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Welcome to my Blog, I will try my best to keep this site up-to-date with interesting content as often as possible. |
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Welcome to my blog!
Just so you know a bit more about my Industry Recognition, these are my Certifications:
I am certified in Managing & Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment, Configuration of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 & Design, Managing & Deployment of Small-Mid Sized Networks based on Microsoft Technologies.
Latest Posts: |
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22/04/2010It would seem today’s botched definition update sent out to corporate users of McAfee’s anti-virus software has caused Windows XP workstations to fail with DCOM errors which then causes a reboot to occur; finally, upon start up loose network connectivity. This will turn into an absolute nightmare for I.T administrators because in most cases this may mean a fix will need to be applied manually by visiting each workstation directly. For some large corporate’s the ramifications to this will be massive if they have 10,000 systems spread globally! Apparently this all came about because the definition update struck a false positive which lead to the engine deleting a svchost.exe from the Windows directory exclaiming it was infected. This blog post from Engadget has been following the story for most of the day: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/21/mcafee-update--shutting-down-xp-machines/ Please read when you get time. The following comment from that post about sums up my views on McAfee quite well: Quote: tekdemon Posted Apr 21st 2010 4:50PM @Madcat Any IT person who's insane enough to run McAfee probably doesn't deserve to have a job. Even a fairly bloated Symantec anti-virus app can't compete with McAfee's sheer awfulness-I mean normally it just ruins your machine by making it run like utter crap but I guess McAfee finally decided to just cut to the chase and nuke your machine once and for all. It seems that McAfee have since posted an updated version of the definition package, as well as a Fix Tool for affected customers, although it also seems the Fix Tool will need to be executed on each effected machine which might cause a problem if the I.T team can’t connect to it over the network.. Check the McAfee support site for more information and regular updates on the issue, the link about has links to McAfee also. 21/04/2010Here is some promising news that came out of the MIX2010 conference last month. 
Increased Support of Client Development Through the jQuery JavaScript Library - As part of Microsoft’s broad engagement with open source communities, Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie today announced that Microsoft is investing resources to contribute to the development of the jQuery JavaScript Library to help improve the development process of standards-based Web applications. Microsoft will also work to provide better interoperability between ASP.NET and the jQuery JavaScript Library by enhancing ASP.NET so .NET developers can better incorporate jQuery capabilities. In addition, Microsoft will actively promote and distribute versions of the jQuery JavaScript Library by packaging it with popular products such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2. As a first step, Microsoft will contribute a templating engine to the jQuery JavaScript Library Team to simplify Web applications. 
Quote Source: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2010/mar10/03-16MIX10Day2PR.mspx Related Posts: 19/04/2010 Yes you read correctly. It has been released; Microsoft Office 2010 has been finally released to manufacturing!
I have been a long time BETA participant, in fact I was using the new release right back in its alpha stages during the first Technical Preview mid-2009 (CTP). This announcement last Friday is of great excitement to me as I have been hanging out for a RTM build; especially the the new SharePoint 2010 server & Office Web Apps builds, the BETAs were good but the full releases will be a significant change in direction of corporate social networking and collaboration from now onwards. The opportunities for developers and partners has never been better! Apparently, according to facts from the Office 2010 Engineering blog, more than 7.5 million people downloaded the public BETA of Office 2010 which is triple that of the BETA release for Office 2007. These statistics would be warming news for Microsoft; as the Office 2010 release is following on from a very successful OS launch; namely Windows 7 late last year. If your a TechNet Subscriber like myself you can start downloading the RTM packages from April 22nd onwards, same for anyone who is a MSDN Subscriber also. Volume License customers who have Software Assurance can get the RTM builds from the new Volume Licensing Service Centre website start from April 27th and those without SA from May 1st. Retail boxes should start to the hit shelves sometime in June 2010. 18/04/2010 For many years now I have tried to voice my frustrations with the way in which big software and social networking giants conduct business and continue to develop their business models with direction to closed systems. The effect of closed-systems results in more control over the end-user and the consumer has little knowledge about the real true underlying goals of the service provider or software company.
