While installing Visual Studio 2005 on Vista Ultimate x64 I got the error "An unknown error occured while copying files to your temporary folder. Setup will now exit."   I have two CD/DVD drives on my machine (HP Media Center m7170n), so I took the setup CD out of the DVD burner drive and put it in the other drive - presto, fixed.

I had this problem before, and couldn't remember what I did to fix it.  Posts on this problem are rare, and none of them document a real fix, only workarounds.  Unfortunately this is not a 'fix' either, but figured I'd post it for 'post'erity.

I spent the last week or so setting up Forms Authentication on Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) and the SQL Membership provider.  There are a couple of good blog posts out there, but judging from the number of comments, this configuration is still frought with potential errors.  Here's my summary, list of resources, and the new findings that weren't documented anywhere else.

1. Install the ASP.Net SQL Membership provider.  I used instructions here - step 3 has the basic info. (run aspnet_regsql.exe from .Net Framework 2.0 dir).

• I only had one instance of SQL Server on my server - the one installed by MOSS under the instance name ./OFFICESERVERS.  The aspnet_regsql.exe tool properly installed the membership database in this instance, but the connection string in machine.config was not correct, and pointed to ./SQLEXPRESS. 

2. Create users in the membership database that you want to use on your Sharepoint site.  There are no default tools to do this if you don't have VS installed on your SharePoint server (which I don't).  The article referenced in step 1 describes how to create a login page using the CreateUserWizard control that allows you to create users, which is what I did. 

CRITICAL STEP: In the web.config file Membership configuration, there is an attribute called 'applicationName', which is associated with any users you create from that web site. 

<membership defaultProvider="AspNetSqlMembershipProvider" >
  <providers>
    <clear/>
    <add name="AspNetSqlMembershipProvider"
             connectionStringName="MyLocalSQLServer"
             applicationName="MyAppName"
             type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />
  </providers>
</membership>

Since I had used 'MyAppName' as the applicationName in the sample, the users I created were mapped to this app name.  The Sharepoint samples use an applicationName of "/", so the users won't show up unless they are the same.

3. Configure the SharePoint site to use Forms authentication as described in the following resources:

TechNet SharePoint 2007 Authentication Samples

This first article describes the most basic configuration required, which is essentially to set the authentication mode of your SharePoint site to 'Forms' in Central Administration -> Application Management -> Authentication providers, and set the membership and role provider names.  The other articles tell you to put the configuration in the web.config files of both the Central Administration site and your SharePoint site.  After all my work I removed the web.config specific configuration and only left the machine.config entries, and everything still worked.  Lesson: if you use the right applicationName, you can save yourself a lot of work (you can ignore the articles below, but they provide good detail if you get stuck.

Nick Swan's Blog - SharePoint 2007 Forms Authentication
SharePoint Team Blog - Configuring Multiple Authentication Providers
SharePoint Unplugged - Forms Based Auth in MOSS

4. Map a user (from the membership db) to the SharePoint site as administrator.  Central Administration -> Application Management -> Site Collection Administrators (or Policy for Web Application)

The blogs above describe doing this in the two places mentioned, I found that only the 'Site Collection Administrator' setting is necessary.  I don't know the difference between the two, but since the policy section seems more oriented toward overriding or restricting specific user permissions, I'm going to stick with the site collection administrator setting.

5. Log in to the SharePoint site using the user account from step 4.  If all is well, you'll be in.  See references above if it doesn't work.

Error conditions:

• Login page simply refreshes, no error displayed.  This is what I continually saw when there were no users in my membership database mapped to the correct applicationName
• Login page has no stylesheet applied.  I saw this a couple of times while mucking with the configuration, but it went away after tweaking the web.config files some more.  I never had to resort to debugging this condition
• Central Administration displays 'No exact match found' errors when trying to add or search for users.  Again, the applicationName must match, as well as have the correct configuration, or the users won't be found.  The blogs state that wildcards don't work, but you can use the TSQL wildcard '%' in the search dialogs to search the sql membership database.

