ASP.NET 4.0 Hosting & Sharepoint 2010 Hosting

Sharepoint 2010 Hosting :: Working with Custom Theme in Sharepoint 2010

Creating SharePoint themes used to require editing CSS style sheets manually or using a tool like SharePoint Designer.  Furthermore, packaging and deploying the themes required administrative access to the server.  This is no longer the case!  Now you can create a SharePoint theme without ever having to see a single CSS style and you can easily deploy it to your server and apply it all within your web browser!  Here's how it's done with Microsoft PowerPoint 2010



Create the theme

First, open Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and proceed to create an Office theme just like you would for a PowerPoint presentation.  See this PowerPoint help documentation which describes how to do this.  For this example we created a theme called Greens which uses a predominately green color scheme.  The files which make up Office themes have a .THMX file extension


Upload the theme

Themes may now be stored in the Themes Gallery on your SharePoint server, and you can also find them on the file system on your SharePoint server in the following directory

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server
Extensions\14\Template\Global\Lists\Themes

After you have saved the <ThemeName>.thmx file, open your web browser and navigate to the Theme Gallery on your SharePoint server.  To find the Theme Gallery and upload your custom theme, follow these steps

1. Open your SharePoint site
2. Click Site Actions
3. Click Site Settings
4. In the Look and Feel section, click Site theme
5. At the top of the page click the Theme Gallery link
6. Click the Documents tab
7. Click Upload Document
8. Click Browse
9. Browse to the <ThemeName>.thmx file you created and select it
10. Click OK
11. Click Save


Apply the theme

1. Click Site Actions
2. Click Site Settings
3. In the Look and Feel section, click Site theme
4. In the Select a Theme section select the theme you uploaded
5. Selecting a theme in the list will show you the colors and fonts specific to the theme.  Here you can see the colors which make up the Greens theme I created



6. Click the Preview button to see what the theme will look like once it is applied
7. To apply the theme to your SharePoint site, click the Apply button

Here you can see the Greens theme applied to a SharePoint site



Yes!  It works for administration pages too!



It also works for dialog popup windows …



… the Site Actions menu …



and the Ribbon too!



Under the hood

What happens when you apply the theme to your SharePoint site?  First, SharePoint opens up the THMX file and creates several images and CSS style sheets based on the colors defined in your custom theme. Then, a new subdirectory is created in the Themes Gallery and the images and CSS style sheets are put inside it. The first time you apply a theme to a SharePoint site the newly created subdirectory is named 0.  The directory name is incremented by 1 each time you apply a new theme to the site.

Here’s a screenshot from SharePoint Designer 2010 which shows the subdirectory that is created when you apply a theme to a SharePoint site.  In this case the subdirectory name is 3 because I applied 4 separate themes to the SharePoint site; the subdirectory name started as 0 and was incremented 4 times



If you want to modify the theme further you can then edit the CSS style sheets and the images in the new subdirectory for your theme


One size does not fit all

The approach outlined in this blog post will not change the layout of your site, it will merely change the colors, heading font, and body font.  It’s a helpful approach to use when developing a prototype or a demo and you don’t have enough time to dig into the CSS to change the layout.  It’s also a helpful approach to use when your requirements do not call for major look and feel changes and color changes will suffice.  Other approaches also exist for changing the look and feel of your SharePoint sites, such as making custom Master Pages, Page Layouts, and CSS files.  This approach usually takes less time than the other approaches, however it is not as flexible


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

Sharepoint 2010 Hosting :: Deploying WCF Service to Sharepoint 2010

The new packaging and deployment stuff for SharePoint 2010 is certainly a lot better than VSeWSS but there are a few things missing, such as the ability to add a WCF service as a project item. One of these days I’ll build a template to do it but for now here’s a quick step by step guide.



Add SVC file to Layouts folder

To make a Windows Communication Framework service available we need to host it somewhere. Since SharePoint runs on IIS, we need to create a .svc file with details of the service implementation. Of course before we create the file we need somewhere to put it and for the purposes of this demonstration we’ll use a custom subfolder within the %sproot%\TEMPLATE\Layouts folder. We can set up this folder automatically using our Visual Studio project

1. From the Project menu select Add SharePoint “Layouts” Mapped Folder. You’ll notice that a new folder is added to the solution
2. We can now go ahead and add our MyWCFService.svc file. In the Layouts\<MyProjectName> folder. Add a new XML File named MyWCFService.svc
3. Replace the contents of the file with the following code

Note: In an ideal world we’d add some code to our SharePoint solution that would automatically add the appropriate configuration details to the web.confg file but that's a story for another dayWe’re now ready to deploy the service to SharePoint.

Note: In an ideal world we’d add some code to our SharePoint solution that would automatically add the appropriate configuration details to the web.confg file but that's a story for another dayWe’re now ready to deploy the service to SharePoint.

Note: In an ideal world we’d add some code to our SharePoint solution that would automatically add the appropriate configuration details to the web.confg file but that's a story for another dayWe’re now ready to deploy the service to SharePoint.

ASP.NET 4.0 Hosting :: How to Upgrade an ASP.NET Web Application to ASP.NET 4 by using Visual Studio tool

If you use Visual Studio to open a Web project that was developed for the .NET Framework 2.0, the .NET Framework 3.0, or the .NET Framework 3.5, Visual Studio can automatically perform all the changes to Web.config files that are required to be able to run using .NET Framework version 4. If the project is a local IIS project and you are using IIS 7.0, Visual Studio can also reassign the application to an application pool that is associated with the .NET Framework version 4



It is recommended that you use Visual Studio to perform the tasks that are required in order to upgrade. If you do not use Visual Studio to perform the upgrade automatically, you must manually edit the Web.config file and must manually associate the application in IIS with the .NET Framework version 4

Typically the procedures covered in this topic are sufficient for upgrading a Web application, because later versions of the .NET Framework are designed to be backward compatible with earlier versions. However, you should also look in the readme documentation for breaking changes. The behavior of a component that was developed for an earlier version of the .NET Framework might have changed in the newer version of the .NET Framework

Note:
Do not upgrade an IIS application if it has nested applications within it that target earlier versions of the .NET Framework. If an IIS application that targets the .NET Framework 3.5 or earlier is nested within an IIS application that targets the .NET Framework 4, the compiler might report errors when it compiles the nested application. This is because Web.config files inherit settings from files that are higher in the configuration file hierarchy. The .NET Framework 4 is backward compatible; therefore, a nested Web application that targets the .NET Framework 4 can inherit settings from Web.config files that are for earlier versions. But earlier versions of the .NET Framework are not forward compatible; therefore, they cannot inherit settings from a .NET Framework 4 Web.config file.

1. Open the Web site or project in Visual Studio.

2. If a Visual Studio Conversion Wizard welcome dialog box appears, click Next. This wizard appears when you open a Web Application Project or a solution. It does not appear when you open a Web Site project that is not in a solution

3. If you are converting a project, in the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard, select backup options and click Next in the Choose Whether to Create a Backup dialog box

Visual Studio upgrades your project file to the Visual Studio 2010 format. If you are upgrading a solution instead of an individual project, Visual Studio upgrades the solution file to the Visual Studio 2010 format

4. If you are converting a project, in the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard, click Next in the Ready to Convert dialog box

5. If you are opening the Web project on a computer that does not have the .NET Framework 3.5 installed, in the Project Target Framework Not Installed dialog box, select Retarget the project to .NET Framework 4 and click OK

6. If you are opening the Web project on a computer that does have the .NET Framework 3.5 installed, in the Web Site targeting older .NET Framework Found dialog box, clear the check box if you do not want to upgrade all Web sites or projects in a solution

7. In the dialog box, click Yes

Visual Studio updates the Web.config file. The changes that are made to the Web.config file are listed in the procedure later in this topic that explains how to update the Web.config file manually. Visual Studio does not update comments. Therefore, after the conversion, the Web.config file might contain comments that reference earlier versions of the .NET Framework

Visual Studio automatically sets the controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion attribute of the pages element to 3.5. You can remove this setting in order to take advantage of XHTML and accessibility improvements in ASP.NET 4. For more information, see the procedure later in this topic that explains how to update the Web.config file manually

8. If you are converting a project, in the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard, click Close in the Conversion Complete dialog box.

