again.

Performance Test

Next was the performance test. So I used PerformanceTest for this part of my eval. The score weights 2D graphics at 12% and 3D graphics at 14%. Considering I'm not using anything but the onboard video card and don't have DirectX installed, a score of 2501.9 is pretty good. If you're interested in comparing your system you view my baseline here (note: I removed all the graphics scores as nothing was done to help the machine in that way... this isn't a gaming rig, it's a virtualization rig):

Click for a larger view.

Virtualization Software Eval

At first I tried HyperV but in the end I passed up on it. One of the big things for me in terms of virtualization is that I want to be able to take a VM I've built on my laptop/new virtualization rig (vRig henceforth) and move them between the two machines. With HyperV, technically this is possible in combination with VirtualPC, but VPC leaves a LOT to be desired. I use VMWare Workstation on my laptop which kicks the pants of VPC 2007 IMHO. The three biggest factors to me about Workstation > VPC:

1. Performance: VMWare Workstation 6 is just faster than VPC, hands down.
2. Snapshots: If you're a VPC guy, you know how you can do save state? Think the same thing, except you don't have to shut down and you can do multiple. You can see this in a previous post of mine here.
3. 64-bit: VPC can't do 64-bit hosts so if I want to move VM's between my vRig and laptop, they have to be 32-bit only. I'm 100% 64-bit these days (just installed Vista x64 in the last week as well).

Now, I know HyperV doesn't apply here as it can do 64-bit hosts, snapshots and is very fast, but remember one thing: I want to move VM's between my laptop & vRig so I need to compare VPC 2007 & VMWare Workstation. And no, I'm not interested in running Windows 2008 on my laptop as my primary OS (I'm not even going to address that in the comments on this post :)).

Because of these reasons, and a few others, I passed on HyperV. The other thing that got me about HyperV was the administration & management. If you are remote, everything has to be done by connecting to the host machine via RDP or through some other admin utility. That was REALLY annoying. I think you have to do the same with ESX, but VMWare Server 2.0 has a slick Web interface (more on that later).

I really wanted to get VMWare ESX up and running. The short story on this: I've given up for a while... maybe I'll revisit it down the road. The problem: the two onboard RAID controllers (and two extra controller cards I've bought and since returned) didn't work with ESX. Either ESX didn't see them at all or it saw the drives as four 750GB individual drives rather than one logical 1.5TB. I tried everything I could think of. In theory it should work (via the Intel onboard RAID controller as a guy with the handle of doctorttt got it working here, but I haven't had success), but I wasn't able to get it to work. All I need is to find a RAID controller that ESX will recognize and I'm a bit tight on time with two projects so I need to move on. So for now, rather than keep fighting with ESX, I'm going to take a break and just run VMWare Server 2.0 RC1 on top of a dumb Windows 2008 Standard 64-bit install. Dumb meaning nothing is installed on that box... just the OS+VMWare Server 2.0.

Noise:

All I can say is I'm incredibly impressed with the lack of noise out of this machine... especially after my PowerEdge 2900 experience. The case has a lot to do with it. The sides are lined with eggcrate foam. I almost put some PAX material on the flat surfaces inside, but I don't think it's necessary. All the HDD's sit on silicon buffers so there's no metal-on-metal. The four 140mm fans on the case all run around 1100RPM... the one on the bottom even has an angling thing so I can point where I want the airflow to go.

This rig is by no means silent, but it's one of the quietest machines in my house. Let me put it to you this way: my Tivo is louder churning away at the drive. I just can't wait to consolidate my other machines & shut them down so this vRig along with my Windows Home Server are the only things running. The loudest thing on this guy is the DVD drive when there's a disk in it!

Summary:

All in all, I'm very pleased. So far I've only got a handful of VMs running on it, but that will change very quickly as I migrate my AD & SQL to virtual machines.

In part 1 of this series I explained the reasoning and background on why I'm building a virtualization rig. In that post I included my experience with trying to get an OOTB Dell PowerEdge 2900 III. In this post I want to cover parts. The next part will be more about setup and installation of the virtualization software.

Before electing to build a new machine, I did consider getting a MacPro and installing VMWare Fusion on it. The reason I didn't was because first, I could build a machine for much less than the MacPro cost and the Fusion just isn't meant for constantly running VMs IMHO. I did love the fact it is completely silent... no fans to speak of... yet another sheer engineering beauty from Cupertino, CA.

