Eddie Tse

RDP and certificate

2010-02-22T09:21:00.001+10:00

If you have configured RDP on Windows 2008, 7 to use an internal certificate for computer authentication, CRL will only work if the only published location is an HTTP endpoint. If you have multiple end point, the CRL checking will not work.

Alternative is force RDO to use legacy encryption by creating a RDP file with

enablecredsspsupport:i:0
authentication level:i:0

Note to self, Outlook doesn’t have intellisens

2009-05-04T14:44:00.001+10:00

Crazy past couple of weeks, been rushing like mad and very much sleep deprived all for work. So this afternoon while I was replying to an email, I keep hitting Ctrl-Space waiting for intellisense to show up while I was in Outlook. I went crazy thinking why is my intellisense broken, only realising I’m actually in outlook. That’s just telling me its time to get some rest.

PDC 2008

2008-11-01T05:30:00.001+10:00

I've thoroughly enjoyed my time at the PDC this year, the biggest announcement was obviously the cloud services with the Windows Azure platform. But the greatest thing is the chance to network with other developers and Microsoft product team members.

This was my first PDC experience and I had high expectations, I think the conference overall was organised pretty well. But I have to say was disappointed that we don't get a nice show bag, was expecting some kind of nice backpack or laptop bag given the price of the conference ticket, but instead only got a plastic show bag

It would also be nice if the "Ask the experts" session was slightly better organised.

WCF WSDL and ASMX SOAP Extensions

2008-08-07T22:49:00.001+10:00

Interesting observation today, if you have an invalid ASMX soap extension registered in your web.config file. WCF will not render wsdl from its metadata endpoint. I didn't think the two was related, but there must be some connections between them.

MOSS and antivirus scanning exclusion

2008-07-27T12:06:00.001+10:00

If you're running an OS level antivirus scan on your MOSS production servers, you might run into decreased performance and random lock ups. Check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952167 and add in the necessary exclusions to your virus scan to stop your scanner from competing with Sharepoint.

Office 2007 on Vista authentication prompts with Sharepoint docments

2008-07-26T20:28:00.001+10:00

Under Windows Vista, sometimes when you open an Office document stored on a WSS or MOSS site, Vista keeps prompting you for user credentials and integrated security just doesn't seems to work. This can be caused by a number of different configuration issues in your environment and sometimes you need to have all the stars aligned for it to work.

First thing to check is make sure your Sharepoint site is working with integrated security to start with, that is you have configured either NTLM or Kerberos correctly. So when you navigate to your Sharepoint site in Internet Explorer with your desired url, it should not prompt you for username or password.

If you are having trouble here, check these items.

Make sure the url you're using is in the Intranet zone and not the Internet zone. By default on Vista, only Intranet zone does integrated security.
Check that you are using NTLM on your WFE server.
If you are using Kerberos, make sure SPN are configured correctly. Check out this post from Martin Kearn on kerberos and Sharepoint.

Now make sure Vista is running SP1, if not, install the hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/?id=943280 on your clients.
Add AuthForwardServerList to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters in the registry. The value in this key should be the URLs of your sharepoint stie. Restart the WebClient or for the changes to take effect. I've used the new group policy preference to deploy this key.

With everything configured correctly, there shouldn't be any more annoying authentication prompts from Vista when you open an Office 2007 document.

Technorati Tags: Sharepoint,Vista,Office,Authentication

Why are data charges so high?

2008-05-16T22:51:00.001+10:00

I think it is crazy that you could be charged $1 per MB of data over wireless. In Australia, if you're not careful in choosing your provider, you could be in for a very nasty surprise. I feel sorry for SMB owners who are not that technical and sign up for these outrageous prices.

http://www.telstra.com.au/business/products/internetanddata/mobilebroadbanddataplans/mobilitypacks.htm

OBA Composition Reference Toolkit v2

2008-05-10T13:05:00.001+10:00

If you develop applications on the Office platform, check out the OBA Composition Reference Toolkit. It contains some very cool demo and useful reference guides to give you a great starting point to create very powerful composition applications around office applications.

