In a recent Hanselminutes podcast show "Moving your email into the Cloud" Scott Hanselman and Carl Franklin agreed to do some testing and evaluate the relative merits of Google Apps and Windows Live Custom Domains for email hosting (amongst other things).

In a supporting post on Scott's blog I commented that while Carl Franklin had now abandoned the idea of using Live Custom Domains to host his email (via his own domain name) because we could not find a good way to migrate his legacy emails into his Live Mail account; I felt that there was not neccesarily any good reason to have given up on it.

By using the Outlook Connector it is possible to view both POP3 accounts and Live Hotmail accounts in the same environment and simply drag emails between them.

I know this because (like this guy) I've been doing something similar for years now. Whenever I get an email in Yahoo that I want to be able to access from anywhere, I copy it to a folder in Hotmail (inside of Outlook). Why not just leave it on the POP3 server? well, if I moved it into a folder other than the inbox then I've not found a way to have Outlook download files from anything other than the default inbox folder.

With Hotmail the technology that made this possible was a (presumably) proprietary HTTP (WebDAV?) synchronisation method (because I personally have not seen any other email providers using anything other than POP3). This beauty of this was that it allowed me to manage sub-folders inside of my email account and to be able to see those online (via the web email client interface) as well as 'offline' in Outlook. This was never a very well publicised feature (and Microsoft probably decided that they didn't really want people using it because at one point they threatened to disable it - although it never actually stopped working). It has now been superceded by the Outlook Connector which does pretty much exactly the same thing but also synchronises Contacts to some extent (and Calendar in the paid-for version only).

[I've since Google'd on this and found some useful background info from Omar Shahine]

I just emailed Jamie Cansdale at TestDriven.NET but in the meantime, this might come in useful to someone out there using TestDriven.NET...

As discussed in the FAQ you can use access appSettings values from a .config file.

I discovered a way of making this just a little bit easier to manage:

• Add an App.Config file to your Class Library root folder along with all your tests, and rename it to match the name of the .dll of the unit test class library (e.g. MyProject.Tests.dll.config)
• Add your config settings (i.e. appSettings and so on) in the normal way

It this point, when trying to run a test, TestDriven (or possibly NUnit itself?) will not be able to find your config settings because the config file should really have been placed in the bin folder but we'd then need to manage 2 copies (one for each of the Release and Debug folders), and anyway, it's easier for you to see and manage the config file if it's in the project root folder along with all your other classes rather than having to move it to the bin folder (because we'd then have to mess about doing 'show all files' and 'include in project')

To get round this problem without having to move the config file:

• Add a pre-build command to the unit test project:
  (i.e. under the Project Properties dialog (Build Events | Pre-Build Command Line))
• enter the following command:
  xcopy $(ProjectDir)$(TargetFileName).config /YR

This is just to test that my new dasBlog blog is cross-posting OK to my SharePoint blog and to my dotnetjunkies blog

Welcome to my new blog.

Don't expect much content just now as I want to work out how to migrate articles from my dotnetjunkies blog first, and to consider the implications of moving over from a blog that has a referral from MSDN!

[UPDATE]

The entries from my SharePoint themed blog carried over beautifully thanks to DotText2DasBlog. Kudos to Aaron Junod for the source code for that! I think there must be something very wrong going on with the install of .Text over at dotnetjunkies - I just keep getting a 'NullReferenceException' when trying to access BlogContent.asmx or SimpleBlogService.asmx.

Hopefully sometime soon they'll install the very exciting new Community Server 1.0 as announced recently by Rob Howard.

I discovered today that Indexing List Items so that they appear in Search Results doesnt happen by default and I thought "surely this can't be right". Luckily (thanks to Daniel McPherson) if you follow this link you'll see that you can still enable this on a list-by list basis

Christa Carpentiere has done yet another implementation of reporting off an ADO.Net Dataset but this time it's in an MSDN article, and it's in both VB.Net and C#.

This one add something interesting though, as it also shows how you might call an external assembly to generate the DataSet.

 

 

Toby Riley emailed me to alert me to his extension that can take a select query and execute it against any DB using a connection string as a parameter and pass the data back to the designer:

http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/appworld

Another blogger of note has also come online,  lead developer for the Reporting Services product by the name of 'Tudor'.

Searching google groups for "failed to create portal successfully" group:microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.* returns 120 results

"portal creation failed" group:microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.* returns 86 results.

I have read most of them and few seem to offer any resolution, there are ALOT of very unhappy people out there.

Unlike most people I am only reaching a very early stage in the portal creation process, most seem to get past the 'extending virtual server' step, but I don't. The app pool identity has the required privileges on the remote SQL server (database creators role) and local admin rights on the IIS server.

---

22:41:32 Checking virtual server state.
22:41:32 Virtual server needs extend.
22:41:32 Extending virtual server 'http://myserver:8100/' using existing AppPool 'MSSharePointPortalAppPool'...
22:41:33 Failed to create portal successfully MY Portal

---

UPDATE: Travis advised that I should have removed WSS before starting the SPS installation but this document clearly states that during SPS installation "your virtual servers for WSS are automatically disconnected" it does not at any point indicate that you should first uninstall WSS completely. This is a valid point but not the source of the problems in this case.

UPDATE 2: Having completely removed SPS and WSS and restored our production sites from backups I have had more time now to inspect the server event logs.

It seems that at the stage when I was asked to configure the component assignments web/search/index/ (SPS Central Administration | Configure Server Topology), there are 'Information' messages in the event log (surely these should be warnings or errors?!) relating to errors with various SharePoint-related services (search service, alert service etc)

e.g. "..description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( SharePoint Portal Alert Service ) cannot be found."

So there is no way to find out what the errors are, but in any case it seems a whole slew of services failed to get installed properly. What annoys me no end is that the 'Configure Server Topology' page gives you no indication that anything has gone wrong.

The reason I assume that these services failed to get installed is that immediately preceding these cryptic errors there are more specific errors as follows: 

"The configuration information of the performance library "C:\WINDOWS\system32\infoctrs.dll" for the "InetInfo" service does not match the trusted performance library information stored in the registry" and there was a similar one relating to W3SVC

then one of these:

"WMI ADAP was unable to process the SharePoint Portal Alerts Notification Service performance library since one of the data blobs reported to have classes but had zero size"

and one of these:

"WMI ADAP was unable to retrieve data from the PerfLib subkey: SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SPSARPI\Performance\Library, error code: 0x80041009"

the same error was also logged for SPSAUTOCAT, SPSGATHERER, SPSGTHRSVC, SPSINDEX, SPSMATRIXPI, SPSSEARCH, SSO, subpi.

Then there was this (reported under the identity of the app pool service account being used for SPS/WSS):

"Windows cannot unload your classes registry file - it is still in use by other applications or services. The file will be unloaded when it is no longer in use."

and

"Windows saved user MyDomain\svcSharePoint registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use. This is often caused by services running as a user account, try configuring the services to run in either the LocalService or NetworkService account."

and then

"The worker process failed to initialize the http.sys communication or the w3svc communication layer and therefore could not be started. The data field contains the error number."

If anyone know why all this could have occurred I'd be interested to hear. In the meantime I'm probably going to call TechNet direct.

UPDATE 3: We had numerous issues with DNS and Kerberos authentication on our domain about which we raised a PSS call to Microsoft who dealt with the issue very efficiently. After also reinstalling W2K3 from scratch I then didnt have any problems installing SPS, thanks to everyone who replied with comments.