SharePoint Designer 2007 and Forms Based Auth

A note on using a site with Forms based Auth. SharePoint Designer.  There are two ways you can use this with Forms based auth.  The first (and what SharePoint Designer tells you to do) is to sign into the site first and select the 'Sign me in automatically' checkbox.  Alternatively, you can use the Intranet/Extranet scenario described in of the team blog above.  You can have the same SharePoint site accessible using different authentication schemes by 'extending' a site. (Central Administration -> Application Management -> Create or Extend Web Application.)  When you extend an existing site, you create a new Zone, and each zone can use a different authentication mechanism and membership provider.  I extended my SharePoint site by specifying a new web site/port combination, and left it in Windows auth mode.  I can access this site from SharePoint Designer directly.  I'm not sure if this will end up creating problems such as broken links, etc., but it works.

I finally got my secondary display working - by buying a different video card.  I went with an ATI X1300 series with 256Mb RAM.  Performance overall was still pretty poor, and although this video card has more RAM, it was actually rated lower (4.1) by the Windows benchmark than the NVidia 128Mb card I was running before (4.4).  After futzing with defrag, turning off Aero, and generally feeling the pain, I finally ordered a second 1Gb of RAM.  Man did that do the trick!  Windows Media Center used to take 5 minutes to launch, and now it comes right up.  The Windows benchmark didn't change much though - funny how in real use the performance difference was huge, but the way Vista runs the perf tests it didn't report any difference between 1Gb and 2Gb of RAM.

While developing my architecture designer using the Domain Specfic Language tools in Visual Studio I wanted to create my own connector type with filled circles at the ends of the connector.  Many thanks to Bhavin B for his post on the Microsoft Forums for getting me started.  I'm going to recap the steps here for clarity since some of his instructions were not completely clear.

Connectors in the DSL tools come with default decorators that inclue arrows and diamonds, but not circles.  Decorators at the ends of the connector lines are drawn using a 2D GraphicsPath so that the drawing scales well in the designer.  The process for customizing the decorators involves creating the custom decorator class, and extending the Connector.InitializeInstanceResources to load the custom decorators in the call to SetDecorators.  The two first parameters for SetDecorators controls whether the custom decorator appears at one or both ends of the connector.

1. Modify the ExampleConnector 'shape' (in the right-hand swim lane) to allow modifications by setting 'Generates Double Derived' = True.
2. Transform templates so the partial classes are created.
3. Add a new partial class to your project extending the Connector.InitializeInstanceResources to use your custom decorator as arguments (first arg is one end, second is the other end of the connector).

using DslModeling = global::Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling;
using DslDesign = global::Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Design;
using DslDiagrams = global::Microsoft.VisualStudio.Modeling.Diagrams;
using System.Drawing.Drawing2D;

namespace Company.Language1
{

public partial classExampleConnector : ExampleConnectorBase
{

protected override void InitializeInstanceResources()
{

base.InitializeInstanceResources();
this.SetDecorators(new DecoratorFilledCircle(), new DecoratorFilledCircle(), false);

}

}

}

5. That about does it.  Make sure that your custom connector is mapped to the relationship in your DslDefinition.dsl and you should have custom decorators on your connector

Here is a sample of my custom connector.  Picture is kinda small, but you get the idea. You can see the filled circles on each end of the connector.  They are much more prevalent in the designer.

I brought home Vista Ultimate now that we've RTM'ed to install it on my home machine.  The machine is an HP Media Center m7170n Pentium D 3Ghz dual core with 1Gb RAM and a custom XFXForce Dual DVI video card (NVidia 6600 chipset).  Single 220Gb HD.

I was running XP Pro (x86), so first hurdle was that I couldn't upgrade to the x64 version.  I expected this, so did all the necessary items: uninstalled most apps, backups, full defrag (I used a trial copy of PerfectDisk8 to do a full defrag and coalesce all the files) and then booted from the DVD to install.  The installation went flawlessly, and compared to previous versions of Windows, really didn't take all that long - I didn't time it, but it took me a couple of days to prep, the 1 hour install was the easy part.  Aero glass looks great

The next two hurdles: no sound, and I couldn't get my secondary display on. I fixed the sound problem with RealTek drivers (High Definition Audio Codecs) on their website (HP uses RealTek HD Audio chipset on the mb).