9. If the project is not a local IIS project, associate its IIS application with the Visual Studio when it is deployed to IIS. For more information, see the procedure later in this topic that corresponds to the version of IIS that you are using

If the IIS application is associated with the .NET Framework 2.0, the site will not work. ASP.NET will generate errors that indicate that the targetFramework attribute is unrecognized.

10. If the project is a local IIS project and the IIS version is 6.0, associate its IIS application with the Visual Studio by following the procedure later in this topic for IIS 6.0

If the project is a local IIS project, Visual Studio automatically performs this association. It assigns the application to the first available application pool for the .NET Framework version 4. If no application pool exists, Visual Studio creates one

Note: By default, the IIS 6.0 Metabase API that Visual Studio uses to assign and create application pools is not available in Windows Vista or Windows 7. To make it available, enable IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility Layer in the Windows Control Panel by selecting Programs and Features and Turn Windows Features On or Off. The following illustration shows the Windows Features dialog box

11. If the project includes code that accesses the HttpBrowserCapabilities object (in the HttpRequest.Browser property), test the code to make sure that it works as expected

The browser definition files that provide information to the HttpBrowserCapabilities object were changed in ASP.NET 4, and the changes are not backward compatible with earlier versions of ASP.NET. If you discover a problem and prefer not to change your code to accommodate the ASP.NET 4 changes, you can copy the ASP.NET 3.5 browser definition files from the ASP.NET 3.5 Browsers folder of a computer that has ASP.NET 3.5 installed to the ASP.NET 4 Browsers folder. The Browsers folder for a version of ASP.NET can be found in the following location:

%SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\versionNumber\Config\Browsers

After you copy the browser definition files, you must run the aspnet_regbrowsers.exe tool. For more information, see ASP.NET Web Server Controls and Browser Capabilities.

Sharepoint Foundation 2010 Hosting :: Working with Claim-based Authentication in Sharepoint 2010

Introduction

There is a lot of hype about claims based authentication, and unfortunately a lot of confusing jargon.   Our goal in this post is to explain what claims based authentication means in plain English. This includes what it enables, and what it doesn’t enable. We are going to try our hardest not to use any technical terminology beyond the bare minimum.

ASPHostCentral.com, as the premier Sharepoint Foundation 2010 Hosting provider, proudly provides this article to any Sharepoint users and certainly we hope it can help you digest the new feature in Sharepoint 2010 Services. For those of you who are looking to host Sharepoint 2010, you can always start with ASPHostCentral.com as the cost is as low as $9.99/month only!




What is authentication?

Authentication is the process of determining if someone is who they claim to be. It answers the question “Who is this guy really?”

In the Microsoft world, authentication is usually performed by Active Directory.  Foe example: I claim to be Tristan, and I prove this to Active Directory by providing my password. Other systems don’t trust me, they trust Active Directory. Active Directory gives systems a bit of data that says “yeah, I personally vouch for this guy. It really is Tristan.”

Now, if everyone used the same Active Directory installation in the same environment, then that’s all we would need. Claims based authentication is not needed in a simple environment like that

But in the real world, things are different. We face three big challenges:
- Privacy regulations and other pieces of legislation are impacting what kind of information we are allowed to capture and store about users, so in some cases we can’t just demand that people give us all of their personal details
- Businesses want to interoperate with other businesses, and government organisations want to provide more integrated services to citizens. However, different systems use different authentication systems (not everyone uses Active Directory, and even when they do, they have different instances.), and businesses want to integrate in a secure, legally compliant manner


What does claims based authentication do?

Claims based authentication is designed to address the two challenges mentioned above

Claims based authentication addresses privacy and other compliance concerns by requesting less specific, less personal information about people, and by trusting other parties or systems to do the “proof of identity” check

Imagine you have a “sell alcohol to public” ecommerce website, and you are in a country where there are only two laws, called Fantasyland. One of these laws says “alcohol may not be sold to people under 18”, and the other law says “people have a right to privacy and web sites aren’t allowed to track individual people”. (If the law was this simple in real life we wouldn’t need lawyers!)

We’ve got two competing concerns here. Firstly we need to ensure that a user is of legal age, while at the same time we’re not allowed to know who that user is! (Again, I blame the lawyers of Fantasyland).

It turns out that in Fantasyland, the Government has set up a web service that users log on to, which authenticates them based on their citizenId and citizenPassword. It then is able to tell other systems that a user is above 18 or not, without revealing who that user is

So we implement our “sell alcohol to public” website by building a claims-aware system. Instead of building the standard “username and password” login mechanisms, we simply ask the Government’s web service to tell us if the user browsing our site is over 18. The claim that our system uses is a “userIsOver18” claim, and the claim value is either yes or no. We simply don’t build any authentication system at all beyond a simple “if (userIsOver18) then..“ statement

By doing this, we address privacy concerns – we don’t know or keep personally identifiable information – while at the same time ensuring that we don’t sell alcohol to someone under 18

Claims based authentication addresses integration of different systems by allowing communications using open standards, and by providing a platform for developing more specialised ‘identity connectors’ between systems


What won’t it do for me?

Claims based authentication won’t address the lifecycle management of identity information. You’ll need a broader solution to that, but your solution may integrate with claims based authentication systems. How do you deal with new staff? How do you handle staff who are on long service leave? How do you handle fake accounts? Microsoft would like you to use their Identity Lifecycle Management application for this kind of thing

We are going to be a little controversial here, and point out what we believe the biggest limitation of claims based authentication. We believe that what enterprise customers really need is claims based authorization.  Claims based authentication may let our system know that a user is a contractor from a partner company, but it alone won’t let me specify a rule that says “all of my company’s financial spreadsheets must not be seen by contractors”. Not only does claims based authentication not provide this capability, but neither do the role-based access controls provided by SharePoint. In fact SharePoint’s role-based access control model itself is too limited to address this. It still needs substantial improvements

The way industry is addressing this is by producing “entitlement management” systems, for specifying access control rules. Microsoft’s current solution, in my opinion, is strongly deficient in this regard. Yes, you can specify per item permissions for each individual financial spreadsheet. But this imposes such a high maintenance overhead that it is unworkable in practice. In my opinion companies like Oracle are well ahead of Microsoft in this field, but by no means does anyone have a complete turn-key solution


How is it implemented?

