SharePoint Adventures by Rick Smit

Going 64-bit

CORAL\ricksmit — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:37:00 GMT

So, this is my easter break. Finally some time free do things i've should have done before, but didn't have time to do yet. Back in november 2007 i ordered a Dell Vostro 1500 notebook with 2.2 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor and 4 Gbs of RAM. It's a pretty fast notebook, but my experiences were that is was slower then expected. So how could this be?

First of all, the Dell Vostro 1500 comes pre-installed with Vista Business Edition 32-bit with lot's of Dell software. After searching the internet, everybody kept screaming you should re-install the Vostro with a clean Vista.

Yesterday, i finally had time to do this. I have formatted my Vostro and installed Vista Ultimate with Service Pack 1 on it. And also choose to use the 64-bit version. Now the Vostro is damn fast!

The second thing i'm doing now is switching from Microsoft Virtual PC to VMware Workstation. And creating some new 64-bit images. Yes, also this is damn fast.

So, this year a good easter for me! :)

Active Directory and FBA

CORAL\ricksmit — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:06:00 GMT

I've been researching the combination of Forms Based Authentication (FBA) with Active Directory. It took me some time to get it al working. Here's my story:

First of all i was trying to enable forms authentication using the ActiveDirectoryMembership Provider and the WindowTokenProvider within the system.web.security namespace for SPS 2007. Getting the users to resolve was fairly simple. However, i was unable to get groups to resolve. Since we used active directory groups for setting permissions in SharePoint, this was a serious issue.

Finally i found a tutorial by Jason Flowers and you can read it here. The trick is to use the LdapMembershipProviders and the LdapRoleProvider in stead of the ActiveDirectoryMembership Provider.

Additional tips:

Be sure you get the right connectionstring to the active directory.
Use active directory query utilties for this or ask your local system admin guy!
Backup all web.configs before you start editing. You might end up with not working SharePoint sites due to web.config errors.
You need to re-add the users and groups to SharePoint. Your users and groups will have the prefix "LdapMembership" or "LdapRole" when re-added to SharePoint. Otherwise users still won't get authenticated the right way.
Extend your webapplication to another port and use Windows Authentication for this extended version. This way you still can use the SharePoint Designer to tweak your SharePoint site. With only FBA it's a bit of a challenge to get the SharePoint designer to work!

If you have additionals tips, please comment and i will add these to this post!

Software update for web folders (KB907036)

CORAL\ricksmit — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Some of my customers adressed me the problem of not being able to open the explorer view for document libraries. This sounded strange to me because i could open it on my development machine. So i started some research about this. First of all my development machine has Windows Server 2003 as operating system. So that was not a good case. On my notebook i have Vista installed and to my surprise i also could not open explorer view. So something strange was going on.

Finally i discovered that in some cases the explorer view won't work. This is due to problemens with the webdav / webfolders configuration of the operating system. To solve this problem, Microsoft has released a software update for web folders (KB907036). You can download it here if you or your customers experience problems with the explorer view:

Click here for the URL @ Microsoft.com

p.s. Be sure you and your customers reboot the operating system after installing the update!

SharePoint and nothing but SharePoint

CORAL\ricksmit — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:16:00 GMT

So here it finally is! My brand new blog on the internet.

Yes, i have been blogging before. True!

I went from web-log.nl to blogger.com to typepad.com to spaces.live.com and now my own domain with a blog powered by Microsoft SharePoint! And yes it has been enhanced with the Community Kit for SharePoint (Enhanced Blog Edition) and the ntensive Blog Design by PixelMill.

Unfortunatly i have not had enough time available to keep on posting on these former blogs. Now that's something which will change. Guys like Robin have been asking me for a while "where is your blog?" and they've been right all the time.

After reading and using al the information available on internet it's time for me to give you out there something back. As a SharePoint Architect i will share my knowledge, experiences and adventures with my dear friend Mr. SharePoint! Wink So as from now i will try to post on a regular basis information about SharePoint, InfoPath, Web Parts, Development with SharePoint, my biggest challence the SharePoint Designer Tongue out and much much more.

So please come back some time later and read all about SharePoint!

p.s. Big thanx to the guys from Zevenseas.com for making this blog space available at the brand new SharePoint community OpenZeas!