Searching for my lost shaker of salt

In SharePoint 2007, this folder exist at the root of a site collection only and is used to store all InfoPath published forms.  If it was deleted, and it can be by anyone with owner rights to that site, it will cause all kinds of problems publishing InfoPath forms for the entire site collection.  You can publish, but your forms cannot be web-enabled.  For example, if the library has been deleted, you will see the following error when attempting to publish even the most basic InfoPath form:

“The form template is browser-compatible, but it cannot be browser-enabled on the selected site”.

Clicking the error message reveals additional data that will send you down a different rabbit hole, implying that Form Services are not installed or activated.

The first thing you should check is to see if a Form Template library exists at the root site of the site collection.  Click on “View all site content”.

With no Forms library at this level, SharePoint does not have the storage location it needs to hold a browser-based form.  The fix is relatively simple and requires SharePoint Designer 2007.

1. Open the site in SharePoint Designer
2. In the folder list, select the root node and click File | New to bring up the New dialog.
3. Select the SharePoint content tab, then Document Libraries.
4. The name for the library is important, and needs to be called “FormServerTemplates” (without the quotes).
5. Click OK
6. Right click on the newly created “FormServerTemplates” library and select properties.  Uncheck the box on the Settings tab to “Use a template for new documents”, if this is checked.

This will correct the issue and you will be able to publish a browser-enabled form in InfoPath:

Its also a good idea to go into the site collection and remove the newly created forms library from the Quick Launch, so folks don’t get any ideas for doing things they shouldn’t.

Obviously, if you are receiving the above error messages and the “Form Templates” library DOES exist, there may be issues with your server configuration or InfoPath deployment that you should follow up on.

Note: Don’t ask me why SharePoint installs the form library “Form Templates”, but the fix requires you to name the new folder “FormServerTemplates”.  It just does.

Hard drives are like libraries.  There are rows and shelves and books that make up a body of information and knowledge.  If you are looking for a particular book, you look it up or ask your friendly neighborhood librarian and walk (or hike) to the spot.  You find your book after scanning the shelves for a few and are off on your business.  So too is it with your hard drive.  They have blocks and sectors and files that consist of your files and programs. 

Now think about if you had to find 10 books in the library instead of just one?  You would have to find all the different spots where those books are, head to those shelves, and grab your book.  Your library may still use the Dewey decimal system to classify books, placing them into knowledge classifications rather than by author or title.  This would be inconvenient if you had 10 books all starting with the litter “A”.

Your computer has a lot of files to load when you turn on your computer, or load your favorite game.  If these files are next to one another that program loads fast.  If not, its slow and you consider buying a new computer.

Enter the concept of disk defragmentation.  Instead of alphabetizing your hard disk, it places like files next to one another.  Maybe by application, maybe by other means.  By default Windows writes files out where there is space.  It may put part of a file here, another part here, and so on for thousands of files.  The more files and programs loaded onto a computer, the more scattered they can become.  Its a major reason why a new computer appears to work fast, but over time slows down.

I’m not going to get into the “why” behind this happening, enough to say it would be nice that it didn’t.  Fortunately there are several products to combat this.  I’ve personally used the following:

• Defraggler
• O&O Defrag
• Windows 7 Defrag

Defraggler was by far my favorite until recently.  It did a good job of keeping the files in order, even shutting down my computer when done.  It had the bonus of actually displaying the defrag status.  All this for FREE.

And then I received a promotional copy of Diskeeper from TechEd.  I used Diskeeper years ago and liked it then, but stopped using it after a while.  Mostly because I didn’t want to pay for the license, and partly because their tool appeared to be as good as the free ones.  I was wrong.

There is an interesting new product called Soluto – Anti-frustration software.  The major thing this free product does is graphically show how long it takes for your computer to boot, why, and how to fix it.  Many vendors have pieces of their programs that load when a computer is turned on that serve a variety of purposes.  Some to make it so their program appears to load faster, others to fetch updates.  More often than not it takes an experienced person using MSConfig or CCleaner to remove unneeded things from system startup.