Anyway, so I elected to build a new machine. In spec'ing out a machine, I was not only conscious of the points I mentioned in part 1 (fast, quiet & reliable), but I also wanted to have a shot at running VMWare ESX. This is a tricky proposition as unlike Microsoft's HyperV where the drivers live in the VMs, in ESX, the hardware drivers reside in the hypervisor and thus, only certain devices are on the approved list. I did my best working off the VMWare forums & whitelist, but it wasn't easy.

All links below go to the manufacturer product page... the price list on the end shows you where I got them (almost all from NewEgg).

First was the motherboard. I wanted something that had onboard RAID 10, supported at least 32GB RAM and two Xeon CPUs. I went with the ASUS DSEB-DG and I'm very pleased with it.

Then came the CPUs. I elected for two 64-bit Quad Core Intel Xeon's E5410's @ 2.33Ghz, 12MB cache & 1333FSB. To keep these guys cool, it was hard finding a heatsink that would allow me to have two side by side... and to keep with the quiet factor, I had to find something that really distributed the heat. I went with two Thermalright HR-01 X's. More on the cooling in a bit...

Now I needed some RAM. The ASUS required FBDIMM's which aren't cheap. It has 8 slots so I elected to get six 4GB FBDIMM's from Crucial (this was the most expensive part of the box) for a total of 24GB with room to jump up to 32GB as I left two slots open.

Next, storage! I got four 750GB 7200RPM SATA2 (3GB) WD Caviar Blue drives with 16MB caches. I'll stripe a pair of them for two 1.5TB logical sets and then mirror them ala RAID10. Always hard cutting 3TB -> 1.5TB, but speed and fault tolerance is key for me!

The next thing I needed was a power supply. This turned out to be the biggest pain of all as I ended up going through three of them. I wasn't looking at the connectors coming out of the PSU and thus, my ASUS motherboard wasn't getting enough power. Then I finally found the Thermaltake 1000W with the 24pin, 8pin and 2x4pin motherboard/CPU power. It's also got modular cables which are real nice for airflow.

Last but not least... gotta have a place to put it all! I really wanted to reuse my Antec P182 case (the same one Hanselman used), but the ASUS was just too big. I elected to go with the Cooler Master Cosmos 1000 and I love it! Brilliantly built... love the drive caddy's and the ability to hide cables around the back. It's got four big 140mm fans that are virtually silent. Also the fans, except for the rear one, have washable filters to trap dust... very slick!

Oh, as for the DVD drive... I just used one I had lying around. All it's used for is installing for a few installs.

And now for the buildout... and because people love pictures (click on pictures for bigger shots)...

Closed case.

Here's the open insides... check out those two heatsinks! Absolute monsters (hard to see in this pic from above, but check this one out), but they don't get hot and keep the Xeon's cool without fans! No cards though as you can see. The HDD's are behind those six caddy's. There are two fans at the top you can barely see, one in the back near the RAM ad one at the bottom with an angled top.

And finally, the other side of the case.

Putting everything together wasn't that bad. The hardest part was getting the heatsinks secured to the motherboard as the brackets had some fancy way to go into the heatsink and then get bolted down. You have to use this tiny wrench and you just don't have a lot of room to work. Everything else was a piece of cake (once I had the right PSU).

Recall, total budget was around $5,000. Here's the parts & price list:

What you don't see here is the experiencing of ordering 3 different PSU's (two of which that were returned) and ordering the wrong RAM the first time around. :) But notice that this is a solid $700 less than the Dell. Oh, did I mention how quiet it is? Next to my MacBook Pro (which has an aversion to using fans to cool itself apparently), it's the quietest thing in my room. Seriously... it's more quiet than the ceiling fan! I'm blown away by how quiet it is!

Early last year Scott Hanselman & Jeff Atwood set out to build the "Ultimate Developer PC" for Scott. It was an entertaining series of posts on both blogs (check out this post for links to all the other posts). As someone who works exclusively out of a home office (except when onsite or teaching obviously) I've been eyeing doing something similar over the last two years. But as a SharePoint developer who doesn't do so much gaming, I was more interested in a virtualization rig rather than a dev rig... things like graphics are of zero importance to me. I'm still a Vista guy, so as long as Aero works, I'm happy.