Patching the DSDT table for 8510p to reduce fan noise

2008-03-29T20:41:00.001+10:00

Following the previous post, here are the steps that worked on my Vista SP1 x64 notebook. Please note this is for reference only, this could damage your machine.

Download the Microsoft ASL Compiler v3.0.1 and install it on your notebook.
Start a command prompt using "Run as administrator" to make sure you have the correction permissions.
Create a working directory, I used C:\DsdtPatch.
Copy asl.exe from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft ASL Compiler v3.0 to your working directory.
Extract your current AML data from your registry. It is located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\ACPI\DSDT\HP____\8510x\00010000. You need to extract the binary data in the key 00000000 to the file system. I've written a quick and dirty .Net program to do that.
1. Unzip ExtractDsdt.exe into your working directory.
2. run ExtractDsdt, a file 8510x.orig will be created. Make a backup of this file.
copy 8510x.orig 8510x.aml
asl /u 8510x.aml, the file 8510x.asl will be created.
Open 8510x.asl in notebook. Now we begin our patching.
Search for the following (note the pattern could be different for your machine).

For my F.0F BIOS the original values are

Name(C357, Package(0x6)
{
    0x64,
    0x4b,
    0x3c,
    0x32,
    0x1e,
    0x0
})

I found it easiest to search for "Package(0x6)" from notepad, that should take you to the right section, check that there are 6 hex values within the braces and within the _TZ_ scope.

Each value should represents the % fan speed at each temperature trip point in hex. I changed mine to.

Name(C357, Package(0x6)
{
    0x64,
    0x4b,
    0x32,
    0x1e,
    0x14,
    0x0
})

Save your file after your changes.
Now we can compile our updated 8510x.asl back to 8510x.aml. Execute asl 8510x.asl, I ignored the warnings, but if you get errors, go back and check your syntax. If you get "error: expecting Symbol '('" the number in the brackets is the line number, go to that line in 8510x.asl and add a pair of bracket () to the end of the previous line, I had to repeat this a few times before it will compile.

For example, change

If(LEqual(Arg0, 0x0))
{
C375
}

to

If(LEqual(Arg0, 0x0))
{
C375()
}
When you've compiled successfully, the file 8510x.aml will be updated. Check the timestamp.

Load this file to your system asl /loadtable 8510x.aml.
Now reboot, if everything works, your notebook fan should be slower after a few minutes after things settled down after reboot. WARNING: if it doesn't work and you get a blue screen during reboot. Press F8 and choose the "use last known good" option.

Hope this works for you if you're like me and was annoyed by the fan noise.

HP 8510p fan noise

2008-03-29T10:49:00.001+10:00

For work I've got a HP 8510 p notebook and the fan noise it makes on idle is unbearable. It was annoying enough I was on a quest to find a solution. After many hours on the Internet I found the following site http://www.p35-forum.de/board/notebook-hardware-control/acpi-module/7332-acpi-modul-für-hp-8510p/ which talks about overriding the ACPI DSDT table.

After reading up a bit on the topic and learnt more than I ever wanted to about ACPI, I've managed to change the fan speed on my HP 8510 notebook. Now Vista SP1 x64 runs like my other notebook, quiet! Will have to see will it over heat or have any side effects.

I have no idea why HP releases notebook that are so noisy out of the factory. Their engineering department should be reeducated that noise should be minimal on the desktop in the office.

Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) Released

2008-03-27T14:10:00.001+10:00

With the release of the RSAT for Windows Vista SP1, I can finally manage my Windows Servers in Vista directly without hacking the AdminPack to make it go on Vista.

Both 32-bit and 64-bit version are available.

After install, go to control panel, add remove windows components, and check the admin tools to enable it.

Nokia NSeries PC Suite 2.0 install failed caused by long path

2008-03-16T11:37:00.001+10:00

I couldn't install the new Nokia NSeries 2.0 PC Suite on my Vista machine. After a bit of investigation, it turns out that the installer doesn't work if you system path variable is too long. It doesn't handle the case when the system tells the installer the supplied buffer to store the returned path string isn't big enough.

To work around, shorten my system path variable, and restore to my normal path after install.

