I recently found out about SQL Aliases and how to use them in combination with SharePoint installations. It enables you to define local alias name to connect to with a SQL Client, so you can change the actual connection later on. This may come in handy when switching over to your mirror database server, when moving servers, when virtualizing you database server etc.

This is how it’s done:

1) Open the cliconfg.exe tool and go to the Alias tab

2) Click Add to add a new alias. Choose a Network Library and then configure your alias. In my example I use MossDBServer as my alias, and ActualServerName:1433 as the underlying connection.

3) Use the alias name in your client app, e.g. the SharePoint Configuration Wizard:

4) When time has come to change the underlying connection, just launch cliconfg.exe again and make your change:

I can think of at least a couple scenario’s where this might come in handy. Fancy a simpler way to move all of your MOSS databases anyone? Change the port SQL Server is listening to?

Scott Hanselman is calling out for a secret handshake to use when calling technical support to let them know you know about technology. This way, they can skip the standard questions and get to the interesting stuff ;-)

This calls for a new website!

Recently I enabled Kerberos authentication for my SharePoint web applications. Since then, we began to receive random blue screens. After analysis of the crash dump, we received the following error message:

BugCheck 7E, {ffffffffc000001d, fffffa6000000000, fffffa60005a5848, fffffa60005a5220}Probably caused by : HTTP.sys ( HTTP!UlAuthenticate+73 )

That immediately ringed a bell, as we implemented Kernel Mode Authentication by manually changing the applicationHost.config file on our webserver. The details on the why and how are detailed in these articles.

Microsoft recently published http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962943, that should solve this issue! At the time of writing, I could only find this KB via the Microsoft Support website – so it must be so recent that Google did not pick it up yet ;-)

Recently I've been struggling with the integration of Reporting Services 2008 and SharePoint 2007. One of the fundamental steps in getting this to work, is to grant the Reporting Services service account (domain user of course) the necessary rights in your SharePoint databases. The provided addin is supposed to do this for you. However, in my farm setup I cannot get it to work properly. Every time I'm greeted with the following error: "Unable to connect to the Report Server WMI provider". It seems that the server hosting the Central Administration website cannot connect properly to the SSRS server.

One way to get around this, is to install the Central Administration website on the SSRS server - at least temporarily. But as you add content databases in the future, you must follow this scenario again.

Therefore I recorded all steps that this function performs:

1) adds the SSRS service account to the WSS_WPG group on the Reporting Server

2) Grants the SSRS service account the following rights on your SharePoint databases:

• Contentdb for central administration: db_owner & WSS_Content_Application_Pools
• Configuration db: WSS_Content_Application_Pools
• For every other content db: db_owner

That's all there is to it!

Having played with WIndows 7 for a couple of days now, I already noticed some subtle improvements to the user interface. In the past, when you needed to change the environment variables, you had to click a lot of times to get where you wanted.

In Windows 7 it’s as simple as typing “env" in the search box, et voilà:

On the other hand, browsing with Internet Explorer 8 has not been that good: as already reported, browsing GMail is a real PITA.

A very cool new  feature from Microsoft Support emerged lately: Microsoft Fix It.

"Have you ever come across a Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article or been presented with a Windows Error Reporting (WER) solution and asked yourself, why can't Microsoft just fix this for me? Today KB articles and WER solutions provide you with a list of steps that can be followed to resolve your issue. However, tomorrow looks much different and we hope it helps you resolve any issues you have with our products faster and easier. "

The team already released some articles - these are the latest, but there is already more!

• Disable TCP auto-tuning Fix it Live!
• Disable Automatic Updates for Media Player Fix it Live!
• Restore Recycle Bin Fix it Live!
• Open Non-Digitally Signed Non-Encrypted E-mail as Text Fix it Live!
• Enable Hibernate and Hybrid Sleep Feature Fix it Live!
• Enable ACPI interrupt storm hotfix Fix it Live!
• Enable hotfix for the address of this site is not valid Fix it Live!
• Enable WinHlp Macros Fix it Live!
• Enable Windows Firewall Fix it Live!
• Restore My Active Desktop Button Removal Fix it Live!
• Restart Print Spooler Fix it Live!
• Fix Windows Update Error 0x8000FFFF Fix it Live!
• Increase Folder View Settings and Customization Limits Fix it Live! 

I'm highly excited about StackOverflow getting a sister website for IT Pro's in march 2009. If you don't know about StackOverflow, it's the highly successful programmers Q&A site that Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky founded.

Like everyone else in the world, I downloaded my copy of Windows 7 last weekend and installed it on my Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook E-8310 laptop – a dual core machine with 4 GB RAM and a rather modest 80GB 7200 rpm harddrive.

For the first time ever, all my drivers were detected and installed automatically! Even the obscure manufacturer ones. Over the next couple of days I’m going to install all my apps on it, to see how they behave. So far, my company’s VPN client works like a charm – my number one requirement for any OS installation to last longer than a few days.

Having the pleasure to have inherited an interesting codebase from a former colleague, I recently discovered first hand that source control can be a PITA too! That is, not using it as it should be used. As I already stated in an earlier blog post, when used right, source control can safe your life. But not this time..

When I first looked at the codebase I’m being asked to change, I was relieved to see that it was under source control. Okay, let’s see what version is the one in production right now. Huh? Okay, no tags to be seen anywhere. In case you don’t know what tags are, this is a very good introduction to source control.

Right, let’s see if I can determine the production version by looking at the history of changes. Nope, almost no checkins contain comments to determine what was changed and why. Great. What’s next?

What I’m doing now is trying to compare the dll versions on the production system with the times of checkin in source control to narrow the scope. To make things even worse, it seems that the client side of the application has been modified after the server side has been into production. Because all parts of the application reside in the same solution and source control tree, I’ll have to do some serious hacking afterwards to assemble the current state of the system as it is in production.

So using source control is good, using it as it should is even better!

Definitely the best guide to using source control is made by Eric Sink.

[Update] Currently using the magnificent WinMerge to see what has changed exactly

I decided to change the design of my site to something simpler. I used the Newspaper theme from Janko Jovanovic which was included in the BlogEngine theme pack from Codeplex. So far I like it: clean, sober and simple. Just like me ;-)