A few months ago I decided it was time: get a rig I can have in my home office that will primarily be a file server & virtual machine host. I'd like to share my experience with others as I think this applies to people like me, but also small businesses who deal in SharePoint consulting or where virtualization is key.First let me explain the "why", the reasoning behind this and what my end goals were.

A few years back I built a machine that I use as my main server at home for personal and work stuff that's been good to me. It's a dual core AMD x64 with 4GB RAM and two mirrored 250GB SATA 7200RPM drives. It runs AD & SQL for my home domain and hosts two or three VMs that used to be running off Microsoft's Virtual Server but are now running off VMWare Server 1.0. Problem is I can't go beyond that. After working on a few big projects with some clients recently, I've found I can't simulate near-real world environments which is quite frustrating. It was around that time that I reached the tipping point and said I needed to do something about it. Going into this, I had a few requirements:

• Fast... real damn fast: I want something that's not only fast, but has the horsepower and capacity that I won't have to upgrade for 2+ years (ideally three). I want it to host multiple VMs... I'm talking 5-10+ actively running at any given time.
• Quiet... very quiet: this thing is going in my home office so I don't want a jet engine in here. I do recordings in my office as well as teach via Live Meeting... I can't have it sound like I'm working from a server room. I want something that just hums away.
• Reliable: this parlays into being fast, but I also want something that I don't have to worry about a drive failing or something.

So I decided on a few specs for the box (more details on these in a future post):

• CPU: I am going with a quad core Intel Xeon. I contemplated single or dual processors... but settled on dual quad cores... that's 8 cores baby! Great for a virtualization rig.
• RAM: Loads of it... it's going to be a virtualization rig, so 4GB won't cut it... neither will 8GB. We're talking minimum 16GB. Remember, I don't want to have to upgrade this for a while. RAM is my biggest bottleneck on my current rig.
• Storage: I need lots of space. I need to store ISOs, virtual disks that have snapshots or saved states as well as a lot of other data. I also want it to be fault tolerant and fast. So I settled on RAID 10... mirrored stripe sets. How big? At least a total of 1TB fault tolerant storage minimum.
• Virualization: I'm not much of a fan of HyperV for a few reasons which I'll get into later, so I was leaning towards VMWare ESX 3.5i or the new free VMWare Virtual Server 2.0.

So what was the budget? Well, as a independent developer consultant, your non-billable operating costs are quite low. You've got hardware (figure a $2,000-3,000 laptop every 12-18 months), software (unless you can swing it for free) and some services (cell phone, Internet service, etc). Because this rig was going to last me for at least 2+ years, ideally 3 years, I gave myself a budget around $5,000.

While I like building my own rigs... it's fun albeit very frustrating. But for this one I elected to make my life a bit easier and just ordered a Dell. I first selected a beefy Dell PowerEdge 2900 III: dual quad core Xeon 2.5Ghz, 32GB RAM & 1TB RAID10 array (total storage was 2TB, but because it's mirrored, it gets cut in half). Nice machine, but I made one major blunder: I didn't consider the noise factor.

This box set me back almost $5,300 with shipping & taxes. That's fine, a bit over budget but that's not a big deal. It showed up and I was quite impressed with the build out. It was a big and heavy box. I had read some comments in the Dell forums about noise but figured building a cabinet lined with eggcrate & PAX foam would help... but boy did I grossly discount this fact. I flipped that guy on and it was INCREDIBLY loud. I thought "maybe I can stick this in the closet and close the door." So I shut the door to the office and went in the kitchen... it was still loud! Uh oh... I called Dell about some quieter fans but no dice... it is what it is. This isn't anything against the box... it is meant for a rack mount in a server room, but I was just taken back by how loud it really was. Later that afternoon my wife took my full size SUV out to the store. As she pulled out, I stood in the garage and thought "damn, that server sounded almost like my V8 idling!" Needless to say, in the span of 1.5 hours, I had the Dell unboxed, setup in my office, reboxed and taped back up with a nice RMA number sending it back for a refund (minus shipping). That little experiment set me back about $150 in shipping costs, but it was a lesson learned.

After much soul searching and thought, I elected to build my own machine from scratch. In the next post (#2) I'll walk you through the process, the parts list, share some photos and share some performance numbers. In the last post (#3) I'll talk about the virtualization software I evaluated and where I stand today.