I've been uncharacteristically quiet lately but kept busy with the creation of a new County SharePoint Intranet. I've also been busy on the home front, building up a new development machine which is the topic of this posting.

Although I have been working with VMs for the last year or so, and find them amazingly powerful to work with, a couple of things contributed to ongoing hirsutical challenges. Firstly, external drives simply don't cut it performance-wise and secondly, you really need ample RAM, storage and raw horsepower to develop SharePoint on VM's and still carry out normal development on the host machine in Visual Studio. At work, my problem was solved by an investment in VM servers and a SAN. At home, I felt like the Slowsky snail in the Comcast ad :-S

I upgraded from an XP Pro machine with 2MB of Ram, half of which was added a few months back, to a new HP D5000t 64-bit PC with a Quad Q9450 2.66 GHz processor, 8 GB of RAM and a 500GB SATA drive. I've hooked up a 500GB external Western Digital drive, mainly for back-ups and graphics storage. And I have purchased an extra internal SATA Seagate 750GB drive which I will use for all my VM work. More than anything, I wanted to work with VS 2008 on my host PC and this was the main carrot on the stick for upgrading.

Here are a few things to remember if you are moving to VS 2008 on Vista:

1) You need to get a version above Vista Home or Home Premium, such as Vista Ultimate, if you want IIS7 to play nice. This is reminiscent of having to use XP Pro over XP Home with IIS 5.0. If you try to install SQL Server 2005 on anything less than Ultimate you will start getting install errors relating to missing IIS7 features. Ultimate is $319 off the shelf so it's cheaper to include the upgrade when purchasing the PC.

2) Add the required components to IIS7 by going to Control Panel, Programs and Features, and clicking on "Turn Windows features on or off" on the left of the screen. See here and here for more details.

3) Your development tools have to be installed in this order: SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2005 SP2 service pack, and finally VS 2008. Do not open anything in SQL Server 2005 before the service pack is installed. If you do not follow this order of install, you will have real problems installing the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) IDE. After VS 2008 is installed open it once to initialize it before checking for any Windows updates.

4) When installing SQL Server 2005, you may start getting compatibility errors; ignore these. After everything is installed you may notice some errors in your event log like this code 10 error:

"Event filter with query "SELECT * FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA "Win32_Processor" AND TargetInstance.LoadPercentage > 99" could not be reactivated in namespace "//./root/CIMV2" because of error 0x80041003. Events cannot be delivered through this filter until the problem is corrected."

KB 950375 contains a script to easily resolve this.

It was pretty painless to grab one of my existing 2.0 Web application projects from back-up and get it to work in VS 2008, using the multi-targeting feature.

One of the lesser-known VS 2008 gems is the built-in Database Publishing Wizard 2.0. While developing with VS 2005 / SQL Server 2005, I have always used the standalone Database Publishing Wizard 1.1 to deploy SQL Server databases to production. It was a bit hacky but worked very well for a long time. Now the new wizard is built in and can be accessed in Server Explorer. Just add a connection, right-click it and select "Publish to Provider". You can use this to deploy complete databases both ways between a hosted server and your local IDE.... very nice :-)

Many developers have been complaining at having to install a server on their development machine in order to code against WSS/MOSS. I wouldn't have thought it possible but someone has stepped up to the plate and made it happen... thanks to Jonas Nilsson, principle architect of MashPoint we can do our WSS coding on our main development PC.

No longer will you have to be slave to your VM. Although VMs are still the best thing since sliced bread, the achilles heel of SharePoint has always been the lack of consideration for the development environment. People running demos for clients and giving presentations will find this particularly useful. Take a bow Jonas!

Read about it here...

As promised, here's the final installment. You can find the download links for the final version of the code at the end of this article. Feel free to use this code and tweak it any way you wish. For demo purposes, the menu is on all the pages but you can easily factor this out into its own form. I would normally make this a separate control, but you will probably be integrating this application into your existing navigation anyway, so...

The membership system in ASP.NET 2.0 is pretty much plug-and-play right out of the box. When I worked with it first, I took some time to read up on the new membership controls before trying them out. For this particular topic, I cannot recommend the following two books highly enough:

* Murach's ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader's Guide (Lowe & Murach)
* Pro ASP.NET 2.0 in C# 2005 (MacDonald & Szpuszta)

Just to recap, at this point you should have a working Guest Book application and database. The only thing left to do is to configure the membership system and add some administration forms to allow us to edit, update, delete and publish comments posted by users.

The next item on our list is to use the WSAT tool to add an admin user, create the admin role and add the new admin user to that role. By using a role, we can grant extra privileges to admin users in the future if needed. We can just do it once rather than having to grant them to each admin user individually. A picture is worth a thousand words, so please refer to the pics for guidance.

Access the WSAT by clicking on the icon at the top of Solution Explorer in VS 2008. Note that the administrator role is already set up in the config file and all you have to do is add the admin user to this role. I'm including a picture showing how to set up the access rule using the tool. The main problem people encounter here is the order of the entries in the authorization section of the config file. The administrator role is listed before 'users'. See the config file picture in part II of this series for clarification.

We will add a new form called guestBookAdmin.aspx to the Admin folder which shows a list of the comments awaiting moderation in a GridView. Clicking on one of these brings up the commentDetails.aspx form. This is almost a replica of the addComment.aspx form which is populated with the data for this comment. The comment ID is passed to this new form when the 'select' link on the guestBookAdmin form is clicked. This is then used as a parameter to the stored procedure when fetching the data for this comment. Note also, that there is now a 'publish' check box. The administrator uses this to put a comment live after it has been edited and approved.

Just a few words about the ObjectDataSource control here. This is an amazingly helpful control which we can use to create a declarative link between our front-end Web controls and our data access methods. Note that our data access class must have a default, parameterless constructor and none of the select or update methods can be static. This is just another reason why I prefer to inject a business layer between the front and back-ends. It gives us a nice comfort zone for future code customizations in the shape of new business rules and the like. Plus, we get to use a more friendly syntax. Ideally, each record should be a custom object but that's another story!! Bring on the new Entity Framework :-)

Be sure to check out the brand new security video tutorials from Scott Mitchell.

Download Code:

GuestBook.zip (99.61 kb)

GuestBook-DB.zip (1.01 kb)