I’ve finally got around to completing my Linked In profile apart from finding a decent photo to add. In anyone is interested you can view it at http://www.linkedin.com/in/salamandersoft.
I’m not sure how much use Linked In is, but it seems to be a useful networking tool.
I’ve finally released the long-awaited My Shared Documents Web Part. This is a companion product to My Documents, but instead of allowing access to the user’s home folder, it allows access to file shares on the network through SharePoint. It is styled just like a normal document library and respects the NTLM permissions that are set on the files.
For more details see http://www.salamandersoft.co.uk/myDocuments.html or contact me at mydocuments@salamandersoft.co.uk for a trial version.
I’ve just finished writing another web part. This one is a web part
which simply redirects the user to another page. There’s quite a few of these around, but none of them suited the school who had the requirement. Their problem was that there were multiple domains the users could belong to – a domain per school, and the existing web parts couldn’t handle this, they were only able to look in one default domain, for example to find the active directory groups they redirected based on.
Salamander Redirect Web Part redirects based on the OU the user is contained in. The list of OUs and the redirect urls are kept in a SharePoint custom list on the same site and the most specific one is used to redirect the user. For example if the following data is in the list
ou=students,ou=users,dc=school1,dc=local http://sharepoint/school1/students
ou=staff,ou=users,dc=school1,dc=local http://sharepoint/school1/staff
ou=users,dc=school1,dc=local http://sharepoint/school1
Then if the user is in ou=students,ou=users,dc=school1,dc=local they will be redirected to http://sharepoint/school1/students, but if they are in ou=support,ou=users,dc=school1,dc=local they will be redirected to http://sharepoint/school1/.
If you are interested then please send an email to redirector@salamandersoft.co.uk.
I’ve just come across a great free tool for SharePoint 2007. It’s SharePoint Manager 2007 and is hosted over at CodePlex. It’s quite simply an object model explorer for SharePoint, allowing you to drill down into any detail of SharePoint, from server properties, to web users even down to individual list items. It will even let you modify the properties if you’re feeling brave.
I’ve lost count of all the little console utilities I’ve written to dump things like list fields, view CAML etc, all of which you can browse to with the tool. I think that it’s going to save me a lot of time and increase my knowledge of SharePoint.
Everyone should know by now that certain SharePoint objects, including SPSite and SPWeb need to be disposed of when you have finished with them or you will get a memory leak. If you want to refresh your memory have a look at the MSDN white papers Best Practices: Using Disposable Windows SharePoint Services Objects on MSDN and Best Practices: Common Coding Issues When using the SharePoint object model.
What you may not know is that there are a couple of tools/techniques which can help you find areas in your code where you are not disposing of objects correctly.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\HeapSettings
SPRequestStackTrace: DWORD = 1Will cause the SharePoint runtime to log a stack trace everytime a SPRequest object is not disposed of correctly. This will actually pick up all the types of objects not being disposed of as internally the problem with not disposing of them is that they contain a reference to SPRequest.
At this point I have to say thank you to Jared Kahlil who pointed out a memory leak in the SLK by using the second method above and started my research into both of these methods. Unfortunately we can’t use SPDisposeCheck on SLK as it checks to see if the file name begins with Microsoft and if there are any namespaces beginning with Microsoft, and if so ignores the assembly.
I’ve updated the components of the MLG which depend on SLK to use the latest version (1.3.1). You can download these from the MLG 1.1 release page. This had been one of the biggest bugbears of the SLK & MLG projects, the fact that they were not in sync. Not that there’s convergence again we should be able to keep them in sync.
Please let me know if there work for you.
slkadm is a tool which ships with the SharePoint Learning Kit and is analogous to stsadm for SharePoint itself, in that it’s used the administratively configure SLK, in particular the SLK mappings.
What is an SLK mapping?
An SLK mapping is the link between a site collection and the SLK data. For each site collection you want to use SLK with you must create a mapping. You would normally do this through SharePoint Central Administration | Application Management | SharePoint Learning Kit.
A mapping consists of:
To re-iterate, if a site collection does not have an SLK mapping associated with it, you will not be able to use SLK on that site. A common problem is not setting the correct site collection on the Configure SharePoint Learning Kit page. It’s actually not that obvious which site collection the page is going to update, even though it’s the first control on the page.
