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...

As I alluded to in an earlier post, there have been some changes in SP1 and June CU that impact the ability of Windows Phone 7 (both RTM and Mango) and other mobile devices to access SharePoint sites that use SAML authentication. I described in a different...

I know that there have been a number of posts and articles out there about using diagnostics in Windows Azure. This, in fact, was part of the problem when I went to flesh out the details of what’s available recently. I found a bunch of different...

One of the sorely missing pieces in the Silverlight toolbox for SharePoint developers is a people picker control. There is a control that SharePoint provides, which you can use in a web part or custom layouts page (the PeopleEditor class). Silverlight...

I recently spent too much time trying to get an ADFS Server upgraded, in my case from Windows Server 2008 to 2008 R2. Like many SharePoint folks that are just trying to get along in a claims happy world, seemingly simple things like this can cause a surprising...

Okay, this will hopefully be the longest titled post I ever write, but I wanted to make sure it covered all the relevant technologies being discussed. This is an area that I’ve heard a more rumbling about recently, which is really all about how...

Hey all, there has been a potential issue that's recently come to light for folks that have only applied SharePoint 2010 SP1 but not the June 2011 CU. What you will find after doing this is that the people picker will no longer work for your SAML claims...

For those of you who have been waiting for integrated IRM support in SharePoint 2010 with SAML claims users, your wait is over. The recently released June CU contains the fix you've been waiting for. Actually, it's the re-released June CU (if you got...

Hey folks, our good friend Adam C. in SharePoint support recently alerted the folks here with a complaint we're seeing come up more frequently from customers that are using SAML claims. It starts out as taking a very long time to log into a site using...

I've had this scenario come up a few times now when working through various federation scenarios. These cases always involve using Facebook as an oAuth source for login, or Azure's AppFabric ACS as a federated identity provider. The common behavior is...

I was doing some work on the Mango release of Windows Phone 7 the other day. One of the great features (there are many) that has been added is support for DPAPI. One of the cases in which you might want to use this is to encrypt some content before storing...

I had this happen with a CU recently, and I saw someone that had the same problem with SP1. You download and install some patch - a CU or service pack. The final step after installation is to run psconfig on each server in the farm. However, psconfig...

I recently witnessed a problem that proved to be fairly difficult to track down so I thought I would share the issue and resolution. In this case, a custom claims provider had been developed and it was being used as the default claim provider for the...

Had lots of fun earlier trying to figure out why my Windows Phone 7 application could not connect to my WCF endpoint. I had tested things out thoroughly with a standard winforms client application and everything worked great, but whenever I tried hitting...