OCS 2007 and Asterisk integration

2008-03-11T23:04:00.001+10:00

Spent some time over the last few days trying to put together an OCS 2007 lab environment with Asterisk integrations and it wasn't exactly smooth sailing. I have it mostly working now, but there are still some issues with RTP which I hope to resolve when I have some spare time in the coming weeks.

For my setup I deployed OCS 2007 in 2 VMs, one for OCS itself and another for the mediation server. I used asterisk 1.6-beta5 as it supports TCP SIP and it seems to be working ok. I can dial out through Asterisk using my home ITSP (PennyTel) through both Communicator 2007 and my Linksys SPA942 IP phone. I can also receive calls from my mobile to both Communicator and SPA942.

I found a bug in Asterisk 1.6-beta5 where it was not handling the SIP Invite from OCS mediation server properly. It was causing RTP packets not to be sent from Asterisk to OCS at the start of a call and I traced it back to Asterisk not parsing the "Content-Type" properly. OCS sends extra data in the "Content-Type" field ";encoding=utf8" which Asterisk was not parsing. That was an easy fix, one good thing with Open Source software when you actually have time to debug and fix it yourself.

So things seems to be working *mostly* but I still sometime misses out on voice at the beginning of some calls. I suspect there are still bugs in Asterisk, will post back here for reference if I have to to investigate further.

Rant about poor Optus service

2008-03-11T22:48:00.001+10:00

I just cannot believe the poor Optus is providing in Australia. I spent the last two days trying to organise 2 new phone numbers to be added on our existing account and after two days of talking to sale consultants, solution consultants and other call center staffs, I still cannot talk to someone that can take my order to setup 2 new phone numbers for our office. I thought in would be easy, how wrong was I.

It seems to me that in Australia, customer service for the small guys is really poor. You're not spending enough to be provided with a proper account manager, and you wanted service a little bit more complex than the standard SOHO offerings, then no one seems to be able to help you.

Truncate SQL log on development machines

2008-02-20T09:58:00.001+10:00

By default the recovery model in SQL Server is full, so if you have a development server that doesn't have scheduled backup, the database log file can potentially grow out of control. You can either set the recovery model to "simple", and then truncate the file. Or keep the recovery model as full and force truncation. Obviously shouldn't do this blindly in production unless you understand the implications. This gets asked frequent enough, but not enough to remember the syntax, so this post is here as a memory jogger.

USE dbname

BACKUP LOG dbname WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY

DBCC SHRINKFILE (logical_log_filename, 10)

Sharepoint VSeWSS 1.1

2008-02-17T20:33:00.001+10:00

If you are doing WSS or MOSS development, do check out the VSeWSS 1.1 release. It provides some help to develop .WSP package right inside visual studio. The new 1.1 release allows you to have more control over the WSP solution creation.

If you have been only using Sharepoint designer for customising WSS or MOSS or have your own scripts to generate and maintain sharepoint features, give VSeWSS 1.1 a go. See the sharepoint team blog entry at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/02/11/announcing-the-final-release-of-vsewss-1-1-and-the-upcoming-version-1-2.aspx

Import Spreadsheet with Sharepoint error

2008-01-22T11:25:00.001+10:00

A customer ran into a problem where he is getting "Method 'Post' of object 'IOWSPostData' failed" when trying to create a sharepoint list via importing a SpreadSheet using Excel. There are plenty of posts on the Internet about this and the fix is to update EXPTOOWS.XLA to force a different version number.

The original macro code uses a new method in the Excel 2007 object model Application.SharePointVersion(URL). That method is returning 0 in the customer's environment causing spreadsheet import not to work.

As it turns out, Application.SharePointVersion checks the root site for a Sharepoint site to determine the version. Because for this particular environment setup, I do not have a valid Sharepoint site at the root, it does not return the correct version number.

The solution was to create a dummy blank sharepoint site at the root of a web site and now users can import spreadsheets and create list using spreadsheets for all sites (root and sub site).

