I posted a new article to my SharepointBlog titled ToolPane Customization. (I practice code re-use all the time -- even in the blog titles!) None of this is really ground-breaking, just some background on what I'm trying to do. I don't know how many parts the series will have, but I hope you'll stick around for the series.

I've been deep in coding my first web part. It is a rather complicated one, but I need to replicate one of the functions on our existing intranet site.  I'll post the details in a later post, because I want to document it carefully.

Any of you WSS developers out there, drop me a note. I know your out there, and I want to find you!!

Alex Chang writes about his experience installing WSS. Of particular interest is the discussion in his comments about included/excluded paths.

Thank you for all your efforts at "personalizing" Microsoft. I certainly appreciate it.

I know that you are working on bringing RSS throughout the company.  I would love to see a feed added to the "Columns" page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/using/Columns/default.aspx). In my opinion, this is one of the best areas of MSDN online.

From Christa Carpentiere:

The Knowledge Base is your friend

For about the umpteenth time, I've seen a newsgroup question on how to merge data from two or more DataTables responded to with a link to HOW TO: Implement a DataSet JOIN helper class in Visual C# .NET. This is just one in a series of KB articles on a DataSetHelper class that can be used to address common data merging and filtering questions. They can be handy - if you want to see what's available, just go to http://support.microsoft.com and search on "datasethelper".

Wow!  I knew that there where How To articles in the KBase, but I didn't know the depth of this subject. I wonder how much “gold” is in there...

The initial stress test went well. I was able to get over 1100 connections to each server. According to the test tool, I generated almost 300 requests per second.

One thing that I don't like about performance numbers is the vast quantity of them! I need to find more time to research the particular items to record to ensure that I am watching the right things. So, while the test was running, I fired up the browser and navigated to the site being tested.  I did not notice any difference. WOO HOO!!!!

For those interested, the servers each reported an average of 175 requests executed per second, which exceeds the 300 the clients reported. During the 15 minute test, 266,000 requests were issued with 2400 failed connections. (This is less than 1%, so we will most likely not follow-up until later.)

The performance is deemed acceptable, so now we push forward with a “beta” roll-out starting April 1st. I have a few parts to create, so it's off to the SDK.

I came across the following post:

From: Tom Rizzo [MSFT]
Subject: Free Chapters and samples on SharePoint 2003 Development
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.development
Date: 2003-10-06 22:42:29 PST

I just finished my Exchange and Outlook book (linked below) and the book was too long to include all the SharePoint material I wrote so we made it available for FREE on the mspress website. It's about a 500 page book on WSS and SPS 2003 development including web parts (basic, async, toolpane, toolparts, connections, galleries, etc) and the API (document libraries, lists, etc).

Be sure to download the supplemental chapters and also the sample applications for the book.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Enjoy!

Tom

--
Looking for a good book on programming Exchange, Outlook, ADSI and SharePoint? Check out http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/5517.asp

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

This is terrific stuff!!

I noticed a descrepancy on page F-68. When discussing the HtmlDesignerAttribute, there are a few examples. Look at these two (specifically, the bold part):

[HtmlDesignerAttribute(BrowserBuilderType.Dynamic,
"DialogFeatures=center:yes;dialogHeight=11;dialogWidth=12;status=no;"
+ "resizable=no;unadorned=yes;")]

[HtmlDesignerAttribute(BrowserBuilderType.Dynamic,
DialogFeatures="center:yes;dialogHeight=11;dialogWidth=12;"
+ "status=no;resizable=no;unadorned=yes;")]

The first example has DialogFeatures included in the quoted string, the second does not. I can't get either version to work in a VB project. Can anyone help?

Wayne Hall is asking about using a SharePoint list to track assets in IT.

Personally, I would not want to use the plain interface in SP lists for entering this much information. I would want a rich front-end experience (WinForm, InfoPath).

My preference would be to use an automated discovery tool (Altiris comes to mind) and integrate their back-end into my site.