I tend to defrag my disks weekly using Defraggler.  After I did my first full defrag with Diskeeper I rebooted and saw this with Soluto.

My boot time dropped from 1:30 to 1:15 just by defragging my hard disk with Diskeeper.  A new feature in Diskeeper 2010 is their “Invisitasking” which defrags the drive while the system is idle.  I really don’t like these features as they tend to still draw CPU away from other important tasks, like Team Fortress.  But I gave it a shake and let it run, and low and behind not only didn’t I see any loss of game-play performance but it also cut my boot time by another 15 seconds.

Or, to properly call this out, using Diskeeper 2010 reduced my boot time by 30 seconds.

NOTE: the rise in the Soluto line has to do with me installing a variety of applications and service packs and I haven’t tried a reboot in a while.

As I mentioned earlier, I was given this copy of Diskeeper 2010 before writing this article.  I wanted to pass along my experience and give credit where credit is due… and to insert Amazon links :)

Diskeeper 2010 Professional Single License Pack is available from Amazon.com for $60 at the time of this writing.  Also get a 30-day free trial from their website and see for yourself.

As my first TechEd comes to a close here in New Orleans I feel compelled to pass along what I’ve learned about the “TechEd experience”.  While I read a lot and received a lot of advice, there are still lessons learned that I will use myself on future conferences.

• Set your learning goals.  TechEd is HUGE.  Make sure you get the most for your (or your employer’s) dollars by coming up with a list of things you want to learn.
• Plan your sessions.  TechEd is HUGE, both in the number of sessions (over 1000 for this one) and depth of topic.  Use the schedule builder to get a starter agenda.
• Realize you can’t do it all.  TechEd is HUGE!  There may be 5 or 6 session slots per day, but this doesn’t leave room for hands on labs, vendor presentations/discussions, or just down time.
• Plan your trip.  Decide when to arrive and stay based on your schedule and goals.  Find a hotel that is on the conference list as shuttle buses are available for those;  you may not need a rental car.
• Plan for a little fun.  Research where the conference is and pick one or two things to do.  Sample the local cuisine, visit an attraction, or find a place to walk from your hotel… something to give you a break from sessions and to enjoy the host city.

Once the planning is done, there are a few more things to consider

• You are an army of one.  And you will carry everything with you.  You’ll get a backpack or you may want to bring your own.  Keep it light, you’ll be living out of it for 4 days.  And remember it will be filled with documentation, tee shirts, books, or other prizes along the way.
• Which laptop to bring?  Consider a netbook, tablet PC, or slate PC.  Your intention should be to take notes, do some light web surfing and e-mail, not playing WoW between/during sessions.
• Power considerations.  Plan your battery life.  Outlets are often available in between sessions, occasionally during, and not at lunch.  Tweak your devices for max power savings BEFORE you arrive.
• Leave work at work.  This conference isn’t cheap.  Get your money’s worth by actually attending and not being a remote worker.
• Bring business cards, but not a ton.  They are good for some vendor prize giveaways (when they don’t already scan your badge) and for exchanging info with your peers.
• Wear comfortable shoes!

While the breakfasts at the convention center leave a lot to be desired, lunch is great… as well as the 4:30pm snackage.

There is coffee, tea, and cans of soda all over the place.  What’s fun is the soda is all coke products… along with the welcome addition of Mt. Dew. 

Thomas Deml from Microsoft gave a great discussion on “My website is slow!  And I don’t know what to do about it!”  Its an aptly named topic.  I spend a great deal of my day looking at performance issues with the shotgun approach.  If key performance indicators aren’t out of whack, figuring out what to do next is a challenge.

Thomas went into detail on a number of things to examine and try.

First off, if you are not yet using Fiddler, go get it.  The tool examines network traffic to and from a client and is a key tool to helping understand web page load times.  Specifically, there is a WCAT (web capacity analysis tool) extension that can be used to simulate load on a server.  While less precise than other stress test tools, this along is better than nothing and looks to help with ensuring the basics are set.

I’m going to interject a few items from my own experience, including the fact that many of these options are available for Windows Server 2003… not just Server 2008.