What can slkadm do?
slkadm is a command line tool and can perform 4 tasks:
Configure a site collection
The command for this is
slkadm.exe -o configuresite -url http://server/site -databaseserver myDbServer -databasename myDatabase -createdatabase -instructorPermission “SLK Instructor” -learnerPermission “SLK Learner” -observerPermission “SLK Observer” -createPermissions -uploadSlkSettings “file name of slksettings.xml” -defaultSettings
The arguments for these are fairly self explanatory Some notes are:
Show the existing mapping for a site collection
The command for this is
slkadm.exe -o getsiteconfiguration -url http://server/site
and an example output is
Notice that slkadm has “found” the SLK configuration and then listed what is configured. The output could be clearer though, here’s one for a site collection which has not been configured:
Although it does state that “no SLK configuration found”, it then goes on to list the default settings, so at first glance it could be configured.
Show all mappings on the server
The command for this is simply
slkadm.exe -o enummappings
with an example output as
You will get one line per site collection configured, with some minimal information – the site url, GUID and database details. In the example here I’ve got 2 site collections configured for slk.
Delete a mapping
The command for this is
slkadm.exe -o deletemapping -guid 1234abcd-1234-abcd-1234-abcd1234abcd
where the GUID is replaced by the GUID of the site collection. The easiest way to get the GUID is by running the enummappings or getsiteconfiguration commands.
This will delete the mapping, and disable SLK on the site collection, but it will not remove the database or the Assignment List Web Parts from any pages in the site collection.
List the commands
As is standard with any command line tool you can view the commands by running
slkadm.exe /?
I’m regularly asked about whether it’s possible to link Moodle to school MIS systems. There’s a number of ways to link Moodle to Sims.Net or Facility CMIS, both open source and commercial and here’s a summary of the ones I know about. If you know of any others, or feel I’ve missed some information out, please let me know and I’ll add them.
Open Source
CLEO MIS Upload Tool
The CLEO tool was originally developed by Dan Poltawski for the CLEO Regional Broadband Consortium. It’s not a fully automatic tool as you need to create a csv file from your MIS system first. It then simplifies the process of creating users and courses from the data. Once the tool has been run, changes in Sims/Facility CMIS are not automatically reflected in Moodle. I think that if you re-export the data and re-run the tool it will update the courses, but I’m not sure about that. This tool will run with any MIS system you can export csv files from. Suport is via the Moodle forums notably this thread.
The Definitive Guide to SIMS.net, Moodle and LDAP Integration by Penfold_99
Penfold_99 is a highly active EduGeek member who has posted documentation and scripts on how to link Moodle to Sims. The documentation can be found on the Moodle Docs site. It consists of VB scripts to populate Active Directory from Sims, and then a number of scripts to create views in the Sims database so that the enable external database setting for creating courses can be used. It also includes a module to show the timetable from Sims within Moodle. Penfold_99 has given a lot of support on the Edugeek forums around setting it up, for example this thread. This is an automatic solution as Moodle is looking directly at the Sims database. The AD provisioning is run as a scheduled task. You don’t need to use the AD provisioning, but you do need a pupil identifier (their UPN) in a certain field in AD as the integration depends on using Active Directory authorisation in Moodle.
There’s now a sticky thread on this on Edugeek http://www.edugeek.net/forums/virtual-learning-platforms/28487-definitive-guide-sims-net-moodle-ldap-integration.html.
Guy Thomas’s Facility to Moodle Integration Block
Guy Thomas from the Ossett School has developed a Moodle block to integrate Moodle with Facility CMIS. It allows the bulk creation of pupil and parent accounts, and also a teacher to add Facility CMIS teaching groups a Moodle course. The initial creation of accounts is done manually through the Moodle front-end as it is a Moodle block, but there are then scheduled tasks to keep the pupil, parents and teaching group membership synchronised. The documentation it comes with looks good and Guy provides support via the Moodle forums. It does require initial preparation of Active Directory and your existing Moodle accounts to ensure that they all have the Facility CMIS Student ID in to make sure Moodle knows which user is which in Facility.