Reuse BizTalk WCF service publishing wizard settings

2008-01-03T17:57:00.000+10:00

In BizTalk 2006 R2, there is a new WCF Service Publishing Wizard. It becomes quite painful if you want to update the published service to run the wizard over and over again. The settings from the wizard are saved in the output App_Data\Temp folder with a name of WcfServiceDescription.xml. You can reuse some of the settings if you launch the wizard from the command line and pass in the configuraiton file as a parameter.

BtsWcfServicePublishingWizard -WcfServiceDescription=C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\BizTalkWcfService\App_Data\Temp\WcfServiceDescription.xml

Saved me some time during development, however, it doesn't seem to remember the namespace specified.

Sharepoint authentication prompt in Vista RTM

2007-10-03T22:40:00.001+10:00

If you try to open a document from a document library from MOSS or Windows Sharepoint Services, you get prompted for authentication even you've setup all your kerberos authentications and correct zones for IE. And you're pulling hair out of your head. It turns out that this is caused by issue in Vista and the WebDav component.

When you open a a document in Office 2007 stored in Sharepoint, the office programs use the OS WebDav component to communicate to the Sharepoint server. However to successfully pass your current Windows authentication through to the server, it is very sensitive to what proxy and zone settings you have setup in IE for the user. The best way to to mandate these IE settings via group policy or your favourite management tool for your users.

Until a SP1 of Vista is available (If it is fixed), your workaround is to specify a proxy settings in IE and select "bypass proxy server for local addresses".

If you use IE and choose to configure your client using automatic configuration script, instead of checking the "Automatically detect settings", you may need to apply this hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941853/.

Updated: 3/1/2008, Well with vista SP1 RC, it is no longer prompting me.

Limitation on TFS 2008 and shared WSS farm

2007-09-27T10:19:00.000+10:00

A new feature in TFS 2008 (Orca) is the ability to easily point TFS to use an existing Sharepoint farm. For example, if you've got an existing sharepoint deployment for your project team, you can configure TFS 2008 to use that same farm instead of setting up and maintaining another farm just for TFS. Check out this blog post by Sudhir Hasbe http://blogs.msdn.com/sudhir/archive/2007/06/25/sharing-your-corporate-sharepoint-server-with-multiple-tfs-servers.aspx

Its all good except when I tried it with TFS 2008 Beta 2, you seem to have some restrictions in your selection of path. It only works correctly when your path is a single level deep. Ie, http://wssserver/TFSSites, if you try to point it to http://wssserver/development/TFSSites, some functionalities works, but a lot of things don't.

Sent a feedback to MS and apparently is by design. So from my tests, it seems that you can have WSS on a corporate farm, but as long as that path is onlye 1 level deep.

MSDE Backup on x64 Windows 2003 Server

2007-07-23T16:50:00.000+10:00

While testings backup on a x64 Win2003 Server today, I keep getting strange errors from NTBackup and EventLog.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: VSS
Event Category: None
Event ID: 6013
Date: 23/07/2007
Time: 4:06:59 PM
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
Sqllib error: OLEDB Error encountered calling IDBInitialize::Initialize. hr = 0x80004005.
SQLSTATE: 08001,
Native Error: 17
Error state: 1,
Severity: 16
Source: Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL ServerError message: [DBNETLIB][ConnectionOpen (Connect()).]SQL Server does not exist or access denied.

Well as it turns out the application I was testing had a dependency on MSDE and I just had to install the patch to MSDE http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913100 for x64 machines only.

Apple bootcamp 1.2 running vista

2007-03-30T23:17:00.000+10:00

Apple recently released 1.2 beta of its bootcamp software, one of the key new feature is support for Vista. So I couldn't resist and after shuffling some files to free some space, I installed Vista on my Macbook Pro C2D. Installation was very simple, basically install Vista as per normal, then install the Mac drivers by inserting a Mac drivers CD that you create using the bootcamp assistant.

Vista reported I have a 4.7 Windows Experience Index. So far the laptop is working ok under Vista, some features such as automatic screen brightness and keyboard illumination doesn't work. One complaint is that when booted into Vista, the hardware makes a high pitch noise.

