I’ve been hesitant to install SharePoint 2010 on my computers, virtualized or otherwise, due to what I think to be steep hardware requirements to run SharePoint 2010. My impression was I needed a beast to run SharePoint 2010. I’ve seen demos where the hardware is a LOT better than what I have and demo choked—super slow response, take forever to reset IIS, etc. So I kept procrastinating to install SharePoint 2010. I’m still shopping around for a super laptop  but the one that I’m eyeing, the HP Envy 14 won’t be out for another couple of weeks. My best hardware is my “production computer” and it has Intel Core i7 with 6GB of RAM but I really don’t want to put a development SharePoint there. But I need to install SharePoint 2010 now! So, I said, what the hell– I might as well put the MacBook Pro 13 to the test! My MacBook is configured for dual boot and runs Windows 7 Ultimate on the “Bootcamp” side.

My MacBook Pro 13 Windows (Ultimate) Experience Index looks like the following:

 

Not too shabby. Lowest score is the graphics (NVidia 930M) but shouldn’t be an issue with regards to SharePoint and development work in general. See that Memory and Primary hard disk scoring 5.9? That worried me. The hard drive speed is only 5400 RPM and that could be a bottleneck for database read/writes. I went ahead and installed SharePoint 2010 on the MacBook Pro/Windows 7 anyway.

Instead of rewriting the steps needed to install SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 for a development rig, I will point you to existing resources out there. Too many write-ups regarding this topic already. So here they are, the ones that I’ve tried and tested:

• If you are going to read anything about installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7, this is the resource you want – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx
• Execute EVERY step outlined in that walkthrough. Don’t even try to shortcut or think that you can do it without reading any documentation. You may get past the installation but you will pull hair out when it’s time to configure your farm. So just do it, every step in that walkthrough! I will show some of the errors I encountered when I tried to “fast-track” the SharePoint installation.
• Here’s another good one – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/fromthefield/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=112. This one talks about how to configure the scalable farm (not the Stand-Alone setup that uses SQL Express) for development purposes while using local accounts (instead of domain accounts). SharePoint 2010 needs domain accounts to configure. If you are building a “SharePoint workstation”, it’s very common to use local accounts instead of domain accounts (maybe because getting in touch with the AD admins is not easy—just create local accounts yourself). See, my MacBook Pro is not joined to a domain. I have to use non-domain accounts. I wouldn’t have been able to configure my “SharePoint farm” to use a true SQL Server 2008 if not for this walkthrough. Remember, if you do a stand-alone install, the Web apps use the SQL Express for the databases—not really  my ideal configuration!!

Here’s the first error message I encountered:

I was so excited to install SharePoint 2010 after I got my MAPS subscription that I just double-clicked the setup.exe. The above message is what I got! You have to edit the \Files\Setup\config,xml of the SharePoint 2010 install directory and add the following:

<Setting Id="AllowWindowsClientInstall" Value="True"/>

This was mentioned in Step 2: Install the Prerequisites for SharePoint 2010 of the MSDN walkthrough. Fast-forward to the end of the SharePoint 2010 installation/configuration. In Central Admin, you should see this:

Again, don’t skip any steps—follow each and every one!

In follow-up blog-posts, I’ll show the other errors I received while attempting to install/configure the SharePoint farm and how to address them.

Update 6/11/2010:  Here’s the screenshot of the Windows Task Manager of the Macbook Pro when running SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2008, IIS Management Console, Internet Explorer, and Visual Studio 2010 (debugging/attaching to processes).

I was in a SharePoint governance meeting at one of my customer sites yesterday and the group is thinking of enforcing some rules as far as SharePoint solution packages go. I kept saying during the meeting “Inspect the manifest file so that you can view what files are going to be installed on the server and where they are going to get installed”. One of the network engineers asked “How do you read a manifest file given a WSP?” This is probably common knowledge to people who are SharePoint veterans. But if you didn’t know how it’s done, here’s how:

1. Rename the wsp file to a .cab file
2. Open up the .cab file (used to be wsp) in WinZIP or something that can open a CAB file.
3. You can either: a)  extract all files in the cab file and open up the extracted manifest.xml; or b) look for manifest.xml in WinZIP and just extract that one single file.
4. Open up manifest.xml in notepad, Internet Explorer, or your preferred XML file viewer.

That’s it!

Several of my upcoming posts will be on how to create solution packages. Stay tuned!

I had phone meeting with a potential new customer last Thursday and the customer said that he was watching the news about a lunatic who crashed a plane into the IRS building. The news didn’t hit the place I was working at yet so I didn’t know what was going on. But as we talked about the news, it reminded me of 9-11, plane crashing into Pentagon. Plane crashing into a building—yep, it definitely reminds you of the threats out there. Eventually we talked business and ended our call and I went about my day.

I’m not sure if the crash took out IT resources (such as servers) for the IRS. I couldn’t help but think, “If the crash took out IRS servers, were they able to recover in a timely fashion”? Yeah I know it’s geeky and nerdy to be thinking about these things but I’m an IT pro—I can’t help but ponder these things!

Every IT resource—infrastructure and systems alike—should have a disaster/recovery plan. Within government agencies, they like to call this Continuity of Operations Planning or COOP. COOP is pretty comprehensive and includes not just how to recover IT but also how management succession, crisis procedures, etc. If you are part of IT and you get detailed to participate in COOP planning, most of your contributions to this COOP plan will revolve around recovering IT assets such as servers, applications, databases, and the like,

I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen network and DB administrators claim “yeah we have backups” and when disaster comes, the backups were no good and couldn’t be restored! What good is that??! What the hell is that?? See, it’s not enough that you are backing up data and applications; you must also rehearse recovery procedures using the capture back-ups so that you can confidently report to your management, “Yes, we have backups and can recover in the event of a disaster.”

In the SharePoint world, it’s not enough that you are backing up content and configuration databases—you should rehearse recovery procedures from time to time. How do you know you can recover a toasted SharePoint farm configuration if you’ve never rehearsed it and seen with your own two eyes that your backups are good? You must test your recovery procedures.

How often should you backup and test recovery procedures? Well, one can probably write a dedicated Web site just on the topic of disaster-recovery (just google it and there are tons). So, without having to discuss this too much, as a general guide I like to follow, the more critical your systems, the more backups and test-recovery procedures you should do. For less-critical apps, your frequency doesn’t have to be as extensive (the important thing is you do it). Just as an example, for critical apps—daily full back-ups with incremental back-ups during the day and test recovery procedures every 2 weeks. The “least frequent” backup schedule I’ve ever done for a “non-critical” app is bi-weekly full backups and test recoveries every 3 months.

The point is, you must backup and be ready to recover when disaster strikes. Nine years ago, the terrorists attacked WTC and the Pentagon. Last week, some lunatic had a personal grudge against the government. Who knows, maybe this week, some admin at your office spills some latte on your production server and toasts mission-critical apps. Whatever the disaster may be, be ready.