Commercial
Salamander Moodle from SalamanderSoft
I’m obviously biased about this one. It will automatically create student, staff and parent accounts from the data in your MIS system (Sims, Facility CMIS, Phoenix, Integris, any csv file or database I can figure out the schema for). It will also create courses based on your criteria, if you can describe it I should be able to do it e.g. course per teaching group or course per subject year combination with teaching groups as Moodle groups. The provisioning is run as scheduled tasks so not quite live. I update the database directly, so if there’s other items you’d like doing I should be able to figure it out.
Which should I go for?
That’s entirely up to you and what you want out of the integration. The advantages of the Open Source solutions are that the cash price is £0 and you are contributing to the community by using them. The downside is that it can take a long time to get them working in your network and you are reliant on the goodwill, inclination and availability of the writers for support (so far the support from all the above open source tools looks pretty good). For commercial solutions, it’s pretty much the opposite, it’s going to cost you money, but will take less of your time sorting it out and the commercial company will be responsible for making sure it works and keeps working.
Jay Beavers recently asked for volunteers to be the co-ordinator for the SLK project on CodePlex as he no longer had the time to commit to it. I have volunteered and am now the co-ordinator for the SLK and Learning Gateway projects on CodePlex. Many thanks for all the hard work that Jay has put in, but I’m sure he’d be the first to admit that it slowed down a lot recently.
Hopefully, now that I am co-ordinator we can get the projects moving again. My priorities are:
After that it will depend on what is being requested in the forums and issue tracker. I might look at Course Builder, or get the rest of LG up to date.
Now, although I am co-ordinator I do have a day job as Managing Directory of SalamanderSoft. My role as co-ordinator complements this, which is why I was prepared to take it on, however realistically I am going to have a couple of hours a week I can spend on the projects. My paying customers will always take priority! I’m not going to be able to do all the work that I’d like to see done on the projects, so either the community needs to submit patches, which I will look at, or it’s going to take some time. The alternative is if I can get funding to spend more time on it – any volunteers 
Finally, although it is easy to find my contact details, please direct all queries and support requests to the forums. I won’t be the only one who answers questions, and any answer needs to be a shared resource.
I was deploying a WCF service and when testing it started to get the following error:
The security timestamp is invalid because its creation time (’2009-01-28T16:18:26.625Z’) is in the future. Current time is ’2009-01-28T16:11:40.173Z’ and allowed clock skew is ’00:05:00′.
A quick search of the internet threw light on what the problem was, by default in WCF the clocks on the client and server have to be within 5 minutes of each other. Now this can be controlled if all the machines involved are on the same network, but as soon as you start having clients on other networks, you will get them with bigger time differences than this. After another bit of searching I found that you can control the size of the allowed clock skew. However, you can’t do this with the WSHttpBinding, you have to create a custom binding.
The problem then is that the documentation about doing this in web.config is pretty poor. With a custom binding you start with nothing about your connection set up and have to build it from scratch, which given the complexity of the possble binding is really difficult. I found several posts in newsgroups asking about it, but for a long time couldn’t find a decent answer. Then I stumbled across http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/wcf/thread/6554776e-4b05-427f-ad6f-5d72c6579746/ and discovered that you could programmatically create the binding, convert it to a custom binding and save it to a configuration file, which will then contain all the settings you need to duplicate your original binding, but within a custom binding where I could then set maxClockSkew.
