Connecting to Live from a Windows Phone Background Agent

Windows Phone Mango introduced Background Agents. This are a really exciting feature that allows applications to run in the background either as a Periodic or as a Resource Intensive tasks and perform certain actions. One of the things that I needed to implement for my application was a synchronize task that would connect to the current user Live account and perform some synchronization and management tasks. This feature promised exactly what I needed and with the recently released Live SDK that included libraries for Metro and Windows Phone applications it looked like this would be really straightforward to implement… How wrong I was !

I have moved to a new blog, read the rest of the article here:

Connecting to Live from a Windows Phone Background Agent

ULS Log Viewer: Sharepoint tool for accessing ULS logs from Central Administration

Lately I have been posting a few articles related to how the new Sharepoint Logging database worked and how to configure it to store
the ULS logs. In these articles we have seen how the ULS Trace tables are populated by a diagnostics timer job
and also how was the data stored in the different partition tables. The reason why I have
been interested in this topic is because I have been working on a tool to surface the ULS data stored in the database in a administration page
accessible from my Central Administration. I thought it would be a great idea to share it so feel free to download it if you also find it useful.

Click here to access the tool and the rest of the article in my new blog!!

Sharepoint Logging database: ULS Trace tables, how they work

With the new Sharepoint Logging database we now have the possibility of storing ULS trace logs in tables in this
database. The responsible for this process is a Sharepoint Job that periodically moves ULS logs from the files in
every Sharepoint Server to the database (follow my previous article on this topic
for more info). But how are the logs actually stored in this database? Recently I have been involved in a project for
extending this logging platform and I had the opportunity to review how this database works.

Read the rest of this article in my new blog !

Yet Another Powershell Warmup Script for Sharepoint

The title says it all ! I am publishing in this article a Powershell script I created that I use in my Sharepoint Farm to warmup my sites after there has been a recycle of the application pools that host my Sharepoint Web Applications. It is a good practice to schedule a recycle of the web sites on a daily basis, ideally this should happen during non working hours. The issue then is that when first users access the portal they experience slow load times because it’s the first time the pages are accessed

Read the rest of this article in my new blog !!

Sharepoint Logging Database: Enable Verbose and Information ULS logs

One of the new nice and cool features of Sharepoint 2010 is the new Logging database. What it allows us to do is to collect all sorts of usage and
health information and store it in a database that we can later use for querying and reporting. When I first heard about that I was pretty exited,
specially when I read that it could be used to store all of our farm ULS logs as well! No more having to connect to each server in the farm and
browse the log files trying to diagnose an error, even with the new
Merge-SPLogFile powershell command this was still a tedious process.

Read the rest of this article in my new blog !!!!

Move a Sharepoint Designer Workflow to a different Farm

Sharepoint 2010 has introduced lots of new features in Sharepoint Designer Workflows. What used to be a technology designed to allow  some power users to create their own workflows and associate them with Sharepoint lists is now a much more powerful tool. Amongst the  new features introduced are the possibility of creating reusable and global reusable workflow that can be reused in the same site or at the Site collection level, create Site level workflows and also to export Sharepoint Designer workflows to .WSP templates

Read the rest of the article here !

‘the server was unable to create your template’ error when saving Sharepoint Designer workflow as a template

This an error I got while developing reusable Sharepoint Designer workflows for Sharepoint 2010. What I was trying to do was to create a new reusable SPD workflow and publish it globally to the Site Collection, then I would try to export it as a WSP template and import it on different sites. I had already succesfully exported other workflows with no issues however with this one I run into a new error. When clicking the “Save as template” button, Sharepoint Designer would return the error “the server was unable to create your template”….

Click to read complete post in my new blog !

Obtain next id for a Sharepoint 2010 List

This is a very simple article about obtaining the next id for a Sharepoint list in Sharepoint 2010. The reason why I am writting this is because I have recently been involved in a upgrade project from 2007 to 2010. As part of their current SP2007 environment they have a few number of customizations that had to be migrated, one of them was a custom workflow that at a certain stage would require to calculate the next available id in a Sharepoint list….

Read the rest of the article at my new personal blog:
Obtain next id for a Sharepoint 2010 List

Bawego – Go software for windows phone 7

What is bawego ?

Bawego is an online application that allows users to manage their go game and problems files stored in sgf format and to review and replay those files using the bawego client for windows phone 7.

This is a project I started for fun and to learn how to develop in the new Microsoft mobile platform and also, I wanted to get a new device but as an experienced go player, couldn’t do so if there was no go software available.

Why bawego ?

Bawego name was created using the word for the game in the language of those countries where the game is most popular. In korea the game is known as Baduk, in China as Weiqi and in Japan as Go.

Some of the features of bawego

Upload games in sgf format to a bawego account and review them using the WP7 client

Review collections of problems organized by problem difficulty

More info

Visit bawego for more info !!

Authenticate a service call from a Windows Phone 7 application using Forms Authentication

After some time developing for the Windows Phone 7 platform (initially with the Beta version and now with the RTM) I’ve come across several challenging scenarios and decided to document some of them. First of all and as a disclaimer I’d like to point out that this article is valid with the current RTM version of the WP7 development tools and with future releases, there might be better solutions to the problem exposed, but enough of this and let’s get into the action !

To start with, I’d like to introduce the solution I was trying to build. This is a Windows Phone 7 application built on the Siverlight platform, this application will connect to a asp.net web site configured for FormsAuthentication to gather some data through a WCF Data Services layer and expose it to end users (Consuming WCF Data Services from a WP7 application is a topic on its own that hopefully I will cover in another article) but this one is about securing the service and authenticating the service calls.

Do you want to read more ? I am moving to my new site ! Please follow the link to read all the content of this article: Authenticate a service call from a Windows Phone 7 application using Forms Authentication