So we deployed an ADXSTUDIO site onto ADAM (see my earlier post) but the out-the-box permissions editor didn't support ADAM, only full AD. We managed however to override the default permissions editor with our own - more on how we did that with ADXSTUDIO later. For now I'd like to take our experiences and do a short blog series on writing your own permissions editor for AD or ADAM by using ONLY the DirectoryServices namespace in .NET2. The Microsoft documentation is pretty poor on the DirectoryServices side of things and badly lacking in examples and explanations. There's plenty of tidbits in... [More]

I have recently been working on a project where I have the following scenario: Receive a flat file from system X. Map the flat file to an internal message schema. Send the mapped message to a web service in system Y. Three very basic steps, I am sure you will agree.  I did however run in to a problem with date formatting.  I had agreed with the developers of system Y, that thye shold be using System.DateTime for  their dates and not worrying about the format required by system X.  When serializing, this was fine and we got the dates that BizTalk was happy with. I.e. 2007... [More]

No, I know that if you read the Microsoft curriculum, it will tell you how wonderful things like Debug.Assert() are; to a great extent, they are. The problem with using them in an assembly that is called by BizTalk is that BizTalk runs in an Isolated Host. What this means is, if you try to do any sort of debuggin in BizTalk with a deployed assembly, you will never see the pretty litle pop-up box.  The worker thread will simply hang in an active state until you kill all of the services and start all over. They key thing to remeber is that the .Assert method in general pop up a little e... [More]

I recently had an issue in BizTalk where I needed to start off an orchestration with one of two types of message.  This in itself is not a difficult task, although I do find that the documentation is a little lacking some times and it can take a while to figure out how it is done.  In fact, some rather sketchy documentation will tell you that you may only have one activating receive shape at the start of an Orchestration without mentioning the exceptions to that rule; namely the Listen shape and the Parallel Actions shape. In this post, we are concerned with the Listen shape.  But we need t... [More]

I thought I'd just blog a little interesting thing I came across whilst fitting a new CPU to my PC yesterday. I've got an Asus motherboard and wanted to swap my Socket-A Sempron for an Athlon XP (yes, old skool I know). When I fitted the new CPU and hit the power switch, the system fired up for 3 seconds and then shut down. Thinking that maybe I'd got a fried chip - it was 2nd hand after all - I swapped the old one back in. Same thing. Started, then halted. Worried that I'd fried the motherboard somehow, I did the whole techie thing... stripped down to a bare board and tried another PSU. Same... [More]

So you might have an MCMS site that has been kicking around for a few years... lots of content has been deleted. Site is getting sluggish. You go into Site Manager to empty the deleted items and everything you click takes 1 minute to respond. Emptying the deleted items is useless - it just crashes. The reason for this, I think, is that it retrieves XML from MCMS and when trying to manipulate the huge XML files in the XML DOM it just falls over. The DOM does have a maximum logical size of XML it can manipulate before performance degrades quickly. What to do? Well it's a nasty one as there is ... [More]

Imagine the MOSS search without the surrounding SharePoint gubbins. Imagine it free. http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/default.aspx  

If you've ever done a UNION in SQL you may not have noticed that by default it actually does the same as a SELECT DISTINCT on the resulting data - so if you had the same 5 rows in two tables you'd get only 5 rows after the UNION. That's great most of the time, but what if you want all 10 rows? That's where UNION ALL comes in - that won't do a distinct and will get you every row. Cheers Mr Sherwood for posing the question....