I haven't been able to get the secondary display working, even after installing the beta Vista ForceWare drivers from NVidia's web site.  I'll be checking around internally on Monday to see if this is a known/fixable problem.

Long story short: before installing Vista x64, make sure you have x64 or Vista drivers for your hardware, as the native drivers may or may not work.  I bought this refurb machine planning to run Vista, but it doesn't have the 'Vista certified' logo on it, so I took the risk.  I wonder how many customers are going to struggle trying to put Vista on older machines - maybe the only risky thing is trying to run the x64 OS because at least the x86 XP drivers will likely work in most cases (I'm not certain of this though.

I've been learning how to use the Visual Studio DSL tools to model an architecture language called 'ArchiMate'.  The DSL tools allow you to assign custom shapes using the DSLDefinition.ImageShape class, which is described in the documentation as supporting several image types, including WMF.  However, once I assign a WMF resource to the ImageShape.Image property the DSL fails validation and won't compile.  I found that I could change the resource manually after running the TextTemplate generation by direction modifying the 'DomainModelResx.resx file. 

 Now my problem is I want the image to be resizable like the stock GeometryShape class.  There doesn't seem to be documentation on the methods to override, however.

Reflecting on a funcional review this week where the Operations GM kept talking about business intelligence and 'back-end SQL access' in the same breath, I realized that there needs to be a way to articulate what services users should be allowed to access. I was doing some reading tonight in Enterprise Architecture at Work and came across a layered application/services view that is similar to many whiteboard sessions I’m sure we’ve all done. One way to articulate a principle is achieved by describing a boundary at the ‘application services’ tier.  In a transactional system we would not likely give ad-hoc access to users to the application objects or technical services, does it make sense to restrict Business Intelligence data access to the olap tier (assuming that olap fits at the level I've described in the diagram)?  Here I've extended the layer diagram into transactional & BI spaces and rough Microsoft technology mappings - red line reflects the boundary.

I was chatting with Dale in the hallway about service management, which happens to be related to his latest post regarding service discovery.  Something that crosses my scattered brain from time to time is whether it would be feasible to use DNS namespacing to facilitate service management.  In the same way that the .Net libraries are well specified via namespacing, wouldn't it make sense to manage the service directory the same way?  If I knew that I could always go to http://microsoft.it.crm.customer to find the latest services related to customer management, wouldn't that facilitate discovery and re-use within an enterprise?...

Work is progressing with an internal project to create an MIIS adapter for SAP.  We've tested a beta version of this adaptor, which we'll be using to integrate our SAP HR Employee records with SAP for account provisioning.  More info to follow...

Tamer Shaaban posed a brief overview of how to use the Biztalk 2004 SAP Adaptor in his blog here.

Also, some internal research around how to use adaptor for distributed transactions revealed:

Setting the SAPSend.ConnectionType = “OPENREUSE” for the first message and then SAPSend.ConnectionType = “REUSECONNECTION” for all additional BAPI calls maintains a single unit of work and allows committal of changes with BAPI_TRANSACTION_COMMIT

Today I attended the following sessions in whole or part:

• BW201 - Guidelines for Managing SAP Business Information Warehouse 3.5
• NW203 - Integrating Third-Party Applications Using SAP NetWeaver
• XI201 - SAP Exchange Infrastructure and SAP Business Intelligence Integration
• CI203 - Adaptive Computing
• CI204 - Enterprise Grid Technology and Applications

BW201 - Guidelines for Managing SAP Business Information Warehouse 3.5 - The key thing I learned here was about 'Process Chains' which are very analogous to SQL Server DTS workflows.  The talk focused on use of process chains to manage BW operational activities from data loading to transformation and report pre-processing or aggregation.  The talk mentioned compression of data - need to investigate that for reducing the size of our BW database.  Process Chains have a graphical modeller like DTS does and pre-canned 'widgets' for performing operations.  The workflow does not appear to have the richness of DTS in SQL 2000.  The rest of the talk focused on performance and monitoring analysis of BW using standard SAP transactions/tools.

