SharePoint Server 2013 Preview – Development Environment Installation and Performance Experience

As everyone knows Microsoft released SP2013 Preview (Beta) last week and most of the SharePoint developers are curious to install it and few might have already started exploring. I am sure there is enough blog post around to guide you through the installation. The main intention of the blog post would be to elaborate more on the system configuration and performance from developer perspective

As we know the minimum hardware configuration is pretty high for setting up development environment, developers are worried if they can install and work with a lower configuration. I would say it’s possible but you need to be patient enough to see the “Working on It” screen for some time.

To start with I have the following hardware and software configuration

Hardware
Type	Laptop
Hard disk	500 GB
RAM	4GB DDR 3
Process	Core i7 , 1.6 Ghz

You might be assuming this is a pretty good hardware configuration, but that’s not the case with SharePoint 2013. It eats up almost 3.8 GB of Ram when you start using it and this where you start seeing “Working on it” screen for longer duration when you start creating a site collection. It took almost 5-8 minutes to create my first site collection on the default port.

If you are planning for better usage please don’t run the SharePoint Farm Configuration Wizard for all the services, as this would end up in seeing “Working on it” for almost 20 – 30 minutes.

Here is the snapshot of Physical Memory usage and Process performance

Developers who are facing issues in installing SP2013, it would save your time if you read through the Software Requirement thoroughly before you start installation. Following are the steps which I followed during my first hazel free installation of SharePoint 2013.

• Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard/Enterprise, Add Roles for Active Directory Domain Services, DNS, and IIS etc.
• Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1
• Install service Pack for IIS
• Configure Domain controller, and provide a domain name, so that you can create multiple active directory users.
• Install Dot Net Framework 4.5 RC
• Install SQL Server 2008 R2
• Install SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008 R2 ,SQL Management Studio (Optional)
• Run the SP Server 2013 Preview setups, and Install the prerequisites, Make sure all the prerequisites are installed successfully.
• Runt the SP2013 Server Preview setup
• Finally run the SharePoint configuration wizard.

I have decided to work with  the system for next 1 week, if the performance further degrades then will go ahead for upgrading my RAM from 4GB to 8GB (max configuration my laptop can support L)

Note: The above system performance will be different for different hardware configuration

SharePoint 2013 public beta has been released

The wait for SharePoint 2013 beta is over.

Microsoft released the public beta for SharePoint 2013. Download here: or
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30345

Here's a bunch of other SharePoint 2013 content 
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/search.aspx?q=SharePoint%202013&p=1&r=40&t=32

Critical Path Training is providing training on SharePoint 2013, you can get more details here
http://www.criticalpathtraining.com/Pages/SharePoint+2013+Training.aspx

Lets start exploring 2013 and its new feature!!

CAML Designer the Next Generation CAML Query Builder for SharePoint 2010

CAML Query builder is the favorite tool of SharePoint Developers. The much awaited CAML Query Builder for SharePoint 2010 is released and its termed as CAML Designer. Karine Bosch’s co-developed this tool with Andy Van.

The newer version of tool is developed using WPF and support only SharePoint 2010. For more details of the tool you can visit here.

Snap Shot

Click to Download CAML Designer or CAML Query Builder for SharePoint 2010

SharePoint2010 MAC FBA Authentication Issue

Recently we ran into an issue where Custom Forms Based Authentication was failing on MAC machine. The FBA was configured properly without any issues and is working like charm with Windows OS. Did few searches on Google and found that few of them have faced the issues but in a different scenario and following were the work around or fixes were suggested.

•       Most of them have either wrongly configured Form Based Authentication and on proper configuration   it started to work.
•      For few the Claims to Windows Token had stopped, and on restart of the services FBA started working.
•      Few also suggested the performing an IISRESET on the server solved their issues.
•     In some case the APP Pool Credentials for Security token services was wrong.

All the above 4 fixes where not valid in my scenario since FBA was working perfectly fine with windows OS.

In order to get to the root cause I had to go through the traditional approach of visiting event viewer and SharePoint logs. On analyzing the event viewer log it was found that the Secure Token Service was not getting generated for the users who were trying to log into the SharePoint 2010 site using FBA from Safari browser on MAC machine.

In order to get more exception details in the event viewer, add the following <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="True" httpHelpPageEnabled="True"/>   tag in web.config of Security Token Webservices which resides at the following location “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\WebServices\SecurityToken”

On restarting the services details of the exception was logged as follows.

Event: 8306, SharePoint Foundation

Task Category: Claims Authentication

Exception Details: An exception occurred when trying to issue security token: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

On seeing this exception we re-visited the Custom Forms Login page which we had created for FBA.  On debug we noticed that the below link threw the above exception

SPClaimsUtility.AuthenticateFormsUser(Context.Request.UrlReferrer,txtusername.Text, txtpassword.Text);

It was certain that the issues was with Context.Request.UrlReferrer passed to the SPClaimsUtility.AuthenticateFormsUser method. In order to get this working we modified the way we were passing URL parameter to the below approach.

string siteUrl = SPContext.Current.Site.Url;

string extraneturl = siteUrl.ToString();

Uri extrametUri = new Uri(extraneturl);

bool status = SPClaimsUtility.AuthenticateFormsUser(extrametUri, txtusername.Text, txtpassword.Text); and FBA started working on MAC.

Hope this post would help anyone facing similar issue. Please feel free to drop any comment or any other alternate approach.