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After all the pain I went through getting my dev image running, I was jonesing to try out the SharePoint 2010 Beta. Of course, I work during the day so I had to wait until I got home to even think about it. It didn’t help that a couple of my friends are feeling the same way but have laptops so they can tinker whenever/wherever they like. By the time I got home and through dinner and past taxi duty (it was hockey practice night for the boy) I was not in the mood for any surprises. Naturally, this didn’t stop me from firing up the install and promptly getting the “this OS not supported” error. Thankfully I was expecting that so no big deal. I hit up Google and promptly found someone who’d been here before me. I followed the advice, went to the MSDN article and heeded the warning to “read it completely”. Damn good advice there!

I ran through the article step-by-step doing everything it said. Installing everything it said. It all went pretty smoothly except for the hotfix in Step 3.5. Damn thing took nearly a half hour to download. Microsoft really should have a better connection to it’s hotfix download servers. Anyway, I started up the Configuration Wizard and let it chug for a bit then took a quick bio break only to come back to a “Configuration Failed” message. It claimed that it couldn’t do something or other to a web.config file because it was in use. I did what any self-respecting SharePoint Guy would. I ran the wizard again…

It quickly skipped to task 5 of 10 and proceeded to chug along for a bit before failing on task 8 with a different error. They say the third times a charm so I ran the wizard yet again. Alas, no charms were had this time. It failed at the same point. Back to Google I headed. First hit had a link to an answer. Unfortunately, it’s a “known issue” and a hotfix will be released to the public shortly. I decided to try the workaround anyway, just because I’m crazy like that and I really wanted to see SP 2010 in action. Naturally I saved a copy of the original file and will fix it later once the hotfix is released. Anyway, back to the wizard again and this time, finally, it completed successfully.

I still need to install Visual Studio 2010 and the SharePoint 2010 SDK but it’s nice just to get a look at the new version running. Stay tuned for more news from the SharePoint 2010 development front. There’s exciting times ahead!

- Dave

Update

The link with the workaround only talks about it vaguely so here’s the details:

• Find the client.config file at “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\WebClients\SearchService\client.config” (assuming a stock install)
• Save a backup copy for when the hotfix is released
• Remove the “allowInsecureTransport” attribute on line 47 and 96 (iirc)
• Restart the config wizard

I decided to try out the new Windows 7 feature of native boot to VHD. With the public drop of the SharePoint 2010 Beta, I decided I wanted to keep my development stuff completely separate from my normal computer usage. The native boot to VHD seemed like a good fit. Somewhere down the line I’ll put together a proper set of virtual images for playing around with SharePoint 2010 but I thought it’d be nice to see how it runs on bare metal.

Anyway, from browsing around, I figured this would be a piece of cake. Boy was I wrong. I started off with Scott Hanselman’s excellent article. I booted from the Win7 install DVD, followed the bouncing code ball and created a virtual disk. This was the point I first ran into problems. Somehow, I couldn’t figure out how to “exit and go back to the setup window”. I ended up rebooting a few times and learning a bit about DISKPART via the help command. On it’s own, that’s not a bad thing but I was trying to do something else, not learn about command line disk tools. Anyway, I eventually figured out how to get the vdisk attached and recognized by setup but it just wouldn’t work. After a bit of browsing and reading, I found one line in a Windows 7 Hacker article on doing this that stated that trying to do a fresh install to the VHD just won’t work. You’d think I’d have expected this since pretty much every article went from DISKPART to using an existing image (in a variety of ways).

So now I had to come up with an image. As most people know by now, Windows Virtual PC doesn’t support 64-bit guest OSes. I already knew that and had been playing with Sun VirtualBox in preparation for my full farm simulation images. For some reason, VirtualBox disk images have a .vdi extension instead of .vhd. I haven’t had time to research why this is, but I didn’t want to take any chances so I created the vhd using Windows 7 Disk Management, then added it to the VirtualBox media manager and proceeded to install Windows 7. Easy peasy.

Now that I had an image, I needed to add it to the Boot Manager. Since I’d read all those articles on doing this, it was fairly simple. Using the Hanselman article referenced above (I’d printed it out), I followed the steps in an administrator command prompt then rebooted. Voila! I had two choices now and happily chose my new dev image.

BAM! BSOD! Crap…

In my haste to get this working, I hadn’t really thought through what I was doing and forgot to do the sysprep on the image before trying to native boot. Since the hardware was real now and radically different from the virtualized hardware, it just didn’t work. It took me awhile to figure this out though, especially since I couldn’t read the BSOD before reboot. I did manage to get a partial read of it through good timing with my BlackBerry camera but it said something about a virus which didn’t really help.

So, back to the image in VirtualBox and time to do a sysprep. Fire that up and get a fatal error. Google to the rescue again. This time I had to turn off the Windows Media Player Networking Service. Did that, set it running and soon enough I had a sysprepped image. Tried the native boot, and lo and behold it’s working! Yay me…

Unfortunately, this took an entire evening so I didn’t have time to get to the SharePoint 2010 Installation. At any rate, although I blew a lot of time on this, it was mostly my fault for trying to be different. If you’re looking to do this for yourself, there’s only a few things you really need to do:

1. create an image and sysprep it (use VirtualBox, VMWare or the Windows AIK)
2. BCDEDIT the boot menu
3. use it!

I can hardly wait to play with the SharePoint 2010 beta – news on that shortly…

- Dave

I use virtual machines for all my development work. One of the projects I was working on was based around a simple desktop application so I had setup a Windows XP image with Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1. I had used the same product key as the host machine since it would be running on the same hardware. When I moved it over to my new machine, the Genuine Advantage thing kicked in and started whining.

Rather than dealing with that, I decided to give Windows 7 XP Mode a try. So far, it seems pretty good. It appears to run faster than a discrete VM, it’s well integrated with the operating system and it automatically recognized all my drives, both internal and external. One thing I found disappointing was the number of updates required. I’ve come to expect to spend a significant amount of time patching the OS when building VMs but I didn’t anticipate doing the same with a newly downloaded VM. All in all though, a very positive experience. If you have native XP software that you need to run, this is definitely the way to go.

- Dave