The claims-based authentication implementation has a number of components. In simplified terms here’s how the pieces of technology fit together

- From a developer’s point of view, the platform that Microsoft is providing is called the Windows Identity Foundation. This used to be called the Geneva framework. It provides a programming library suitable for building claims-aware applications. This library is also used by SharePoint 2010
- Active Directory Federation Services implements services to create, accept, and transform tokens that contain claims
- Cardspace provides a user interface for users to select which “identity card” they wish to use for a particular system

MOSS 2007 Hosting :: Strategies to Backup and Restore in MOSS 2007

SharePoint is an incredible platform. It is all about a good return on investment for your clients. It lets you put together and deliver very compelling solutions with ease. It is thus not hard to imagine why a lot of clients get addicted to this good return on investment and misinterpret it as “Hey, it’s cheap!” and completely ignore long term planning of what they are addicted to

They might ignore, but you shouldn’t, and lucky for you there are well defined mechanisms to perform backups and restore of your SharePoint environments. In this article, We will talk about the various standard mechanisms available to you as a SharePoint developer or administrator to perform reliable backups of your environment


Backup using Central Administration

This is probably the simplest and most straightforward mechanism of performing backups and restores of your SharePoint installation. Under Central Administration à Operations, you would see an entire section for backup and restore as shown below





Over here, you would simply check-mark the portions of the farm that you intend to backup, and click on the “Continue to Backup Options” button. In step #2, you are presented with the following screen:



As you can see, this UI will let you specify a full or a differential backup, and all you need to do is supply a network location where the farm account has sufficient read/write writes, and your entire farm is easily backed up as a single file. You even get an estimate of what the backed up file size would be. This approach is dead simple, but the obvious problem here is that there is no straightforward way to automate this


Backup using stsadm

GUIs get me started on the basic tasks We need to accomplish to keep myself out of trouble. For instance, when We was learning SharePoint, We did realize that backup is an important aspect, and the dead straight UI made our learning curve a lot easier. But soon enough We got bored of performing all those clicks on a daily basis, so We wanted to script the backup process. As it turns out, stsadm.exe will allow me to backup individual sites and site collections very easily

In order to backup a site collection, you can use the following command:

stsadm –o backup –url <site collection url> -filename <filename to store backup>

Similarly, to restore a backed up file to a site collection, you may use the following command:

stsadm –o restore –url <site collection url> -filename <filename that has backup>

Similarly, to backup a single site, you may use the following command:

stsadm –o export –url <site url> -filename <filename to store backup>

In order to restore a single site at any URl, you may use the following command:

stsadm –o import –url <site url> filename <filename that has backup>

Seems quite straightforward, but there is more to it than meets the eye. For starters, backing up individual sites, isn’t exactly backing up a site. It queries the site using the object model and stores everything the site had that was exposed using the front end UI, into the given file. By default, you might miss older versions of files in a document library that has versioning turned on. You can however specify command line parameters to these commands to influence further control on how older versions are backed up. Also, this approach is quite arduous for a farm with a number of sites. Most of all, stsadm can error out at times, and the error can show up on command line, or even worse, the command line may tell you that it worked, but an error may show up in a log file somewhere. So even though this approach is scriptable, making it 100% bullet proof is still somewhat of a problem


Backup using database backups

This is probably the approach you will end up using most often. SharePoint stores all its data in SQL Server. Also, a site, or site collection, is nothing but data. Thus it is reasonable to assume that this data, can be easily backed up and restored using standard SQL Server mechanisms

SharePoint stores its data in content databases. A single website can have a number of content databases, and a content database can contain one or more site collections. In other words, you cannot scope a content database to a single site or single list level

You can view all the content databases associated with a given web application under central administration à Application Management à SharePoint Web Application Managementà Content Databases. This can be seen as below



From this screen, you can add or remove content databases to a given web site. When you add a content database, you have the facility of specifying a database server and a content database name. If the database already exists on the server, it will be used as is. If in case the database does not exist on the server, it will be created for you by the farm account

You can use this behavior to your advantage to backup restore web sites. In order to backup a web site, you simply backup all the content databases associated with the web application. In order to restore a website, you restore the content databases, and perform the extra step of specifying new site collection administrators in the new environment

This is a fairly robust mechanism of backing up and restoring your SharePoint environment and We suspect that in any serious installation, this is what you will end up using the most anyway. This by far, however is not enough. Depending upon the specific needs of your SharePoint environment, also want to invest in the following:

1. Backup the entire 12 hive (c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12). This is because, frequently you will deploy code to your SharePoint farm, and you will need to restore the supporting physical files for the site to work properly
2. You need to keep monitoring the size of your content databases. If you start hitting the 50GB mark, think of splitting them up, so the backups are done overnight before users start hitting the database in the morning
3. Backup the entire INETPUB directory
4. Always maintain a path to restore the current state of the production environment as various releases are pushed into production. This can be achieved by following the below recommendations:

- Always use a scripted deployment process with clear instructions for deploying code to production. Give special attention to ensuring releases capable of taking your SharePoint installation from one version to another. With various releases, your scripts and instructions should be capable of taking a fresh SharePoint installation to the current production state
- Always deploy custom code as solutions, not fragile xcopy scripts
- Backup source control databases, and establish a strong version control policy for all code that goes into production
- Document all customizations and administration done under central administration for every release
- Follow standard disaster recovery best practices, such as regular and verified backups, off-site storage etc
- Backup Shared Service providers and Central Administration using stsadm after every significant configuration change or production release


Backing up shared service providers

You can backup and restore an SSP in a mechanism similar to restoring any other SharePoint website. You must however perform the additional step of associating the SSP with the appropriate web applications after such a restore has been performed. This may be achieved using the following steps:

1. Under central administration, click on the “Shared Services Administration” on the left side of the page
2. Once on the “Manage this farms shared services” page, click on “Restore SSP”.
3. Now assuming that you have already restored the SSP on a site, complete the required fields on the page shown. Just make sure that you specify the restored web application and database that the SSP site has already been restored to


Backing up search

Search is probably the weirdest portion to backup on a SharePoint installation. First of all, given the additional complexity that backing up search requires, it might be a good idea to go with rebuilding the indexes for small or even medium sized farms. However, if your search database is huge, and your farm is quite big, and you need search to be online shortly after a disaster, you will need to look into an appropriate strategy for backing up search

The reason backing up search is different than other portions of SharePoint, is because of how search works. Search data is stored in two locations, the search database, and the index files on the disk. You need both in order to be able to successfully serve search queries. Not only both, but you need both of them backed up concurrently for the restored versions to work together. In other words, if the search index was backed up 5 minutes after the search database, the index entries created in the additional 5 minutes will cause inconsistent results in the restored search

In order to ensure this consistency, you should backup search using SharePoint 2007’s backup tool, or a third party product


Conclusion

Backups are terribly important, do not ignore them. This article introduced you to various aspects of backing up your SharePoint farm. As you can see, you have a gamut of choices to pick from, and depending upon your environment you may want to pick the right combination of these choices that fits your needs the best.

SSRS 2008 R2 Hosting :: New Features in Reporting Service (SSRS) 2008 R2

The Data Platform Insider blog provides an overview of what's new in this first public CTP release for SQL Server 2008 R2.  If you are reading this blog, you are probably interested in knowing what’s new in Reporting Services 2008 R2, and already in August CTP

ASPHostCentral.com presents this article to any SSRS 2008 R2 users and we certainly hope it can help the community, particularly to those who are using Reporting Service 2008 R2 services. In case you are looking to host your SSRS 2008 R2 Service, you can always start from as low as $4.49/month only!



- Map and spatial data visualization
Maps can be very powerful visualizations.  They can consume and visualize geospatial and geometry data directly (as shown by Ed Katibah here), “regular” data, and combine multiple datasets using map layers.  Maps can integrate ESRI shape files, as well as directly integrate with Bing Maps.

- Report Builder 3.0
The most notable new Report Builder feature area already available in the August CTP is the so-called "server mode": 
+ An edit session concept enables support for embedded data source credentials, relative references, and subreport references when connected to a report server.
+ Dataset results are cached when connected to a report server, which speeds up making layout changes and previewing the new report

- ATOM data feeds
Reports are now also available in the ATOM standard compliant format that can be consumed by Gemini and other tools.