NW203 - Integrating Third-Party Applications Using SAP NetWeaver - Brief discussion of leveraging distributed repositories in knowledge management scenarios (see my previous post from Day 2 under NW205) - SAP provides repository 'connectors' to allow SAP KM solutions to surface content from various repositories (File System, Web Server (http/s), WebDAV, etc.).  Per NW205 apparently MS has committed as part of the interop deal to create a repository manager to allow SAP KM to connect to Sharepoint repositories.

They discussed and demoed the Web Services support built into the SAP Web Application server. Using SE37 the function must be 'RFC Enabled'.  Then select the menu 'Utilities -> More Utilities -> Create Web Service'.  Name the virtual interface, select the function module as the endpoint.  The web service must still be enabled in some way through transaction SICF I believe.  You can test the web service using tcode WSADMIN.  I checked one of our test systems and apparently this stuff is not installed because the menus and WSADMIN tcode are not available.

XI201 - SAP Exchange Infrastructure and SAP Business Intelligence Integration - I didn't stay for the whole thing, but this talk described how to post delta business content into BW through XI from any external system/web service.

CI203 - Adaptive Computing - This talk discussed adaptive computing as a virtualization layer between SAP application servers and vendor hardware.  They have a sample system set up with blade servers and a NAS device where the servers do not have any local configuration - all OS and configuration data is stored on the NAS storage.  SAP automatically configures a server by starting the SAP services through a centralized controller.  The machine is not auto-provisioned in terms of installing software, but simply connected to the appropriate configuration on the storage tier in some way.  The service can then be moved from one server to another automatically.  The SAP service is stopped/restarted however, so it is not a high availability solution. Microsoft is a part of their 'Adaptive Computing Council'. 

CI204 - Enterprise Grid Technology and Applications - This talk demoed auto-provisioning of distributed computing resources to handle specific computing intensive applications.  They demoed APO Optimizer processes being auto-provisioned (installed) and run on a pool of 4 way servers.  They also showed Internet Pricing Configurator (IPC) handling increasing user load - when a preset threshold was passed the grid added more processes to servers in the pool to handle the load.  As the load reduced the processes where stopped and removed from the servers.  They discussed grid computing as a way to either reduce TCO by having less servers (share server resources among departments and have less of them, for example), or to increase performance by pooling existing resources to accomodate higher loads.  There were Windows servers in the 'grid'.  The applications they are delivering are focused, stateless, computing intesive applications that can be easily started/stopped on the servers.  SAP Application servers would not work well in this scenario due to their stateful nature.  They stated that more applications are being enhanced to support grid computing, but would not say which ones specifically.

In a previous post I noted that the SAP adapter was available from iWay.  Today I noticed that we have actually released our own SAP adapter for BizTalk 2004.

http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/adapter/adapters/sap/2004/sap_overview.asp

I noticed a couple weeks back that www.sap.com shows pages ending in .aspx!  Today I ran into a guy who knows the web master and says the guy loves Microsoft technology.  I think it is funny and fantastic that SAP is running their home page on ASP.Net!  Love it.

Session summaries for TechEd Day 2 - Oct 6, 2004

CI205 - High Availability for SAP Solutions - I arrived in the second half, covered the typical stuff - what is high availability, existing solutions.  Explained Windows Server Clustering for SAP DB and Central Instance Servers.

