I was running Vista on my Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz with 3 GB ram desktop at home for a while, but the toy did not always performed as I wanted. Especially when working on my SharePoint virtual machines. The typical issue. I was thinking of just adding more memory, but considering it was a 32 bit installation adding memory didn't seem to be working for me. Looking around the net I discovered that some guys out there where using Windows 2008 64 bit on their machines as native OS. After some further digging I discover something astonishing! You can install Windows 2008 and just by enabling some specific features you get everything you had on your Vista including the Aero theme :-) Nothing astonishing yet ... taking a look at performance Windows 2008 Vista Enabled is more stable and performing better then the real thing. I really had to see this for myself so I decided to install Windows 2008 64 bit on my desktop! Here's the story.
Inserted the DVD and let's boot! The setup worked like a charm. After a half hour Windows 2008 was running on my machine without having to install drivers or nothing. First thing to look at was the initial footprint. Good thing that I was sitting down. The initial footprint was just under 300MB!!!Sweat! This was looking very promising! Next was to start enabling everything so I would end up with a Vista look and feel. Following these 2 great posts:
I ended up with a Windows 2008 setup with all Vista features and my footprint hardly went up! Really, this is really by far the most stable windows setup I have ever encountered! I am still wondering as to how it is possible that Vista performance is so low compared to a Windows 2008 system. Of course it's a server and it's supposed to perform better than a desktop OS, but still... it seems that Windows 2008 has a different core then Vista which results in better performance.
So now that I got the OS running it was time to start thinking SharePoint! Seeing that I had lots of memory left I started enabling roles and features:
All this running my footprint was 1.5 GB! Let's push on and start installing SQL 2008, VSTS2008 and SharePoint 2007. All went fine. Nothing strange to mention. So now I got a SharePoint farm running on my machine without any virtualization! Footprint? 1.97 GB! Really this is like a dream come true. Final step was to add a WFE to my farm using Hyper-V. All the basic Hyper-V steps, which is pretty much the same steps as using Virtual PC, resulted in having another Windows 2008 running in my domain and a fresh WFE added to my farm! This just keeps getting better and better. Footprint? 2.97 GB! Ok... I was getting to the limit of my machine, but it was all still running pretty good!
As I was now running a 64bit systems there are no more limits on my available memory. Oh yeah! After a trip to the shops, I replaced the original 3GB with 8GB 800MHz DDR2 memory... This really rocks!
Conclusion:
In following post I will keep you posted on any strange things I encounter as I add tools and software to my sweet machine
Got a great MSPress book on SharePoint best practices by Ben Curry and Bill English. It outlines best practices on planning & design, building, deploying and operating SharePoint 2007. A must read!
You can find info on http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/books/12197.aspx
In some cases you would like to add some of your own pages to the SharePoint Central Administration site to add farm or web application level functionality. There are several ways to do so. You can add your pages to the layouts folder and create the navigation elements via custom actions. Using best practice your page or code behind will inherit from the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.LayoutsBasePage class. Doing so will result that your page mend for central administration is also accessible for other site collections, which you wouldn't want to do. Instead of deploying your pages to the layouts folder you must deploy them to the ADMIN folder in the 12 hive. This way you avoid that your page will be accessible to other site collections on your server. This is more like it, but still missing something essential.
Instead of deriving from the LayoutsBasePage class you can inherit from the GlobalAdminPageBase class. This class exposes a few methods and properties that come in handy when creating central administration page. In fact you also have 2 classes that inherit from the GlobalAdminPageBase class, being the OperationsPage and the ApplicationManagementpage. Not many extra in these classes besides the fact that they override the PageToRedirectOnCancel property to the appropiate page (operations.aspx or applications.aspx). If you create your pages this way they will be redirected to the correct section when you hit the cancel button.
All pages reside in the Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages namespace. Be aware that you will not find the these classes in the Microsoft.SharePoint.dll assembly, but you need to reference the Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationPages.Administration.dll assemby located in the /config/adminbin folder in the 12 hive. This assembly is not deployed to the GAC, so pretty private and secure. If you want to reference the assembly in your VS projects you'll need to browse for it, add it and be sure not to copy the assembly locally.
When you build your SharePoint solution you'll need to make sure that you add an entry in your manifest file to point to the assembly. You can do so by adding the DLLReferencePath property. Also be aware that if you are using the WSPBuilder Extensions for Visual studio your Build WSP command will not work as the command line parameter for WSP Builder to add the DLLReferencePath is not there! You'll need to create your own bat file to build and deploy your WSP. Add parameter -DLLReferencePath "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\CONFIG\ADMINBIN" and everything will work fine.
The technical part has a FTP link with login credentials. Snooping around that I discovered several courses there on MOSS, Unified Communications and Business Intelligence. You do not only online find tons of course material, but more important also VM’s! The technical materials are divided into:
There’s also a link to the online university which links you through to the partner training site. It reveals tons of FREE online courses for you to follow.
Other interesting links on BPIO:
Enjoy!
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