- AJAX Report Viewer
The August CTP provides a preview of some of the functionality that will be available in the stand-alone report viewer control with the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 release.  You will notice a more fluid navigation experience in August CTP

- Report Manager
Report Manager received visual and functional improvements with SharePoint-like interaction and menus.

-RDL Expression Language enhancements
We added direct geospatial data & function support, as well as three types of Lookup functions (Lookup, LookupSet, MultiLookup).


Top Reasons to trust your SSRS 2008 R2 service to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in Reporting Service 2008 R2 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

Sharepoint Foundation (WSS) 2010 Hosting :: How to enable Anonymous Access in Sharepoint 2010

It can be a little daunting if you're new to SharePoint and tasked with doing something you've never done before. Can it be done in SharePoint? Will doing it break your site or the entire installation? Is doing it so difficult it's not worth doing? Configuring anonymous access is one of those tasks because you're dealing with SharePoint (and ASP.NET indirectly), your site collection (and potentially your database indirectly), IIS, and occasionally the file system.

At the time of writing there are a number of sites and blog posts out there offering instructions on how to configure anonymous access. Some are extremely detailed--and depending on what you're trying to accomplish, unnecessarily so. Others are a bit vague. ASPHostCentral.com presents this article to any Sharepoint users and we certainly hope it can help the community, particularly to those who are using Sharepoint 2010 services. In case you are looking to host your Sharepoint 2010 site, you can always start from as low as $9.99/month only!



What you'll find below is a detailed step-by-step set of instructions for setting up anonymous access for a fully branded web site like http://www.westernaustralia.com/. The anonymous access site gives internet users the ability to browse the site without having to log in and another site allows content editors to post content updates using their domain accounts.

A bit of background information

In brief, the steps below involve 'extending an existing web application' (that's a SharePoint concept) by creating a sister web app from an existing web app. The extended web app will use the same content database as the original and will be configured to support anonymous access. The top-level site of the database will also be configured to support anonymous access. As a final option, I'll show you how to disable all other types of non-anonymous access

The following tasks should be completed by a server administrator and assume you have already created a web application the normal way (it might be a good idea to ensure it's working before you begin...)

1. Extend an existing web application

- Open the Central Administration console and select the Application Management tab
- Select Create or extend Web application from the SharePoint Web Application Management section
- Select Extend an existing Web application on the next screen
- Select an existing web application to extend
- Modify the description and configure the port and, optionally, the host header
- Set Allow Anonymous to Yes
- Set the Load Balanced URL Zone to Internet (you may choose another zone here if you like but Internet generally means anonymous so it's the best option).

Once you've extended a web application, the new (i.e. extended) application seems to disapper from the Central Administration screens: it won't be listed as a web application and it doesn't appear as an option when selecting a web app. You will, however, get a new directory for the extended web app under inetpub\wwwroot\wss\virtualdirectories\ and a new IIS site; you can also remove the extended site from SharePoint if required

2. Enable anonymous access on the site's corresponding site collection

Although the site collection will be shared by the existing web application and the anonymous web application, the following steps must be completed via the anonymous web application
- Browse to the home page of the extended web application
- Select Site Settings --> Modify All Site Settings from the Site Actions drop-down menu
- Under Users and Permissions, select the Advanced permissions link
- Select Anonymous Access from the Settings menu
- Set Anonymous Access to Entire Web site

Sites inherit the permissions of their parent by default so if you have any problems with a specific site you can ensure it's set to inherit permission from here as well (browse to the site settings screen for the relevant site first).

If you can’t see the Anonymous Access menu item, either the web app hasn’t been configured for anonymous access (see above or below) or you’re accessing the site via the default zone instead of the internet zone—you must access the site via the internet zone (at the extended URL).

3. Test

- Browse to the anonymous site in Firefox (or turn off integrated windows authentication if you're using IE); the site should be rendered without the Site Actions menu and other SharePoint controls
- Browse to a SharePoint administration screen (eg. /_layouts/settings.aspx) and you should be prompted to supply login credentials

At this point your site is set up to allow anonymous access but will also prompt you to log in as an administrator if you hit any of the SharePoint screens. This may be desirable but alternatively you may want to lock down external access to your public site; if that's the case, read on...

4. Remove integrated authentication from the anonymous web application (optional)

- Open the Central Administration console and select the Application Management tab
- Select Authentication providers from the Application Security section
- Select the Internet zone (this is the zone specified when the anonymous application was extended).
- Deselect Integrated Windows authentication
- Set Enable Client Integration to No

5. Test

- Browse to the anonymous site in Firefox (restart any open browser windows if you receive a 401 error immediately after completing step 4). The home page should appear as it did previously.
- Browse to a SharePoint administration screen (eg. /_layouts/settings.aspx); you should receive a 401 UNAUTHORIZED HTTP error (which, in this case, is appropriate).

6. Troubleshooting

If you run into difficulties (mainly with 401s and 403s popping up where they shouldn't), these ideas may help

- Make sure the page you're trying to access is published. It's easy to forget this simple step in all the excitement but if a page (or image, etc) doesn't have at least one published version MOSS won't serve it up
- Reset IIS--it's quick an easy
- Grant the Read & Execute permission to the Authenticated Users group on the anonymous site's web.config and /bin directory (both can be found below Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories); do the same again for the authenticated site. Permissions on these files are reset every time the authentication method is changed in SharePoint
- Recognise extending a web app creates a new site in IIS and corresponding directory under wwwroot with its own web.config. Ensure the newly-created web.config in the extended site contains everything it needs to; ensure any virtual directories and applications are properly configured
- Redeploy any solutions, features, etc to make sure everything’s where it needs to be (custom private assemblies in particular)
- It's possible your custom code is doing something that requires elevated permissions. The Visual Studio debugger will help you locate the culprit. If you can't remove the offending code, you can wrap it using a delegate:

SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated elevatedAction =
new SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated(delegate() { /* dodgy stuff */ });
SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(elevatedAction);

- If necessary, remove the extended web application using the Central Administration console (also remove the IIS site) and start again


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

Sharepoint Foundation 2010 Hosting :: Working with Sharepoint 2010 Backup and Recovery Tools

SharePoint server has become a very popular enterprise application to enhanced collaboration. As the quantity and value of data stored on SharePoint platform rises, backup and recovery becomes critical and it proves to be a challenge for administrators

ASPHostCentral.com, as the premier reliable and the most affordable Sharepoint 2010 hosting provider, proudly presents this article to anyone who are starting to use Sharepoint 2010 service and hopefully, it can truly help the Sharepoint Community. In case you are looking to host your Sharepoint 2010 site, you can always start from as low as $9.99/month only!



SharePoint offers full farm backup options out of the box: First, the web-based Central Administration backup and restore. Secondly, command-line backup tool stsadm.exe. Third option is SharePoint Designer

Unfortunately, these three options have some limitations: no true item level restore option (if a single item needs to be recovered, the entire site must be restored), manually front end backup necessarily , high restore time, frustrating command-line utilities, no back up directly to tape, no custom solution files backup, no IIS backup, no alternate access mappings backup

Because of the intricate nature of SharePoint server and its vital mission, companies investing in the platform should look for reliable backup and recovery solution able to provide complete range of protection. And since out of the box solution does not offer that level of protection, a third-party solution would be a good investment. This article presents most notable third-party backup and recovery solutions available on the market. Did I miss anything? What is your choice for SharePoint backup and recovery?