The code I used is:
public static void Main(){ //Create the custom binding based on your original binding WSHttpBinding binding = new WSHttpBinding(); binding.Security.Message.ClientCredentialType = MessageCredentialType.UserName; binding.SendTimeout = new TimeSpan(0, 15, 0); binding.MaxReceivedMessageSize = 65536000; CustomBinding custom = new CustomBinding(binding); //Set up the config file to save Configuration machineConfig = ConfigurationManager.OpenMachineConfiguration(); ExeConfigurationFileMap fileMap = new ExeConfigurationFileMap(); fileMap.ExeConfigFilename = "out.config"; fileMap.MachineConfigFilename = machineConfig.FilePath; Configuration config = ConfigurationManager.OpenMappedExeConfiguration(fileMap, ConfigurationUserLevel.None); config.NamespaceDeclared = true; //Save the binding in the config file ServiceContractGenerator scg = new ServiceContractGenerator(config); string sectionName; string configName; scg.GenerateBinding(custom, out sectionName, out configName); config.Save();}So from my original binding specification
<wsHttpBinding> <binding name="SalamanderBinding" receiveTimeout="00:15:00" maxReceivedMessageSize="65536000"> <security mode="Message"> <message clientCredentialType="UserName"/> </security> <readerQuotas maxArrayLength="65536000"/> </binding></wsHttpBinding>
I got the following custom binding
<customBinding> <binding name="SalamanderBinding"> <transactionFlow transactionProtocol="WSAtomicTransactionOctober2004" /> <security defaultAlgorithmSuite="Default" authenticationMode="SecureConversation" requireDerivedKeys="true" securityHeaderLayout="Strict" includeTimestamp="true" keyEntropyMode="CombinedEntropy" messageProtectionOrder="SignBeforeEncryptAndEncryptSignature" messageSecurityVersion="WSSecurity11WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10" requireSecurityContextCancellation="true" requireSignatureConfirmation="false"> <localClientSettings cacheCookies="true" detectReplays="true" replayCacheSize="900000" maxClockSkew="00:05:00" maxCookieCachingTime="Infinite" replayWindow="00:05:00" sessionKeyRenewalInterval="10:00:00" sessionKeyRolloverInterval="00:05:00" reconnectTransportOnFailure="false" timestampValidityDuration="00:05:00" cookieRenewalThresholdPercentage="60" /> <localServiceSettings detectReplays="true" issuedCookieLifetime="10:00:00" maxStatefulNegotiations="128" replayCacheSize="900000" maxClockSkew="00:05:00" negotiationTimeout="00:01:00" replayWindow="00:05:00" inactivityTimeout="00:02:00" sessionKeyRenewalInterval="15:00:00" sessionKeyRolloverInterval="00:05:00" reconnectTransportOnFailure="false" maxPendingSessions="128" maxCachedCookies="1000" timestampValidityDuration="00:05:00" /> <secureConversationBootstrap defaultAlgorithmSuite="Default" authenticationMode="UserNameForSslNegotiated" requireDerivedKeys="true" securityHeaderLayout="Strict" includeTimestamp="true" keyEntropyMode="CombinedEntropy" messageProtectionOrder="SignBeforeEncryptAndEncryptSignature" messageSecurityVersion="WSSecurity11WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10" requireSecurityContextCancellation="true" requireSignatureConfirmation="false"> <localClientSettings cacheCookies="true" detectReplays="true" replayCacheSize="900000" maxClockSkew="00:05:00" maxCookieCachingTime="Infinite" replayWindow="00:05:00" sessionKeyRenewalInterval="10:00:00" sessionKeyRolloverInterval="00:05:00" reconnectTransportOnFailure="true" timestampValidityDuration="00:05:00" cookieRenewalThresholdPercentage="60" /> <localServiceSettings detectReplays="true" issuedCookieLifetime="00:15:00" maxStatefulNegotiations="128" replayCacheSize="900000" maxClockSkew="00:05:00" negotiationTimeout="00:01:00" replayWindow="00:05:00" inactivityTimeout="00:02:00" sessionKeyRenewalInterval="15:00:00" sessionKeyRolloverInterval="00:05:00" reconnectTransportOnFailure="true" maxPendingSessions="128" maxCachedCookies="1000" timestampValidityDuration="00:05:00" /> </secureConversationBootstrap> </security> <textMessageEncoding maxReadPoolSize="64" maxWritePoolSize="16" messageVersion="Default" writeEncoding="utf-8"> <readerQuotas maxDepth="32" maxStringContentLength="8192" maxArrayLength="16384" maxBytesPerRead="4096" maxNameTableCharCount="16384" /> </textMessageEncoding> <httpTransport manualAddressing="false" maxBufferPoolSize="524288" maxReceivedMessageSize="65536000" allowCookies="false" authenticationScheme="Anonymous" bypassProxyOnLocal="false" hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard" keepAliveEnabled="true" maxBufferSize="65536000" proxyAuthenticationScheme="Anonymous" realm="" transferMode="Buffered" unsafeConnectionNtlmAuthentication="false" useDefaultWebProxy="true" /> </binding></customBinding>
and I just needed to change the maxClockSkew values.
You do need to set the clock skew on the client and server sides.
Easy when you know how.