SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight

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Was working on a presentation on SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight.

Finally, I get to marry my two favourite technologies in one awesome demo.

 

There’s not a lot of people blogging about this yet, but what we were digging up was very delightful.

In bullet point form – because this is a brain dump blog post, and if you want to know how everything ties together you’ll have to catch up to one of the user groups where I present this stuff (or Adam Cogan… he gets around a lot more than me):

Technologies that made it possible:

  • SharePoint web services
  • SharePoint REST / OData services NEW
    • This is actually great news for the AJAX / JavaScript crowd.  Technically, you can write JQuery solutions that will query SharePoint for you.
  • Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll(s), and the corresponding Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll(s) – which are awesome wrappers
  • CAML is nearly gone, but still lingers on for huge data processing.
  • LINQ to SharePoint is the new crafting knife
  • Silverlight XAP files can be uploaded anywhere
  • Silverlight web part can load XAP files and run them
    • So a user that can upload a short movie to SharePoint, then configure a Silverlight movie player to play that movie… already has the permissions required to run custom XAP applications.
  • Which, if you stop and think about it, is a “different” deployment model!

ASP.NET "5.7.1 Unable to relay for email" when SmtpClient.UseDefaultCredentials = true

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Was looking at a problem with Andy regarding using SmtpClient.UserDefaultCredentials = true, and sending emails within an authenticated WCF service.

We can send emails within the domain without any issues, but when sending emails outside of the domain the mail server rejects us with the 5.7.1 Unable to relay for [email protected]

The easier fix would probably be to UseDefaultCredentials = false, and specify a NetworkCredential(username,password).  But we were stubborn and didn’t want to have to enter a email address somewhere in the web.config.

While investigating – we realized that if we specify the mail server by IP address instead of DNS name – then the email will be delivered.

 

Our suspicions are that the Exchange mail server has different rule sets to decide if it trusts the source to be somewhere local.  If the IP address specified is a local network IP – it seems to relax the relay rules somewhat.

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.

ATI x64 driver fail - Catalyst Install Manager has stopped working

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This could possibly be the last ATI product that I'd purchase.  For almost as long as I could remember I can not get the ATI drivers to install.

  • Download from ATI website
  • Download beta from ATI website
  • Download from Dell website

I've always had to rely on Windows Update - but then it doesn't come with the Catalyst utilities.

 

Today I was forced to upgrade the drivers...

  • Running Boot to VHD on the machine with Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 installed
  • Default driver that Windows Update picked up is the Generic one
  • I need to be able to use an external monitor for presentation tomorrow - Yikes!

Fortunately, I found my solution here:

http://insomniacgeek.com/blog/catalyst-install-manager-has-stopped-working/

To cut a long story short - this worked for me:

bin64\ATISetup.EXE –install –output SCREEN

 

The iPhone design flaw

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Hi Apple,

When I first got my iPhone it truly was a thing of joy. New apps were being created and continued to blew away my expectations of what a phone can do.

Not anymore, I have not found anything worth downloading or buying in the last month. I've browsing through the paid apps section now and filtering anything above $10. Still nothing that I'd consider truly must-have.

I will not buy anything above $10 for a platform that I’m considering to abandon in the next cycle.

I gave up a bit.
I cleaned out my iPhone apps list, call it a defrag, if you will - it is now down to only 20. At its height I had well over 7-8 pages full of apps.

 

I don't know what it is that you are doing - but perhaps it's also what you are NOT doing.

Whatever it is, I call it a design flaw.

 

Please bring back the developers and the great apps.  Otherwise you will lose your users - me.  There are plenty of other mobile vendors that are eyeing your market and they will happily take your developers from you.

I remember the days when I was using a Mac and we had no software.  I don’t know if you had forgotten those dark days.