Microsoft has listened to its customers and has delivered a complete solution with System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM).


Data Protection Manager (DPM)

System Center Data Protection Manager delivers unified data protection for Windows servers and clients as a best-of-breed backup & recovery solution from Microsoft, for Windows environments. DPM 2010 provides the best protection and most supportable restore scenarios from disk, tape and cloud — in a scalable, manageable and cost-effective way

Key Benefits of Data Protection Manager (DPM):
- Recover site collections, individual sites, or an individual document in minutes
- Easy browse and restore of individual sites, documents, lists, ASPX pages, templates, contacts and entire SharePoint databases and systems
- Restore the entire configuration of SharePoint farm including the configuration database, administration content database, and the content databases
- Copy to a network folder or tape for archival purposes
- Restore a single content database to the SharePoint farm


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

Sharepoint 2010 Hosting :: Working with Sharepoint 2010 Language Packs

New resources from Microsoft allow customers that plan to leverage the product lineup that is part of the Office 2010 launch to take advantage of multiple language options across their deployments. The 2010 Server Language Packs for SharePoint Server 2010, Project Server 2010, Search Server 2010, and Office Web Apps 2010 are currently available for download at no charge, allowing customers to build sites and site collections in multiple languages. The actual label of the language packs is rather self-explanatory when it comes down to the technologies that users will be able to employ in concert with the new technologies.



“Multiple language packs can be installed on the same server. Application of a Language Pack will not change the language of the installed Microsoft server product, or the language of the administrative features,” Microsoft stated. “You do not need to download a language pack for the language you installed, these language packs are to support creation of additional languages.”

SharePoint 2010, Project 2010, Search Server 2010, and Office Web Apps 2010 were released to manufacturing concomitantly with Office 2010 on April 15th. One interesting aspect in this regard is related to Office Web Apps 2010. In this particular case, only the flavor of the Office 2010 Cloud components designed for on-premise deployments on top of SharePoint 2010 were actually RTM’d. Microsoft is still working on finalizing the free online version that is offered through Windows Live SkyDrive, and will probably do so with the RTW of Windows Live Wave 4.

In addition to the resources mentioned above, the Redmond company is also offering for download Language Packs for SharePoint Foundation 2010. “Language packs enable creation of sites and site collections in multiple languages without requiring separate installations of SharePoint Foundation 2010,” the software giant stated.

2010 Server Language Packs for SharePoint Server 2010, Project Server 2010, Search Server 2010, and Office Web Apps 2010 is available for download here.

Language Packs for SharePoint Foundation 2010 is available for download here.


Top Reasons to trust your SharePoint 2010 website to ASPHostCentral.com

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other:

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SharePoint 2010 Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Happy hosting!

MSSQL 2008 R2 Hosting :: Working with Managed Self Service Business Intelligence

Overview

SQL Server® 2008 R2 ships a wealth of Business Intelligence components, broadening the reach of BI across the entire enterprise with familiar and intuitive tools and helping maximize return on investment and increasing IT efficiency at scale.

Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 expands on the value delivered in SQL Server® 2008 with new technologies and capabilities designed to make business intelligence accessible to all employees in the enterprise leading to better, faster, more relevant decisions.



By taking advantage of breakthrough performance and scalability innovations, new Master Data Services (MDS) capabilities, and managed self-service reporting, you can build a next-generation Business Intelligence platform that unlocks your data, facilitates sharing and collaboration, and empowers your end users.


Managed Self Service Business Intelligence

Empower your business units and users to create and share BI solutions through familiar and intuitive tools:
- SQL Server PowerPivot Add-in for Excel(formerly known as "Gemini)
This innovative Excel add-in enables Excel power users to easily create powerful BI solutions by streamlining the integration of data from multiple sources enabling interactive modeling and analysis of massive amount of data and by supporting the seamless sharing of data models and reports through Microsoft Office SharePoint 2010
- SharePoint 2010 based Operations Dashboard
This SharePoint managed service enables front-line operators and administrators to monitor access and utilization of analyses and reports as well as track patterns of hardware usage to help ensure the right security privileges are applied and user generated solutions are available, up-to-date, and managed in a consistent way.
- SQL Server Reporting Services Report Builder 3.0
This updated ad-hoc reporting client accelerates report creation, collaboration and consistency  by allowing users to create and share report components that can be accessed via the shared component library and by enabling the rapid assembly of comprehensive business reports using these shared components
- Rich visualization of geospatial data
New support for geospatial visualization including mapping, routing, and custom shapes can help your end users create customized reports that leverage existing content objects, such as queries, data regions, and charts and graphs. You can also enhance location-based data reports with Bing Maps in Report Builder 3.0


Master Data Management

Improve the quality of your data and provide a “single version of the truth” through a unified view of your information:
- Master Data Hub
As part of Master Data Services, this vital component helps ensure reporting consistency across systems and deliver faster more accurate results across the enterprise. Use Master Data Hub to establish the basis for a centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data in the enterprise.


Unlock Your Data

Use SQL Server® 2008 R2 to unlock the data stored inside your business applications:
- Enterprise-Scale Data Warehouse
The SQL Server® 2008 R2 platform enables you to implement and manage unified storage for all of your business data in a cost-efficient and effective way. Integrate large volumes of data into your data warehouse faster by using SQL Server 2008 R2 Integration Services, and consolidate real-time data by capturing data changes. Increase the manageability and performance of large tables with your partitioning, which enables you to manage growing volumes of data and users of your SQL Server 2008 R2 data warehouse more efficiently
- Unified Dimension Model
Take advantage of Data Source Views to integrate data from across the enterprise based on a Unified Dimension Model that consolidates data from heterogeneous, enterprise-wide data stores such as SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, SAP and Teradata. The UDM creates a holistic view of the business, helping end users gain enterprise-wide insight
- SQL Server 2008 R2 Master Data Services
New in SQL Server® 2008 R2, Master Data Services enables consistent decision making by allowing you to create, manage and propagate changes from single master view of your business entities


Empower All Users in your Organization

The Self Service BI capabilities of SQL Server 2008 R2 empower users to make better business decisions:
-Analyze Millions of Rows of Information on Your Desktop
SQL Server 2008 R2 extends the reach of business intelligence to all employees across the enterprise. Using SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel, it is now easier than ever for users to efficiently access data from and analyze millions of rows of information without IT assistance. Predictive analysis is accessible to a wide base of users who can harness the sophisticated data mining algorithms of Analysis Services within Excel by using the Data Mining Add-in
- Ad-Hoc Querying and Reporting 
SQL Server Reporting Services Report Builder 3.0 helps users visualize and share their insights The Shared Component Library enables the reuse of common report elements, helping cut down on the time needed to build reports. The Report Builder Map Controls helps users gain new insights from location-based information by helping mash up business data with rich visualization of geospatial data


Share and Collaborate

The BI capabilities of SQL Server 2008 R2 help you quickly create, share and automatically refresh powerful analytical applications using SharePoint 2010 as a familiar collaboration platform. All employees can realize benefits:
- End Users
Enhanced Microsoft Office compatibility helps enable end users to analyze massive amounts of data in Excel 2010 as well as distribute and collaborate by using SharePoint. Powerful self service reporting, analysis and collaboration capabilities lower dependencies on the IT department leading better decision making with fewer helpdesk calls and costs
- BI Application Developers
SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) is the tool that provides intuitive wizards for building integration, reporting, and analytic solutions in a unified environment. BIDS supports the entire development life cycle of developing, testing, and deploying robust, highly secure, scalable solutions. In addition, developers will now enjoy updated support for RDL 2008 directly from Microsoft Visual Studio® and enhanced event and Ajax support on Report Viewer
- IT Administrators and DBAs
SQL Server 2008 R2 enables end-to-end platform manageability at scale. Administrators benefit from interoperability with SharePoint Managed Services to provide analysis management monitoring on Self Service BI activities. They can also discover best practice analysis applications through automatic notifications about potential issues in their designs throughout the entire Analysis Services development process, and optimize OLAP performance with the innovative Aggregation Designer

SQL 2008 R2 Hosting :: What's HOT in StreamInsight™?

