SharePoint 2010 Speed, and Boot to VHD

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Been pouring through all the new goodies in SharePoint 2010 like a kid opening his first Christmas present -
So much fun, so little time.

A few people have made the comment that SharePoint 2010 Public Beta runs pretty slowly for demo’s – here’re a few suggestions I’ve noticed that helps for me:

  1. You need more than 2GB of RAM for SharePoint on your demo machine. 
  2. Ideally, a generous amount of hard drive space

My setup has worked pretty well for me:

  1. Host is Win7 x64
  2. Created a VHD (virtual hard drive) with about 50GB allocated space. 
  3. Installed Windows 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008, SharePoint 2010 public beta, Office Web Apps, and Office 2010 client apps.
  4. Configure the VHD as a bootable device (new in Win7)
  5. On start of laptop, I get to choose to boot into Windows 2008 / SharePoint 2010 directly, which allocates all the laptop’s resources to the VM
  6. Oh – grab the ATI display drivers for DELL (see my previous post) to make sure Windows 2008 R2 can display via an external projector – ahead of the presentation.  (I nearly had a panic attack but got it all sorted before I had to go on stage).

The best part is when we move on from the public beta, I’ll just copy a new VHD over the same directory under Win7, then it’s all set.

Ah another weekend is upon us…

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And I’m well equipped for this weekend, I’ve got two fun activities to do:

  1. Go camp out in http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/ and ambush people asking simple SharePoint questions – going to aim for two badges – don’t really know how long that will take.
  2. Peter Gfader introduced me to http://projecteuler.net/ I’m up to question 3 and decided to solve them using a combination of FireFox + FireBug Console and JavaScript (ECMAScript)

SharePoint – InfoPath / Forms Library missing

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Testing InfoPath, I try to do the simplest thing – publishing an InfoPath form to a SharePoint as a template, and allowing it to create a new library based on this template - I got this error:

The following computer running windows SharePoint Services does not contain the required InfoPath form template:
http://vm-spdev-xxxx/
A generic form template will be used instead

Warning: This is very bad

You should not continue – because if you do…

  1. InfoPath will create a new Document Library instead of a Forms Library and deploy the InfoPath file as a template in this document library. 
  2. It will appear as if everything’s working – you can do New –> InfoPath Form (as a document), fill it out and save it back to the list.
  3. And when you want to update the template it will complain that the default document isn’t based on a Form template.

    InfoPath failed to publish because the default content type in the document library is not based on the Form content type
  4. You got confused – you went to check the Library and sure enough it says the default content type is a Document
  5. You add a Form content type, and switch it over as the default content type… only to discover SharePoint now publishes two different sets of columns in this list – one set for Forms, another set for Documents.
  6. And it doesn’t appear as if the second publish worked…  I think this may be a different problem – because if I view as web page I see the new updated template

 

Instead, back out right now – delete that list in SharePoint and start over…  By the way… where’s – hmm where’s my Forms Library?

 

Went to site settings and activated:

  • Site Collection Features –> Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features
  • Site Features –> Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Site features

No good, still no forms library.

More stumbling around, finally figured it out – I need to activate:

  • Site Features –> Team Collaboration Lists

Personally I didn’t think this was obvious – but I did know Forms Library is part of WSS…  so may be it made some sense.

 

Now go back to InfoPath again and try to publish.

Migrating from Windows Live Spaces to SquareSpace - outline

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This is going to be a series of blogs, and hopefully release source code for getting your blog out of Windows Live Spaces.  I want to split this into two major sections, and then have a few trailing articles discussing the differences and things as I encounter them.

 

First Half: Export your blog data out of Windows Live Spaces

  • No export option
  • MetaBlogAPI – documented on MSDN
  • Export to some sort of format: XML?  MoveableType?
  • Cleaning the data
  • Exporting comments?

Second Half: Import your blog data into SquareSpace

  • Using a format that SquareSpace understands
  • Unhappiness with documentation – regarding DYI imports
  • Imported Blogs go under a new journal
  • Migrating content between journals

Extended Time:

  • Release code
  • Gotchas
  • Data cleaning
  • Pictures