• Enqueue Replication - There was only one slide on the 'Enqueue Replication' technologies that SAP is offering to create redundant Central Instances - this technology essentially involves replicating the enqueue table from the CI to a secondary application server.  We are interested in using this in tandem with SQL Server 2005 Data Mirroring to create a high availability in our R/3 core environment.  See note 524816.
• Soft shutdown: They covered 'soft shutdown' of SAP Application servers using TA/command SMMS (not sure what TA is).  This sets a server so that it no longer services new requests to drain activity off and remove it from the system or reboot it.  We do this today by removing a server from the Logon Group (tcode: SMLG). 
• Rolling Kernel Upgrades: They discussed rolling kernel upgrades where you can replace 4.6D kernel or higher on one server at a time in tandem with the soft shutdown described above to upgrade kernels.  The kernels have to compatible (they didn't say how to tell).
• Applying Support Packages with Minimal Downtime: Support packages can be imported using a shadow import during uptime and then switching during downtime.  Supposed to reduce downtime by 70%.  I discussed this with our Basis Support Pack guy, and he said we tried using it during our last quarterly release and it did not help much.  He also stated that it has the drawback that in case of a failure of importing SPs, you have to revert to a backup taken prior to starting the shadow import.  This is really bad since the system could have new transactions during the uptime portion!
• Customer Based Upgrade process: they discussed a new upgrade procedure where a test copy of production is made, the 'packaged' upgrade is run against the copy, and the results are exported in a package.  The test system is then refreshed again from production and the package applied as a 'customer specific' upgrade.  After complete testing this package can then be applied to the production system.
• Outlook: End of Daylight Saving Time - They had one conceptual slide that described eliminating the downtime caused by daylight savings time switches.  There was no technical detail, but the statement  was 'Save time continuity by stretching system time in the 'double hour'.   Very future looking.  Not sure how they would accomplish this.

NW205 - Interoperability of SAP NetWeaver and Microsoft .Net - Thomas Meigen of SAP described the state of the interop deal between Microsoft and SAP.  He went into some detail on the Portal Development Kit for .Net (see yesterday's post), and discussed the roadmap. The list of focus areas or products he described:

• SAP .Net Connector 2.0 - released last week - supports both Visual Basic.Net and C#, SAP systems can be registered in Visual Studio Server Explorer- can drag and drop connections into the designer, full support of the BAPI object models and multiple nest result sets (?)
• Web Services collaboration
• Biztalk and XI integration will be through standards based messaging - no special adapters between the products seem necessary or are planned.
• Active Directory  and SSO - this is already delivered broadly, but they need to create an interop layer to allow the Enterprise Portal to authenticate against other MS products such as Exchange in order to host Outlook Web Access within the EP.
• Smart Client Sample Applications - in tandem with Longhorn Avalon APIs they are planning some type of SAP UIs (or a completely new SAPGUI type UI?) for Longhorn
• Repository Manager for Sharepoint/Exchange - I don't understand exactly what this means - he was not clear - something about repository support within Enterprise Portal?
• Windows and SQL Server - ongoing platform support
• Content Management server - MS to provide CMS iView for Business Managers and Users to manage portal content with CMS in 2005(?)
• CTSC - Collaboration Technology Support Center - staffed by 2 SAP and 2 MS employees to act as a center of guidance and integration between customers, sales, consulting, and development.

I attended 4 sessions this afternoon:

PRTL105 - The Integrated SAP Internet Transaction Server in SAP Web AS and PRTL102 - UI Clients for SAP NetWeaver '04: SAP is retiring their stand alone ITS server product and integrating ITS into the Web AS 6.40 server.  We don't use ITS internally at MS, but this change does offer some opportunities to investigate.  Specifically, SAPGUI for HTML functionality offers browser support for standard SAP transactions.  It has been supported in ITS for a while, but was complex since you had to deploy dedicated ITS servers.  Now we can provide browser access to SAP transaction directly from the same application server tier we already have.  Requirements for the Integrated ITS functionality are the WebAS 6.40 server, including both the kernel and programs delivered with WebAS 6.40.  We are on the 6.40 kernel, but have not upgraded or installed the WebAS 6.40 server to include the programs.  I'm not sure what we have to do to install those programs into our 4.7 environment.  OSS note 709038 covers the new integrated ITS functionality.

XI301 - Developing Adapters for the SAP XI Adapter Framework: This talk was a complete waste of time because the presenter was terrible.  He never covered how to develop adapters for XI, but spent the whole time talking about the framework that supports adapters.  His talk was fragmented and confusing with very complex architecture slides that didn't help me understand anything.