Overview

Data volumes are exploding with event data streaming from sources such as RFID, sensors and web logs across industries including manufacturing, financial services and utilities.  The size and frequency of the data make it challenging to store for data mining and analysis.  The ability to monitor, analyze and act on the data in motion provides significant opportunity to make more informed business decisions in near real-time



Top Features

- Process large volumes of events across multiple data streams in less than a second
- Better manage your business through historical data mining and continuous insights
- Provides built-in support for different types of event handling and rich query semantics
- Reduce development cost by utilizing existing skill sets and investments in Microsoft development platform
- Tailor to needs of the business with flexible deployment options
- Reduce cost and complexity of management with a platform that is easy to manage and support
- Extend the benefit of near real time event processing to SQL Server data platform


Process Large Volumes of Events Across Multiple Data Streams in Less Than a Second

Proess events with low latency so that action can be taken immediately based on the insights derived. Process high volumes of data and scale up as required. Scale up and define as many queries as is required to process these streams. Derive insights by correlating multiple event streams from multiple sources with near-zero latency for improved business decisions

Combine real time event streams with historical data seamlessly using the same queries for better insights. Gain better insights by enriching “standing queries” with static reference data. Generate new event streams from large data warehouses for more focused data analysis and mining.


Better Manage Your Business Through Historical Data Mining and Continuous Insights

Mine KPIs from historical data to gain greater insight into your business. Monitor effectiveness of these KPIs using the data from event streams

Create new KPIs and continuously refine your existing KPIs by mining historical and current data streams using the same or a different query


Provides Built-in Support for Out of Order Event Handling and Rich Query Semantics

Use the rich, extensible query language with built-in support for point-in-time and interval event types including intervals of unknown duration and temporal operators including the correct handling of missing events and events that arrive out of order. Events are processed correctly even when the order of event arrival is different from the order of event generation

Derive meaningful and relevant information by finding complex patterns in the data/event streams and modeling them using query languages such as Language Integrated Query (LINQ). The language allows for complexities while providing a very easy way to define the queries. Queries are also combinable, enabling complex queries to be quickly and easily assembled from multiple simple queries


Reduce Development Cost by Utilizing Existing Skill Sets and Investments in the Microsoft Development Platform

Benefit from increased productivity, ease of development and faster time to market with Language Integrated Query (LINQ), C# and Microsoft Visual Studio. Use extensions to the .NET framework to express queries in native C# syntax. Events are expressed in the .NET data types and can be extended to create new domain specific types and operators

Reduce development time and cost by utilizing existing .NET skills and Microsoft Visual Studio as the integrated development environment. Easy availability of Microsoft developer platform skills will allow customers, solution developers and adapter developers to take advantage of the platform faster and in a more cost effective way.

Third party adapters help you decrease the time to market when developing your own custom or packaged solutions. Realize value from existing investments in Microsoft platforms and gain better insights from integration with existing data stores and enterprise event sources and targets. Third party adapters enable easier and quicker integration

Use the adapter development kit to develop your own custom adapters or use industry specific third party adapters from one of the many Microsoft partners. Take advantage of an open and active collaborative environment to drive the adapter ecosystem


Flexible Deployment Options

Take advantage of flexible deployment options to scale your processing needs. Use the deployment option that best suits the diverse processing needs of your business

Use the embedded options to pre-process on the edge (i.e., in sensors and other devices). Use a regional hub for local processing of event streams from embedded engines (i.e., aggregation and correlation). Run complex analytics and mine insights with centralized processing with feeds from regional hubs to create a unified view


Easy To Manage and Support

Use the query debugger to identify, fix, and test problems quickly and easily. The replay capabilities can help troubleshoot and tune queries for optimum resource utilization and predictable performance

Have confidence in reliable access to worldwide Microsoft support and an extensive ecosystem of Microsoft partners with specialized knowledge and solution offerings


Reasons to trust your SQL 2008 R2 database to us

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SQL 2008 R2 Database Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it.
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

SQL 2008 R2 Hosting :: Best TOP 10 Features of SQL Server 2008 R2 Edition

Introduction

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 is the latest release of SQL Server. This article will introduce the top 10 features and benefits of SQL Server 2008 R2. The “R2” tag indicates this is an intermediate release of SQL Server and not a major revision. However, there are a number of interesting new features for both DBAs and developers alike. At the time of this article, R2 is available as a CTP (Community Technology Preview). In addition to new features, there are two new editions as well, SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter and SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse.



Report Builder 3.0

Report Builder is a tool set for developing rich reports that can be delivered over the web. Some of the features of Report Builder include the ability to create reports containing graphs, charts, tables, and printing controls. In addition, Report Builder also supports drill downs and sorting. If you are familiar with the third party tool Crystal Reports, then you have good idea of what to expect from Report Builder.

New features in SQL 2008 R2 / Report Builder 3.0 include: Map Layers, which can hold spatial and analytical data and will integrate with Microsoft Virtual Earth. Indicators, these are gauges used to show the state of one value. Report Parts, this object can be reused or shared between multiple reports. Aggregate Calculating, this allows you to calculate the total value of other aggregate calculated totals.


SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter

The new Datacenter edition of SQL Server 2008 R2 is targeted towards Enterprise Edition users who require a greater performance platform. The new edition will support 256 logical processors, high numbers of instances, and as much memory as the operating system will support


SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse

Another new SQL Server edition, Parallel Data Warehouse, formally codenamed “Madison”, specializes in handling extremely large amounts of data. This new version uses massively parallel processing to spread large tables over multiple SQL nodes. The multiple nodes are handled by a propriety Microsoft technology called Ultra Shared Nothing. This new technology is described as a Control Node spreading queries to Computer Nodes, evenly distributed, then collecting the results


StreamInsight

New in SQL Server 2008 R2 is component called StreamInsight. This interesting component allows streaming data to be analyzed on the fly. Meaning the data is processed directly from the source stream prior to being saved in a SQL Server table. This could be extremely handy if you’re running a real time system and need to analyze data but can’t afford the latency of a committed write to a table first. Examples usually cited for this application include stock trading streams, click stream web analytics, and industrial process controls. Multiple input streams can be simultaneously monitored.


