Now for something a little bit different

In the past weeks, I've been working on a project to build a windows service. At start we thought on a standard and regular multi threaded approach.

That's it, normally you design it to have a thread pool and one job queue. Thant each thread get's one job from the queue and goes all the way processing the job.

One of the guy's here suggested using a different approach, based on this paper. The idea is to break the job processing in several processing modules, each of them providing by it's one queue. I did it, and we came up with a very interesting result.

So, the bottom line, do take some time to think and consider different solutions for common problems, from time to time new solutions tend to surprise us

Reset Bacula Catalog Database

Every time i need to do a new bacula setup, i end up needing to clean the catalog database after installation and configuration tests.

In this post there's a very simple straightforward how-to.

PowerPivots and Sharepoint 2010

If you’re going to install a new sharepoint 2010 box, consider that you must folow special procedures in order to allow the PowerPivots installer to run with success.

In my experience one is normally lead to do a normal install, and when a curious user asks you to provide PowerPivots integration in you sharepoint box… you’re in real problems.

Recently i found this post that in a very clear way explains the steps needed to make things work.

A nice tool… and i had never heard about it

LogParser… yes the name says everything, it’s a simple command line tool from Microsoft and serves to parse log files (you can get it here).

The Problem: Almost 1GB of IIS log files and willing to identify site 404 errors.

The solution: Log parser and a simple blog post explaining how to use it.

So I've executed the following command:

logparser "SELECT [cs-uri-stem], [cs-uri-query], Count(*) AS [Hits] FROM c:\logs\web\ex*.log WHERE sc-status = 404
GROUP BY [cs-uri-stem], [cs-uri-query]"

And I’m done.

That’s it… Had enough of slow Internet Explorer

For several days now, my internet explorer was just too slow. Opening a new tab or a new window could take 10 to 15 seconds, and that was just annoying me. Today was time to say… “No More!”.

I thought that the slow IE response should be related to some bad add-on. So I’ve just disabled them all. And guess what, i just got my IE to work ok.

So i start by enabling them one by one, i figured out that my problem was because of the “Sun Java  Plug-is SSV Helper”. That means that it was time to google a little, i was not willing to believe that i was the only one with that problem. As normal i was correct, several links pointed that this is a common problem.

I leave here some links with useful information:

Link 1

Link 2

Software (and Sharepoint) Development

Nowadays it’s really important to do a proper google search before embracing a new development task. This gains a bigger importance when we’re talking about sharepoint development.

Why?

Simple, sharepoint development is done on virtual machine in a single server environment, but production scenarios are normally populated by several servers in a Sharepoint Farm.

Just to give you all an example: I was starting a simple task - “Just add a simple WSP Feature to allow application content deployment, much like calling STSADM –o copyappbincontent”.

My first thought was, “Ok, that’s a simple one”… than as usually i googled a little about it, just to get myself into context and figure out if someone had any problem in a similar approach. The truth is that it has token me only a few minutes, to figure out that my task was not going to be that simple, because i found this and this one to. After that, I've started implementing a different solution for that not so simple task.

Bottom line: Allays (even for the simpler tasks) have someone in your team to “loose” a few minutes investigating for problems and solutions… it will save you (or your team) a lot.

Content Management and Sharepoint

The use of Sharepoint as a content management product is growing fast. Microsoft Sharepoint is a average product that has several advantages, been one of them it’s ease of use. Standard users can by itself deploy content management solutions with low effort.

Ease of use sometimes means that important issues are left aside. Despite what the majority believes, content management is not all about content types and template layouts. One of the major and probably the most important issue to solve in a content management solution is content categorization.

If you don’t provide your solution with the means to properly categorize the information, soon it will be left down. Sharepoint somehow provide means to categorize contents but they are poorly implemented. Basically, you can use sub-sites, lists, folders, navigation and that’s it. If one wants to provide extended cross-site categorization capabilities it is left alone with the need to implement custom tools.

I find it very important to discuss proper content categorization, as it is a key for success in a content management solution. Therefore i will be writing more about this issues here.