For a long time I have been very critical of companies such as Google and Apple about the way in which they participate in the open web-ecosystem that is the “Internet”; further more the way in which they treat the very people who help them build there platforms out to the scale they are today, the developers. Some may remember how heavily scrutinised Microsoft were back in the dawn of the Web many years ago, simply because they tried to monopolise the web-browser market in a bid to get all consumers into there relatively closed platforms at that time, although you can argue that from very early on, Microsoft have always had a very rich developer-partner ecosystem operating which has been directly related to there success in the industry. That ecosystem was always developer friendly from day one, and always encouraged the integration of third-party devices and services. This article summarises my views on the issue, and confirms my thoughts on what to expect in the future.. (As much as I hope that we don’t continue down this path; the fact is the ball is rolling now, it may be very difficult to stop.) http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/04/14/why-platforms-like-iphone-and-twitter-are-becoming-control-freaks/ Now I may point out I don’t necessarily agree completely with the writers concluding statements I will beg to differ on that the overall facts expressed in the article are facts I have been saying for quiet some time, what do you think? 3/03/2010 It’s been a long while since my last blog post; unfortunately their has just been no time to write anything! In fact this is my first post for 2010, happy New Year everyone! (better late than never!).
As the title of this post states; a long awaited feature which I have just realised exists in the new Outlook 2010 release is the ability to have multiple Exchange Server Accounts in the same Outlook profile. You might say, “but that’s not new, I could do that before” well true; but remember Outlook previously could only open “delegated” mailboxes from the same Exchange Server organisation. Users could configure Outlook to open other shared mailboxes which gave them the ability to “Send on behalf of” as well as limited folder management and mail items management functionality. Now with Outlook 2010, you can have individual fully functional access for up-to 3 Exchange Server mailboxes under the one Outlook profile, this means the mailboxes can be from different Exchange Organisations or complete separate forests without the need to have any partnerships at the server level. This long awaited feature will be welcomed by many users as more and more companies adopt Exchange Server and rely on email as a primary means of communication in today’s businesses. Now all I am waiting for is similar functionality to happen on the phone, and then I will be completely satisfied. Maybe Windows Mobile 7.0 will open up some light on this feature?! I first got word on this feature from the Official Outlook Product Team’s blog, keep up to date with Outlook 2010 news by reading their blog. 4/12/2009 As the title suggests. For those who may have been wondering what this new Foundation 2010 release of SharePoint Server was; I can confirm to you that it is the next release of what we previously referred to as Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). Microsoft have re-labelled the v4.0 release and now refers to it as SharePoint Foundation 2010. The new name better describes what the version actually is, the feature set limitations are much like the WSS 3.0 release in that it gives smaller organisations a good base to start building on their SharePoint investments leaving out the more enterprise-class features .. it will still ship free of charge, free meaning that you have valid Windows Server CALs for each user who will access the SharePoint sites. You can get the BETA now .. or wait till first half of next year to get the full release.
I wonder if Microsoft will do a roll-up update for Windows Server 2008 R2 once SharePoint Foundation 2010 goes RTM, as Windows Server 2008 currently has WSS 3.0 Roles built-in, and I doubt a new server release will be coming any time in the near future; as we have just had one now? Will have to wait and see. It’s also worth pointing out that if your looking to offer the Office 2010 Web Applications to your users, you will be delighted to know that you do not need to purchase SharePoint Server 2010 licenses to do so, the Office Web Apps will work on the SharePoint Foundation Server. (The licensing requirements would still require that you have the appropriate Windows Server CALs and of course the correct CALs for Office Web Applications, maybe SQL Server depending on how you rolled out your SharePoint farm). 1/12/2009  Here is some old news, though I only just discovered this yesterday; apparently Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 has been released as a free download since April 1st this year (2009).
 SharePoint has been such a successful product and platform for Microsoft that it now understands the need to expand the tools out to those who may not have had access to them in the past, in the hope that it will enable more customers and partners to continue developing with the SharePoint Platform right into the next release due in the first half of 2010.
Next year we will see SharePoint Designer 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 which I believe will significantly step-up the way we work, communicate and leverage existing enterprise resources in the future. From what I gathered after watching Ray Ozzie’s keynote at the 2009 PDC, it is Microsoft’s goal to provide a seamless set of tools to help developers work between tools without the need to re-create projects in each. Visual Studio 2010 will be at the heart of this new wave. Here is the Free Download Link for Office SharePoint Designer 2007: http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/sharepointdesigner/HA103607611033.aspx 17/11/2009 Most Microsoft announcements get me excited, this one is no exception. Those who know me would also know my keen love for anything Microsoft and when big announcements are made usually I get carried away with all the news! As a CTP user for the very first limited release of the Office 2010 suite I am now even more excited that the time has come for the first public BETA. Microsoft announced yesterday (16-NOV-09) that the first public BETA of Office 2010 is now out for all TechNet and MSDN Subscribers. Microsoft are still saying that public availability will be sometime in November. I would assume PDC2009 will feature many of the new products in the 2010 suite, including a developers look into the power of SharePoint 2010! 