IIS tweaks

• Ensure default.aspx is your top default document.  Its not a huge change, but with each document request where a document is not specified, like your home page, IIS checks this list in the order shown.  So if you are running .NET or PHP, make sure that handler is listed first.
• Turn off authentication or SSL if not used.  This is especially true with home and static pages.
• Use the browser cache!  On static content pages and folders, set content expiration to 365 days.  This sends a HTTP 304 response on content requests.  As the browser requests the file, if it receives the 304 the file is not downloaded.
• Removed x-powered-by headers.

Server 2008 specific settings

• Use IIS output caching of semi-dynamic content.  These are non-user specific settings that will span multiple sessions and help improve performance.
• Turn off request tracing except when troubleshooting performance.

Things you can (and should) do with .NET.

• Use the ASPNET compiler tool to pre-compile the web application.  Normal operating mode is the first user to request a page will cause that page to JIT, or just-in-time compile.  This means that the first user to hit the page gets the delay, which is often not acceptable.  This tool will precompile all pages within the application at once.
• Watch object size.  An object larger than 85k is treated differently in the .NET memory management model and is garbage collected differently (less frequently, if at all).  Smaller objects with shorter life spans will improve performance.
• Perform IIS tuning.  By default IIS will handle a max of 12 concurrent connections, which may be fine for entry level sites.  Maybe not so much in the real world. 
• As much as possible, don’t use Viewstate.  This is different than ControlState.  Viewstate adds a lot of bytes to the page.

Improving performance by reducing bytes transferred.

• Use output caching.  The demo showed a 5x improvement in performance by just flipping the switch.
• Use the free Microsoft content delivery system for standard JavaScript libraries for Ajax, jQuery, and the .net framework.  The code files are a standard component of the .NET framework and this will offload its download from your server.  Further, it will span servers and applications and will help cache these larger .js files.
• Crunch production ready JavaScript and .css files with AjaxMinify or Doloto.  This removes comments and simplifies variable names.  The net result is file reduction and smaller downloads, but should be used for production deployments only. 
• Ensure that image files are not being scaled by HTML.  If an <img> tag specifies a width of 128 bytes, that should be the size of the image.  Otherwise you are downloading extra bytes (slow) and forcing the browser to do the resizing for you (slow).
• On the topic of images, use .jpg files for photos and .png for graphics files.  Remember to remove .jpg file metadata, as this adds bytes that doesn’t help anyone.

And the biggies; ensure .css tags are at the top of the file and <script> tags are at the bottom.  Native behavior of IIS suspends all other downloads across all download threads when it encounters a script tag.  If if this is a big chunk of Ajax JavaScript, it will give the appearance that the server is thinking long and hard on your page request.  Given the attention span of the average Internet user is 4 seconds, that may be too much.

This was a great session and a lot of good tools and techniques to try out.  Well done Tom!

This year’s TechEd backpack features a number of safety features that may prove useful in surviving the week. 

Aside from numerous pockets that could store (and conceal) just about anything, the pack comes equipped with an aluminum water bottle on a carabineer and what appears to be a drogue chute.

It’s a good thing to slow down, especially in this fast paced technology wonderland we all live in, though I question the thought behind the need to deploy something like this indoors.  I may test it out next time while biking.

UPDATE:  It may not be a chute at all.  After closer inspection it may actually be one of the following:

• Sherk’s shower cap
• The next generation of Woot bag’s of crap
• Reusable trash bag.

What do you think?

As I sip my coffee, clear the fuzz from my brain, and reflect on the day of travel yesterday, flying from Norfolk, Virginia to New Orleans, I find myself wanting to slap my forehead.  Or someone.  While this is my first large technical convention it is not my first time traveling to a new area with a lot of people.  The flights were find, it was at the airport that I actually wondered if anyone told New Orleans that 2,000+ nerds were descending into the city.  I say that because, while still at the airport, there wasn’t a clue which of the 14 baggage pusher was ours, and the recommended, pre-booked airport shuttle was in total disarray.  Ok, so finding one’s luggage is always a challenge at the airport.  But we are nerds, and everyone was trying to connect to the airport’s website to find out where we should be.  I’m pretty sure New Orleans has other large events during the year--- seem to remember seeing pictures, um, reading stories about it.  All was good in the end.  We (my coworkers and I) eventually ignored the signs and just started asking people that looked like they worked there.  And despite the flight delays and airport mishmashup, we even managed register ahead of time… by going straight to the convention center before our hotel.  I can imagine those lines this morning.