Omea Pro Aggregator

2007-03-15T18:14:00.000+10:00

I've spent a little bit of time looking for a RSS Aggregator and came across Omea Pro, I've settled with it for the past week and so far I like it. Its simple to use and aggregate not only feeds, but NNTP, web and mail. And the searching feature is pretty nice too.

WSS 2.0 to 3.0 In place upgrade SPConfigurationDatabaseSequence2 failed

2007-03-15T14:39:00.000+10:00

Had worked on a few in place upgrades of WSS 2.0 sites to WSS 3.0. Haven't quite figure under what conditions this occur under but during some upgrades the wizard fail and a message like this is logged.

An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPUpgradeException was thrown. Additional exception information:
Action 3.0.2.0 of Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPConfigurationDatabaseSequence2 failed.Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPUpgradeException:
Action 3.0.2.0 of Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPConfigurationDatabaseSequence2 failed. --->
System.ArgumentException:
The id 0a54b6fc-79ad-4412-b51d-3091dd622976 is in
use. An Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServer named "sql" is using the same id as the new object named "sql" of type Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServer. Every object must contain a unique id. Either update the new object's id or delete the existing object and try again.

The solution that worked for me is to empty out the "Dependencies" and "Objects" table in the WSS Config database and run the wizard again.

PAG blocks

2004-08-25T08:09:00.000+10:00

I've been having some trouble with a few Microsoft Application blocks lately, mainly threading issues. Haven't spent too much time on it yet, but they don't seems to be fully thread safe. Well the PAG group is taking the existing PAG blocks and developing them into the Microsoft Enterprise Library (http://www.gotdotnet.com/community/workspaces/workspace.aspx?ID=295A464A-6072-4E25-94E2-91BE63527327) I hope they've taken threading into considerations.

BITS C# Wrapper

2004-08-18T00:03:00.000+10:00

I was recently using BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service) to create a component for uploading and downloading files asynchronously from a windows sharepoint services document library. One of the requirement was transfer can only be done by authenticated users. BITS version 1.5 and above supports this via the IBackgroundCopyJob2::SetCredentials method. However, this method uses an union in its parameter and C# does not have union. After playing with interop attributes for a while I've worked out the necessary attributes to make this work with a C# only wrapper without going to managed C++.

After looking at the definition for BG_AUTH_CREDENTIALS in the .h file from the SDK, it turns out that the union (BG_AUTH_CREDENTIALS_UNION) only contains one type which is BG_BASIC_CREDENTIALS. I was able to make the call to SetCredentials work by using the FieldOffset attribute in the struct definitions.

Here is an extract of the important struct definitions.

internal enum BG_AUTH_SCHEME
{
// Fields
BG_AUTH_SCHEME_BASIC = 1,
BG_AUTH_SCHEME_DIGEST = 2,
BG_AUTH_SCHEME_NTLM = 3,
BG_AUTH_SCHEME_NEGOTIATE = 4,
BG_AUTH_SCHEME_PASSPORT = 5
}

internal enum BG_AUTH_TARGET
{
// Fields
BG_AUTH_TARGET_SERVER = 1,
BG_AUTH_TARGET_PROXY = 2,
}

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Explicit, Size=16, Pack=4)]
internal struct BG_AUTH_CREDENTIALS
{
[FieldOffset(0)]
public BG_AUTH_TARGET Target;

[FieldOffset(4)]
public BG_AUTH_SCHEME Scheme;

[FieldOffset(8)]
public BG_AUTH_CREDENTIALS_UNION Credentials;
}

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Explicit, Size=8, Pack=4)]
internal struct BG_AUTH_CREDENTIALS_UNION
{
[FieldOffset(0)]
public BG_BASIC_CREDENTIALS Basic;
}

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Explicit, Size=8, Pack=4)]
internal struct BG_BASIC_CREDENTIALS
{
[FieldOffset(0)]
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)]
public string UserName;

[FieldOffset(4)]
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)]
public string Password;
}

I've posted the interop library at http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=99f2f473-26de-41cd-bf39-8f7e75fda5aa

Start my blog

2004-08-09T00:17:00.000+10:00

Well I think it is time to start my own blog, so here is my first entry.