Master Data Services

Master Data Services (MDS) is both a concept and a product. The concept of a Master Data Service is that there is a central data gate keeper of core business data. Data items such as customer billing addresses, employee/customer names, and product names should be centrally managed so that all consuming applications have the same information. The Microsoft example given is a company that has a customer address record in the customer table but a different address in the mailing table. A Master Data Service application would ensure that all tables would have only one correct address. While an MDS can be a homegrown application, SQL Server 2008 R2 includes an application and an interface to manage the central data


PowerPivot for SharePoint

PowerPivot is an end-user tool that works in conjunction with SharePoint, SQL Server 2008 R2, and Excel 2010 to process large amounts of data in seconds. PowerPivot works like an Excel Pivot Table, and includes analytical capabilities


Data-Tier Application

A Data-Tier Application (abbreviated as DAC –no idea what the C stands for, and not to be confused with the Windows Data Access Components also abbreviated as DAC ) is an object that stores all the needed database information for a project, such as login, tables, and procedures into one package that can be consumed by Visual Studio. By creating a Data-Tier Application, a SQL Server package version could be saved with each Visual Studio build of your application. This would allow application code builds to be married to a database build in an easily managed way


Unicode Compression

SQL Server 2008 R2 uses a new algorithm known as Simple Compression Scheme for Unicode storage. This reduces the amount of disk spaced used by Unicode characters. This new format happens automatically and is managed by the SQL Server engine so no programming changes are required of the DBA


SQL Server Utility

The new SQL Server Utility is a repository object for centrally controlling multiple SQL Server instances. Performance data and configuration policies can be stored in a single Utility. The Utility also includes an Explorer tool where multi-server dashboards can be created


Multi Server Dashboards

While the SQL Server Management Studio could always connection to multiple servers, each was managed independently with no central view of all of them. Now with SQL Server 2008 R2, Dashboards showing combined server data can be created.


Reasons to trust your SQL 2008 R2 database to us

What we think makes ASPHostCentral.com so compelling is how deeply integrated all the pieces are. We integrate and centralize everything--from the systems to the control panel software to the process of buying a domain name. For us, that means we can innovate literally everywhere. We've put the guys who develop the software and the admins who watch over the server right next to the 24-hour Fanatical Support team, so we all learn from each other

- 24/7-based Support - We never fall asleep and we run a service that is operating 24/7 a year. Even everyone is on holiday during Easter or Christmas/New Year, we are always behind our desk serving our customers
- Excellent Uptime Rate - Our key strength in delivering the service to you is to maintain our server uptime rate. We never ever happy to see your site goes down and we truly understand that it will hurt your onlines business. If your service is down, it will certainly become our pain and we will certainly look for the right pill to kill the pain ASAP
- High Performance and Reliable Server - We never ever overload our server with tons of clients. We always load balance our server to make sure we can deliver an excellent service, coupling with the high performance and reliable server
- Experts in SQL 2008 R2 Database Hosting - Given the scale of our environment, we have recruited and developed some of the best talent in the hosting technology that you are using. Our team is strong because of the experience and talents of the individuals who make up ASPHostCentral
- Daily Backup Service - We realise that your website is very important to your business and hence, we never ever forget to create a daily backup. Your database and website are backup every night into a permanent remote tape drive to ensure that they are always safe and secure. The backup is always ready and available anytime you need it.
- Easy Site Administration - With our powerful control panel, you can always administer most of your site features easily without even needing to contact for our Support Team. Additionally, you can also install more than 100 FREE applications directly via our Control Panel in 1 minute!

Sharepoint Hosting :: Creating the Design in Sharepoint

Master Page

A crowd favorite, master pages have emerged as the new "it" thing in SharePoint design.  Master pages are a feature of ASP.NET 2.0 and allow you to store common page elements, such as a header, content container, and footer, in a single file.  This file is then applied to every content page in your site creating a unified and branded look across the entire site. 



The benefits to master pages:

- If your design really deviates from the standard SharePoint look and feel, master pages are for you.  They allow for the most finite control over your page design
- Multiple master pages can be created for various site needs, such as home splash screens, sub page designs, regional or divisional designs, etc
- You can assign a master page to an entire site, or to a single page, and several options in between.  You have excellent control of where the master page is applied within your site

The potential issues that you need to know about:

- Your custom master page will not reach past your standard web pages and affect the application screens (these are the administrative screens peppered throughout the site; you can pick them out by looking at the URL, they always include "_layouts" in the address). For some sites, especially external facing brochureware sites, this isn't a big deal.  For others, especially internal sites and Intranets, this can present an issue
- Creating and editing master pages does require a certain web skill set. You need to know HTML, CSS and be comfortable with ASP.NET and understand what a content placeholder is and how to use them
- CSS only based master page designs are a challenge to create! Short of pitching everything provided to you by the application, you will have tables in your design no matter what, and working around those tables and needs for SharePoint will cause you CSS headaches

How to create a master page

A great way to create master pages is to use SharePoint Designer.  Yes you can use other tools, but SharePoint Designer helps create that bridge between you and your SharePoint site and just makes working with the site a heck of a lot easier. Through either SharePoint Designer or the SharePoint site interface you can add and manage master pages in the Master Page Gallery and apply master pages to your site and site pages.  To create the file in SharePoint Designer you just do a File / New / SharePoint Content / Master Page.  If you don't use SharePoint Designer, you can use the web interface to upload a master page to the Master Page Gallery much like you would upload a document to a SharePoint document library

When you first deploy your base master page, it can be rather alarming since there is no design or layout!  That is ok, this is a great way to start your design.  Add in your design code to the top of the file, and then locate the content placeholders you need in your design.  Move the content placeholder code to the appropriate place in your design code, then hide all of the ones you did not use at the bottom of the file where indicated. It is a puzzle approach and you essentially fit together your code and the SharePoint content placeholders to create your custom master page

Another approach is to start off with a master page that SharePoint provides (for WSS sites it is only default.master, publishing sites include several other master pages) and then modify the code from there. We personally don't like this approach because we think it takes more time to create custom master pages this way, and it limits your creativity. When you look at an existing design and try to morph it into your own, you may very well end up with a site design that looks similar to the original

Using the master page you created

Once the master page has been created, you can do several things with it. Using SharePoint Designer you can set the master page to be used for the site, or you can attach it to a single page. If you have a MOSS site, you can also use the site settings to specify the master page to be used for the site. Make sure you publish your MOSS master page before you use it for testing or production


Themes

Themes are very useful and provide a more lightweight way to brand your SharePoint site. A theme can change the existing colors and images of a site, but not the layout of the elements in the site design.  A theme does not include any HTML or ASP.NET code, it is only a collection of image files and CSS files. The theme is applied on top of the site, replacing images and CSS styles in the site, essentially re-skinning the site. Themes can be used alone, or in conjunction with a custom master page

The benefits to themes

- Often a theme can handle your design changes for SharePoint. The web page layout for SharePoint uses the standard formula of header, main navigation across the top and a left navigation area. If your design includes the same layout, you may be able to create your design only with a theme
- Themes can be used to alter a design to create different variations of a design for departments, divisions or regional sub sites
- Themes affect all aspects of a site, including the application screens

The potential issues that you need to know about

- When you apply a theme to a site, any child sites will not inherit the theme application. You have to individually apply the theme to the child sites. This is an out-of-the-box limitation, and like most SharePoint issues, can be worked around programmatically. If this will create an issue, check out some of the solutions available for forcing theme application via Features and other means
- When you make a change to a theme, you have to reapply the theme to the site to see the change
- When working with a theme, you can only utilize existing CSS styles used in the master page (be it your own or the default SharePoint ones). If there are elements on the page that need to be moved, you will have to use positioning in the CSS styles to shift their layout. You can't add CSS IDs or class names, so you are limited to what you can do with what is given to you in the master page code.