The second reason why I think the city wasn’t ready for the nerd invasion was our hotel.  The Hilton Riverside is a beautiful city and they had plenty of staff on hand to greet us.  It was at check in that I was told they only had smoking rooms with king size beds.  What?  This was booked months ago.  I never said I wanted a king room, but did say no smoking.  How did the wires get crossed?  It wasn’t a big deal to be switched to a queen, non-smoking room.  It just felt like that wasn’t their first choice.

My point is all of this seemed like a big mess up in planning.  All of these organizations had my information and presumably that of my peers.  They knew we were coming.  Why did they seem so surprised when the data turned out to be true?  This is, after all, a information technology conference.  I’m sure I’ll geek out on all the new toys and techniques that I’ll see throughout the week.  But it highlights the more fundamental issues; if you have all the information available any way you want it, are you going to do anything meaningful with it?

Because who has a 3.5” floppy disk anymore, really?  For many years as a system builder and tech it was handy to have those red disks that could be used to bypass any operating system and solve lots of problems. That capability is still around with just a little extra effort and the right software. 

First, of course, you need a USB drive.  Depending on what you want to use it for (say, loading an OS or just running a BIOS update) will determine how big you go.

Second, you need the right software, and that’s UNetbootin.  For just about any time of lightweight OS distribution, this open-source freeware app does what it takes to turn your USB thumb drive into one of those magic floppy drives.

I had to reinstall the BIOS of my Acer Aspire netbook, down to version 3005 from 3009.  The later version spiked the CPU temp which caused shutdowns during boot where I thought I lost the machine.  I found this utility, created a 1GB “floppy” with the BIOS flash software, and sure enough it ran.

Once again, open source to the rescue!

A little background is needed for this one. I was rebuilding a development server to match updated QA and PROD servers. This is a physical server running Windows 2003 x64. While installing WSS 3.0 February Uber Cumulative update (KB 961766) and Office Servers 2007 February Uber Cumulative update (KB 961576) I received the following error in the upgrade.log file:

[SPIisWebSiteWssSequence] [ERROR] [5/14/2010 10:13:05 AM]: Action 3.0.3.0 of Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPIisWebSiteWssSequence failed.
[SPIisWebSiteWssSequence] [ERROR] [5/14/2010 10:13:05 AM]: InstallAspNet 891541206 failed.
[SPIisWebSiteWssSequence] [ERROR] [5/14/2010 10:13:05 AM]: at Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.EnsureAspNetScriptMapInstalled.Upgrade()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPActionSequence.Upgrade()

The highlighted number above references an IIS 6.0 site ID, so the error means the patch was unable to work with ASP.NET to modify a particular web application.

This thread helped me understand and fix the error. It seems that particular web application was running in 32-bit mode, where IIS is running in 64-bit mode. I think, more specifically, that ASP.NET was bound to this web application in 32-bit mode and needed to be rebound elsewhere.

The actual fix is to re-register ASP.NET. The key that was missing from other articles I read is that you need to do this from the Framework64 directory on the server. So the fix is actually running this command:

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis –i

Re-running the patches produced a clean upgrade.

Found this out the hard way doing a demo this morning.  I am using VMWare Workstation 6.5 running on Windows 7 Ultimate.  The guest OS is Windows Server 2003.  The issue is the mouse pointer actual location was not the same as where the pointer was on the screen (a parallax error).

I’ve rebooted both OS’s and ensured the screen resolutions made sense.

The issue appears to be with the host OS, Windows 7.  For demo’s I often increase the font scaling of both my guest and host operating systems, so things are readable on projector screens.  The moment I restored the Windows 7 (host) font scaling back down to 100% everything was fine.