PRTL103 - Introduction to SAP Portal Development Kit for .Net - This was a FANTASTIC talk, both in terms of the content - the new PDK SAP is releasing for creating iViews for SAP Enterprise Portal (analogous to WebParts for Sharepoint) - as well as the presenter Yossi Pik from SAP Israel development labs.  He was funny, well paced, and articulate.  The PDK offers developers the ability to create iViews using Visual Studio.Net and .Net technologies for integration into the SAP Enterprise Portal.  The development experience is very complete, including the ability to visually design the iView by drag-n-grop controls, create connections to SAP systems that are persisted in the VS Server Explorer, and deploy the iView into the portal environment directly from Visual Studio.  The architecture they have created behind the PDK is also well done.  They have used .Net Remoting to create an interop layer between the J2EE engine on the SAP Portal server and the ASP.Net Engine; they also created ASP.Net user controls that wrap the SAP controls expected by portal for use on the design surface.  If you want to create iViews that access SAP information, the strategy to do this with the PDK involves using the SAP .Net Connector.  This is cool because it increases visibility and use of the .Net Connector to SAP developers that want to use .Net. 

Shai Agassi just finished his keynote address here at SAP TechEd 04 in San Diego.  A few thoughts on the presentation:

Key takeaways - they subtly introduced the idea of 'one repository' - that all your data needs to be in one repository.  Lots of Enterprise Services Architecture fluff and gratuitous comments about openness, but consistent emphasis that you 'can't be flexible unless there is only one underlying platform'.  ESA started as cross-platform service integration strategies, but they are continuing to focus on only SAP as the way to do it.  Their repository, their processes, their composition tools, their services and UIs.

Introduced with 'Back To The Future' theme - looking back 30 years.  He reviewed the last year - but I'm not sure where the '30 years' came into play.  In the last year they released mySAP ERP, SRM, and a 'family' of xApps on NetWeaver 04.  They have 150 xApp customers out of 1200 noted 'reference' customers - significant or not?  Seems like a low number to me considering the focus of NetWeaver on xApps as the solution architecture of the future. 

Shai discussed the '5 key learnings' they have seen from the last year and talking to customers:  Begin passing out the kool-aid...

1. Flexibility is key for growth
2. Web services are not enough.  Must have web services, common object repository, composition patterns to create apps
3. A business process platform emerges that provides Enterprise Services Architecture (SAP implied of course)
4. A huge eco-system develops around it (they hope)
5. Few companies can provide these solutions.  (Bug gulp of kool-aid here.)

He discussed how flexible change is important based on the history of shortening lifecycles of

• process execution (i.e. a sales order used to take weeks and today takes seconds),
• new product creation - from years to months
• (Need for) Implementation of new IT systems/processes - from 2+ years to (hopefully) months 

He stated that "If it's not the same platform, there is no ability to go back and forth [in the innovation lifecycle]".  He displayed a slide title 'ESA Roadmap' (Enterprise Services Architecture) and said that everything nEeds to be in 'one repository' - using SAP repository for storing all data.  Peter Zencke repeated this in his portion.  Shai made gratuitous comments that the platform is open - but in my opinion everything else was about only using SAP as the platform.  He also showed a marketecture slide about 'ESA Compliance' that essentially stated that to become ESA compliant (what does that really mean?  there are no standards for ESA compliance...) IT shops have to build application consolidation skills (by using xApps and NetWeaver of course), and build composition skills to create new applications.

They demoed a new Java Virtual Machine 'container' technology that isolates every user process in it's own VM so they can be administered and debugged without impacting other processes.  They pitched this as a 'back to the future' feature they built based on looking back at ABAP process isolation and brining it forward to JVM.  They also had the former exec. of there AVI acquisition (Paul something) demo Master Data Management tools they will be integrating. This was a pathetic demo of very complex UI tools to do data ETL.  I don't think anyone could see or follow what he was doing.  He was toggling between 5-6 different UI's that did not seem to have any usability design applied to them at all.

Peter Zencke came up and lost me in the first 2 minutes.  I've been posting this during most of his talk.  He essentially repeated the themes with some drill down on application architecuture.