How to create a theme

Themes are applied to a site in the Site Settings. When a Theme is applied, a copy of the theme is created in the content database and it pops up in SharePoint Designer. This makes for a great way to develop a Theme. When you make a change to any of the files in SharePoint Designer, it will automatically appear in the site. Because of this, SharePoint Designer is a great platform for custom theme development, but we don't suggest leaving these changes in the content database post development.  When another theme is applied to the site, the previous theme is wiped out (including your changes) and the new theme is put in its place

So you can create a custom theme in one of two ways. First, just strike out on your own.  You can apply a theme to a site, then open up the CSS file in SharePoint Designer and delete out all of the contents and start writing your own style overrides for the site. Add images in the same way.  Or, you can pick a theme that looks similar to your design (if one exists) then make modifications to that theme in SharePoint Designer until the theme looks like your design

Don't forget about the power of CSS. There isn't necessarily a one to one relationship with elements on the page. If there is a CSS class or ID attached to a page element, you can dictate many things about that element just using CSS, such as display, placement and look. Through CSS, you can actually create a lot of modifications to the page

Using the theme you created

After you are done tweaking your theme, you can create a more permanent version that lives on the web server and is available to all sites. How to create a theme is very well documented. On the web server in the 12 directory, you create a copy of an existing theme, modify the INF file, theme directory name, and the SPTHEMES.XML file.  Then you can strip out the theme contents, and insert in the CSS and images you created in SharePoint Designer. Recycle the application pool for the SharePoint site or reset IIS, and your custom theme is now available for use


CSS

Really no matter how you brand your SharePoint site, you will be dealing with CSS. In addition to master pages and themes, you can choose to only do CSS and not use master pages or themes as a vehicle for implementation. You can just make CSS changes and tell the SharePoint site to reference the new CSS file

The benefit to CSS only solutions

- The CSS file does not have to live on the SharePoint web server. You can point the CSS reference to anywhere else on the web. This is ideal if you don't have access to your web server

The potential issue that you need to know about

- WSS only sites don't have a site setting to specify an alternative CSS file. You will have to change something else in the site in order to pull in the CSS file.  You can modify default.master, or a specific content page like default.aspx, or include it at the page level in a Content Editor Web Part. A more elegant way to handle this issue is to use a theme. If you don't have access to the web server, you can assign a theme to your WSS site, empty out the contents of the theme in SharePoint Designer, then point to or include your custom CSS.  Just be sure to keep a back up copy

How to use your custom CSS

MOSS has a nice feature that allows you to specify an alternative CSS file in the Site Settings. If you have multiple files you want to include, just specify one file in the site settings, then use the import declaration in the CSS file to include additional CSS files.  If you have a WSS only site, see the bullet point above for options

What about editing CORE.CSS?

Yes, ok you can do this, but we really don't recommend it.  Here is why:

- You aren't supposed to edit the default SharePoint files - basic rule of thumb and changes can throw you into an "unsupported state".  If you choose to do this anyways, create a back up of Core.css before you make any changes so at anytime you can overwrite your modified file and put yourself back into a supported state
- Core.css is HUGE. 15,000 lines of code kind of huge. We say don't edit this file because dealing with that large of a file is difficult and you will quickly get bogged down trying to keep up with your changes
- Core.css isn't the only CSS file that SharePoint uses. In all, there are 26 CSS files in SharePoint (depending on your installation). So really you aren't looking at making edits to only one CSS file, you will probably get into making tweaks for 1-5 files out of that 26. It really comes down to management of your changes and knowing what was modified where.  Make it easy and just create a separate style sheet.

URL Rewrite Hosting with ASPHostCentral.com

IIS URL Rewrite 2.0 enables Web administrators to create powerful rules to implement URLs that are easier for users to remember and easier for search engines to find. By using rule templates, rewrite maps, .NET providers, and other functionality integrated into IIS Manager, Web administrators can easily set up rules to define URL rewriting behavior based on HTTP headers, HTTP response or request headers, IIS server variables, and even complex programmatic rules. In addition, Web administrators can perform redirects, send custom responses, or stop HTTP requests based on the logic expressed in the rewrite rules.




Define powerful rules to transform complex URLs into simple and consistent Web addresses

URL Rewrite allows Web administrators to easily build powerful rules using rewrite providers written in .NET, regular expression pattern matching, and wildcard mapping to examine information in both URLs and other HTTP headers and IIS server variables. Rules can be written to generate URLs that can be easier for users to remember, simple for search engines to index, and allow URLs to follow a consistent and canonical host name format. URL Rewrite further simplifies the rule creation process with support for content rewriting, rule templates, rewrite maps, rule validation, and import of existing mod_rewrite rules.


Easily replace Web application URLs to produce user and search engine friendly results

URL Rewrite permits Web administrators to easily replace the URLs generated by a Web application in the response HTML with a more user friendly and search engine friendly equivalent. Links can be modified in the HTML markup generated by a Web application behind a reverse proxy. URL Rewrite makes things easier for outbound response content and headers rewriting with outbound rewrite rules that work with HTTP request and response headers and with IIS server variables


Seamless integration with existing IIS features that improve management, performance, and troubleshooting

URL Rewrite is tightly integrated with IIS Manager for better management. In addition, URL Rewrite supports both user-mode and kernel-mode caching for faster performance. URL Rewrite also supports Failed Request Tracing for enhanced troubleshooting of application logic execution


Features of URL Rewrite 2.0

- Rules-based URL rewriting engine
- Rules-based response rewriting engine
- Support for custom .NET rewrite providers
- Regular expression pattern matching
- Wildcard pattern matching
- Global and distributed rewrite rules
- Rewriting within the content of specific HTML tags
- Pre-conditions for outbound rules
- Access to server variables and HTTP headers
- Rewriting of server variables and HTTP request headers
- Rewriting of HTTP response headers
- Allow list for server variables
- HtmlEncode function
- Built-in rule templates
- Reverse proxy rule template
- Rule templates for Search Engine Optimization
- Various rule actions including redirect and request abort
- Tracking capture groups across rule conditions
- Logging of rewritten URLs
- Updated user interface in IIS Manager
- Integrated user interface for managing rewrite rules and rewrite maps
- Integrated user interface for importing of Apache mod_rewrite rules
- Integrated user interface for testing regular expression and wildcard patterns
- Support for IIS kernel-mode and user-mode output caching
- Lowercase conversion function
- Rewrite maps to generate the substitution URL during rewriting
- Failed Request Tracing support


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WSS 3 Hosting :: The database WSS_myDatabase on computer_name\Microsoft##SSEE is not accessible to missing Windows Internal Database signatures.

When you browse a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site collection, you cannot access the site collection as expected. Instead, you receive an HTTP 404 error message. Additionally, you experience the following symptoms:



- The following error message is logged in the Application log on the server that is running SharePoint Services 3.0:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Windows SharePoint Services 3
Event Category: Topology
Event ID: 6800
Date: date
Time: time
User: N/A
Computer: computer_name
Description:
The database WSS_Content on computer_name\Microsoft##SSEE is not accessible to missing Windows Internal Database signatures.

- You receive an error message in the upgrade log that resembles the following:
[SPServerSequence] [DEBUG] [date time]: Web service Instance SPWebServiceInstance Parent=SPServer Name=computer_name not added. Status = Provisioning

Finally, you may also receive one of the following error messages:
Access to the table dbo.sites is blocked because the signature is not valid
Access to module dbo.proc_GetCurrent is blocked because the signature is not valid.

This problem occurs after a hotfix package or a public update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is applied


Cause:

This problem occurs if the SPWebService service has not been fully provisioned.


Resolution:

To resolve this problem, follow these steps:
1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd in the Open box, and then click OK.
2. Change to the following directory:
system drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Bin
3. At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER to stop the SPWebService service:
stsadm -o provisionservice -action stop -servicetype spwebservice -servicename ""
4. After the SPWebService service has stopped, type the following command, and then press ENTER to start the SPWebService service:
stsadm -o provisionservice -action start -servicetype spwebservice -servicename ""
5. After the SPWebService service is started, type the following command to complete the hotfix process or the update process:
psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force