Let's be honest - every now and then SharePoint lies to us. Case in point - I was working with my friend Nidhish today, getting SAML working on a SharePoint site. We started out be getting a strange HTTP 500 error when we hit the site. That in and...

A good “friend of the blog”, Israel V., was good enough to point out to me recently that pretty much all of the code samples that we have for custom claims providers contain an irritating little flaw – if you follow these samples then...

I just had a heck of a time getting failover of a SQL 2012 Availability Group to work correctly with SharePoint 2010, so I thought I would share the outcome in case it helps anyone else. In short, I had my SQL 2012 Availability Group all set up and it...

NOTE: As usual, Word version of this post is attached to counter the brutal formatting this site does with what I actually typed up. Boooo!!! :-) As I’m sure many of you know who have done development on Windows Phone, there isn’t built...

We've been having a few good (meaning "interesting") discussions lately about custom claims providers and search. As it turns out, there are instances when you need to install your custom claim provider on a search box ("box" being something I'll define...

Hey folks, I've written previously about how to migrate code for claims users (such as Windows claims to SAML claims) in this post about the IMigrateUserCallback interface: http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2011/01/27/migrating-user-accounts...

Lots of folks have talked to me in the past about federating SharePoint with Windows Live. On the surface it seems like a pretty good idea – Windows Live has millions of users, everyone logs in with their email address, which is something we use...

In Part 1 of this series, I briefly outlined the goals for this project, which at a high level is to use Windows Azure table storage as a data store for a SharePoint custom claims provider. The claims provider is going to use the CASI Kit to retrieve...

In Part 1 of this series, I briefly outlined the goals for this project, which at a high level is to use Windows Azure table storage as a data store for a SharePoint custom claims provider. The claims provider is going to use the CASI Kit to retrieve...

Hi all, it’s been a while since I’ve added new content about SAML claims, so I decided to come back around and write some more about it in a way that links together some of my favorite topics – SharePoint, SAML, custom claims providers...

I recently ran across a very, very difficult problem to diagnose and fix, and I couldn't find this issue going on anywhere else so I thought I'd write about it here in case it comes up again for anyone else. In a Windows Phone 7.1 (i.e. Mango) application...

I had a friend send me kind of an interesting problem the other day. He was trying to add a new user programmatically to a Windows claims site and having all sorts of difficulties. His initial attempt at adding the user with domain\username and the SPRoleAssignment...

I wanted to document this error here because I recently went nearly blind trying to solve it, and I never did find the exact cause when Bing'ing for it. Unfortunately it's a pretty generic error so it may very well have been out there, but it seems there...

I know this has been a pain of varying magnitudes for folks over the last couple of years, so I thought I would share some nice PowerShell I stumbled upon recently. It allows you to export the token signing certificate of the local SharePoint farm's STS...

Hey folks, I just wanted to pass along some really very cool new features of the Excel Web App and SkyDrive. There's a new site up called Excel Mash Up ( http://www.excelmashup.com/) that has some really interesting ways that you can upload Excel workbooks...

Hey folks, just an FYI that, in case you haven't noticed, things have gone a little quiet on the blog. Nothing sinister at play here, we've just covered a LOT of stuff over the last couple of years and we're well into the SharePoint 2010 product cycle...

Hey folks, I’m here to tell you that I too now have my own story of getting burned by an anomaly of using claims authentication that I wish would have been clearer to me. This is such a fundamental aspect of deploying it that I want to make sure...

The title of this post actually makes this sound a lot more complicated than the final solution. It's really a case of combining the techniques I discussed in two previous posts: http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2010/09/25/retrieving-rest-data...

I had a problem that unfortunately I've seen a few people run across when using the AppFabric caching feature of Windows Azure. This is the release version of the caching mechanism formerly known as Velocity. When you have a problem with the caching factory...

Just wanted to update folks with the announcement made at the SharePoint Conference yesterday regarding the CASI Kit. I have decided to release everything for it - full source code to the base class, the web part, and all of the sample projects - up to...

For those of you who attended my SPC 351 session at SharePoint Conference today (Hitting the Ground Running with Claims Authentication), there was a request for some source code. As promised, I'm attaching a zip file with the source to the Facebook DataView...

NOTE: Please download the attachment to get a Word doc with this posting in human readable format. I had an interesting request recently from someone that wanted help essentially being able to migrate social tags between two different farms. There...

Hi folks, I just wanted to let you know that I will be making a major announcement for the CASI Kit at next week's SharePoint Conference 2011. If you are down there come by session SPC 412 - SharePoint, Azure and Claims Integration for Developers on Wednesday...

I'm sure many, many, many of you have seen my old friend (okay, exception) that goes something like this: "The security validation for this page is invalid. Click Back in your Web browser, refresh the page, and try your operation again." It's like the...

I've seen lots of questions and confusion (and was a little lost myself for a bit) on the fixes in SharePoint 2010 SP1 + June CU to enable use of the WHR parameter. This does in fact work now but requires a couple of things: Configure the SPTrustedIdentityTokenIssuer...