What is more exciting is that SharePoint Server 2010 is now out! I can’t wait to jump in and start working with v4 of SharePoint (downloading as I type), from what I have seen this product will take us into the next decade of internet experiences beyond what we can do today in terms of social networking, information sharing and collaboration in the enterprise or out on the public internet. I have also just downloaded the BETA of Office 2010 Web Applications; for those who don’t know what these are, basically it’s the Microsoft Office applications (Word, Excel PowerPoint etc..) but sold as Web Applications that get installed either into the web servers on-premise (for enterprise customers) or used via Windows Live for SMB’s and Consumers. This offering is again a very exciting development. Some may have seen/used the Google Docs offering. Microsoft are selling something similar to this .. but a lot better in the sense that the applications are identical in most ways to what we use on our desktops. This will mean Office can be extended to more users in more places! Hopefully I can get some screen dumps of Office 2010 Web Apps along with a lot of the other BETA’s out yesterday onto my Blog so you can see what I am talking about. I can’t wait to jump in on these new applications! 10/11/2009Well I was going to leave this one go, and not post anything on it.. but since it hasn’t really gained much media attention around the internet space other than a couple of posts on the Whirlpool forums, I decided to make some comments. The background: DFO is a business that owns/operates many large retail shopping complexes across Australia. Competitor to body corporate; Westfield. Over the weekend this was pointed out to me by Lauren (my girlfriend) after she was having trouble browsing the DFO website. Instead some strange page loaded with plain text exclaiming the details of the defacer who had just destroy the whole site; Afraid that maybe something had infected her computer I quickly assured her that it was there website not her computer with the problem. The reason I decided to write this blog post was because I find it interesting that for the most part of the weekend/early Monday, all the DFO sites were down, and even worse; the page which was uploaded over the DFO’s actual site still remained. It would seem the web hosting company; Diskman.net has been hit hard, as I find other domains hosted by them were also destroyed including their own website. I bet DFO are furious, but yet again it still amazes me a company of such size will resort to cheap crappy web systems, all to save a few bucks. Fact is; this type of attack can happen to anyone who operates a web site. More commonly sites who use free widely available web applications such as Joomla! for example. These attackers know these systems as well as they know the keys on their keyboards. They will break these sites for many reasons, some just do it to show the developers of these systems what backdoors exist in the code or where the vulnerabilities are. I do not endorse these attacks in anyway; and besides that, the activity is actually a criminal offence, but it’s like everything; you wouldn’t leave your store unlocked out of business hours? So why would leave your internet presence unlocked and run the risk of these attacks occurring to you? I am happy to go into further discussion on web site defacement and any questions you might have with security on the internet regarding setting up websites etc. Just leave a comment or question. Some Screen dumps from DFO’s sites over the weekend (click to enlarge):  
24/10/2009 This post is a small reminder to myself for the next time I may run into this problem when working with WSS 3.0 Web Services interface. Hopefully it might also save someone else a huge amount of time if they have a similar problem (A lot of time was wasted for me until I finally found the answer, which turned out to be not so obvious).
I had developed a web application which basically interfaces the Lists service in Windows SharePoint Services using a standard SOAP call. It worked well for ages, and then all of a sudden it started to throw a Web Exception when the application went to talk to SharePoint. Due to the nature of the Exception, one would think the problem is some what related to Security.. of course this caused me to spend hours on checking what might have changed from a security context in the network which might have caused the application to break. Until I discovered that the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 had a small security change in it. Small enough to miss, big enough to cause an application to break!! .. After checking the date which the SP1 was installed on the server lead me to believe this is what broke the Web Services calls. Problems were first reported at the same time as this Service Pack was loaded. So what changed? Well according to Microsoft, a Loopback check was implemented in the .NET 3.5 SP1 update which will cause a web server to perform a Loopback lookup when performing web service calls; I guess in a security sense this might be smart, so applications can’t masquerade themselves from unknown sources. Basically it checks to see if the web servers NETBIOS name matches the host header from the web application. Great idea when applications run as the server name, or when a server hosts a single web site with an unassigned host header value (SharePoint configures this way out of the box). But in my case the Web Application I wrote ran as an alias on a Front-End web server that hosted multiple web applications. This Loopback check is not something specific to SharePoint, but rather a check IIS will do for all applications. If your running WSS 3.0 in a farm configuration with load balancing configured then this will mean you also will likely experience the same dramas with SOAP Calls. Keep in mind that all front-end web servers who have the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installed will need to have this fix applied as you can not be sure which one will serve the Web Service call/request from your Application (in Load Balanced environments). Web Exception that I was getting from my Application: | Type: WebException, Exception Message: The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized. |
Solution:
The fix is simple; disable this new loopback check introduced in .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. Follow the methods in this Microsoft KB Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 |
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