I'm going to get 8-10 machines to act as drones for the test. They are old, retired desktops, but they can handle running 10 threads, with 10 connections on each thread, for a simulated load of 100 users each. That will definitely stress the system more than the user community.

As part of my setup/experimenting, I used the load balance administration program to stop one of the servers in the web farm. The other server picked up the load after a few seconds.  Out of 20,000 socket connections, only 100 failed! I expect that the ratio will be higher in the event of a failure, since the load balancer detection process has some latency. I did a similar "shut down" in the SQL Cluster, and the delay was about 45 seconds.  This will certainly impact the users more, but at least the backup machine will handle the load while I fix things.

So far, I'm very encouraged about our hardware.  I hope to get more testing done over the weekend.

I just lost a post I wrote about the stress-test tool I'm using!  dasBlog logged the error for me, but the content of the post is gone!

I like using the dasBlog entry form, since it will cross-post to the other blog. But losing data is very bad.

Another item on the To-Do list is migrating a ColdFusion application from 4.5 to 6.0 (MX). I found information on the DataSource service from Jochem van Dieten.

I uploaded my notes on installing WSS with integrated authentication.  (I'm sorry that I don't have time to pretty them up.)

These notes apply if you want to use integrated windows authentication for the database connection. The setup program will probably get you there, but you'll have application pools all over the place. (I had 6 of them!! Three each for the admin and default sites.)

MSDN has an article on the Web Part Packaging tool (Wppackager). A developer on my staff took it for a whirl today.

Having an MSI for the web parts will be critical for us. With a server farm, the content must be replicated on all the servers. For standard ASP.Net applications, I can use the Distributed File System service to synchronize folders on multiple servers. (And it works very well!!) But with the web.config entries and web part resources, it will be more complicated for WSS sites.

My first impression (as the guy running the install, not the one creating it) is pretty good. One of the resources was not included (a file that is loaded via a SCRIPT tag), but I don't know whether it's a build problem or an install problem.

I wrote blogging offline a while back.  This will not be necessary, since dasBlog has the wonderful “mail-to-blog” feature.  I send an email to a specific address and the text of the message is the content of a blog entry.  Outlook already supports offline mode, so I'm all set.

The next step in our setup is to stress test the web farm/sql cluster. I considered Application Center Test (ACT) that is included in Visual Studio Enterprise, as well as the Web Application Stress tool (WebTool) (WAS Tutorial).

ACT is integrated with Visual Studio .Net. It also has a command-line interface, so you can schedule tests for unattended operation. However, the version bundled with .Net does not allow the test to have multiple client machines. (I couldn't find any other version, however. I assume there is a version included in Application Center 2000, but that's a big load balancing solution that I didn't want to investigate.)

WebTool is an older product, but is still usable. The key part, for me, is that it installs a service on the machine. Each machine that has the service installed can be controlled by any other machine with WebTool installed. In our load-balanced web farm, I need to simulate traffic from different IP ranges. This distributed testing model will do that quite nicely

Over the last few months, I have had difficulty with running FrontPage websites on the same shared host as ASP.Net websites.  I don't understand completely, other that sometimes the .Net sites issue a generic “Error occurred” message. 

Today was the last straw.  Two different sites were unavailable, for no apparent reason.  No explanation from the vendor.  I am moving to SecureWebs. They host the blog of Scott Watermasysk, the creator of the .Text blog engine.

I have received top-notch help from Scott (a different Scott) at SecureWebs. I am excited about the move, which will be complete before the end of the month.

As I mentioned, I am contributing to the community blog at SharePointBlogs.com.  My main blog tool, dasBlog, has a cross-post feature written specifically for this situation.  So, blog entries at the main blog (http://www.schaeflein.net/blog) that are in the SharePoint category will also appear at www.sharepointblogs.com/spdiary.

I have joined a blog community at http://www.sharepointblogs.com. I am in the process of installing Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) and will be documenting my progress.

My particular corner is at http://www.sharepointblogs.com/spdiary