Girish Gangadharan

Alright Microsoft. You win. I have officially started working with Sharepoint now. I’m now one of the thousands of .Net developers that have been slowly but steadily and methodically, sucked into dark side of the “portal” world. A bunch of us in my company were hoping and praying that we don’t get placed on a project that would force us to learn this technology especially because of the horror stories we’ve heard. When someone like Rob tells you that sharepoint is the shittiest piece of software he’s ever worked on, that is saying something.

Anyways, enough of bitching. Every Sharepoint developer that i knew, installed VMWare on their machines that ran Windows 2003, SQL Server 2005 and VS 2005/2008 and used that as their development environment. Why? Because WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 runs only on server operating systems. Brilliant! Let me get this straight. We are supposed to build applications that would run on “portal” software that are hosted on servers, and so we are supposed to do our development on server operating systems? Of course! Makes perfect sense! Yay Microsoft!

I don’t know man…i just didn’t want to load yet another software on my box and do all the configuration. Luckily for me, Bamboo Solutions had figured out a way to get MOSS 2007 to run on Vista/XP operating systems. As always, i started off my learning process by opening up a brand new word document and taking screenshots of each and everything i did, right from scratch. That includes pictures of installation wizards, “This program has performed an illegal operation” errors (sugar coated for Vista), dashboards, Visual Studio IDE, etc.

The end result of all this pain is a document that has some blurry images but decent content on how to write a “Hello world” web part and successfully deploying it to a sharepoint portal, all starting from scratch. This tutorial would make more sense if you are a .Net developer and have been doing custom application development for a while. It is meant for someone that has no idea where to begin, in their attempt to learn Sharepoint. So if you feel some of the screenshots in the document insult your intelligence, just remember that not all people are as smart as you, wise guy.

Here’s the doc in PDF – How to get MOSS 2007 development environment setup in Vista.pdf

Enjoy!

As promised in the previous post, here’s what you need to do to get clean URLs for WP in IIS.

1. Create a new PHP file wp-404-handler.php in the root folder (in case you are not sure, this is the folder that has “wp-admin”, “wp-content”, “wp-includes” sub folders and bunch of other php files ) and copy paste the following code in it.<?php
   $qs = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
   $pos = strrpos($qs, ‘://’);
   $pos = strpos($qs, ‘/’, $pos + 4);
   $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = substr($qs, $pos);
   $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
   include(’index.php’);
   ?>
2. Open IIS manager – Expand local computer – Expand Web Sites – Right click on your site – Click Properties – Click Custom Errors tab – Select 404. (See image below)
3. Click Edit – Set Message Type to “URL” and URL to “/” (See image below)
4. Click OK.
5. Now login to your WordPress admin control panel. Click Settings and click Permalink (wp-admin/options-permalink.php)
6. Select “Custom structure” and set the text to “/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/”
7. And you are done! Your site should now have clean URLs like this site does.

If you are on a Windows 2003 server, try checking your firewall. Your windows firewall first. By default, windows does not open port 21 which is one of the ports used for FTP like 80 for HTTP.

1. Go to your Control panel and open up Windows Firewall.

2. Click on Exceptions tab.

3. Click on Add port.

4. Enter a name that makes sense (i used FTP) and type in 21 in the port field. (Remember port 21 is the default port Windows uses for FTP)

5. Click OK. You should see the new exception you just created, checked and highlighted.

Try accessing your FTP server now…if it still doesn’t work, it probably is blocked by a firewall that is sitting on top of your Windows firewall.

Anyways…this fixed my problem.

P.S: Now this is all assuming you already have FTP service installed on your server running IIS. If you don’t have it installed already, follow the instructions below. You’ll need to have your Windows 2003 setup files for this task – either on a CD or somewhere in the hard drive.

1. Go to Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> Add/Remove Windows Components. Then select the checkbox for Application Server.

2. Click Details and then select the checkbox for Internet Information Services (IIS)

3. Click Details and then select the checkbox for File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Services.

4. OK -> OK -> Next -> Finish.

Your FTP service should be up and running now. You can go to IIS and set up a new FTP server (Just follow the wizard) or just use the default one Windows creates for you.

Hope that helps.