Here is the Direct Download Link for Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 Offline ISO (size ~ 1.80GB)

Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (KB2707250) Offline ISO Download

In one of my earlier post, I struggled a lot to install Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 online, because of my bad internet connection.  You can see the detailed screenshots here. I am glad to hear that Microsoft team will continue to provide ISO format installers for all larger updates in future.

Sample Issue List in SharePoint 2010

Here is a simple task to be accomplished in SharePoint.  As soon as a new request is assigned to a User, an email should be sent to the user intimating about the task.

You try to look for email setting under List Settings -> Advanced Settings:

List Settings -> Advanced Settings -> List Setting does not show Email options

But the Email setting for notification is missing in this screen.  This behavior is by design. The Email Notification is relied to Outgoing E-Mail settings in Central Administration.

To fix this, you need to launch Central Administration, go to System Settings and select Configure outgoing e-mail under the Email and Text Messages (SMS) section. This will show the below screen:

Outgoing Email Settings in Central Administration

Based on your environment setting, enter the 3 values in the above screen. Click OK to save your settings.

Once done, go back to your Issue Tracking list and navigate to its List Settings -> Advance Settings option.  You will now find the Email Notification setting here.

Email Notification section is enabled after making changes in Central Administration

Enable the email notification option and save the details. Next time, when you create a new Issue, it will send the email to the respective Assigned To user.

Notification bar will indicate that Email Messages will be sent to Assigned To person

As shown above, while creating a new Issue, SharePoint will provide you notification that this List is email enabled.

1) Download SMTP4Dev from Codeplex.

2) At the time of writing this blog post, the dowloaded file is smtp4dev-2.0.9-binaries.zip, which contains a small Windows Application – smtp4dev.exe (544Kb). Run this program and you will get the below screen:

3) By default smtp4dev listens on port 25. You can click on the OPTIONS button and make changes to the Port number in the Server tab.

4) In the above screen, I have entered my local domain name that I am using for testing purpose.  TIP: If you are running your computer without Domain(Active Directory), then provide some dummy domain name and map the same in your HOSTS file.

5) Let us now write a Demo application in ASP.NET to test Email functionality. Here is how the Front-End of this Application looks like:

6) I have following the generic Naming standards for all the controls.  And, finally below is the Code Behind for the Send Mail button click event (additionally, add System.Net and System.Net.Mail namespace at the beginning of your .CS file):

7) Let us test this application.  I run this application from Visual Studio and click the Send Mail button.  I click the button once again.  And the result is shown below:

This completes the demo of smtp4dev.  I am sure this will help you to perform quick tests of email functionality in your application.

My demo environment, that I have built for SharePoint 2010, consists of:

• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Active Directory Role and IIS Roles enabled
• Visual Studio 2010
• smtp4dev 2.0.9

In Windows, Computer Name cannot be the same as your User Name.

Did you know this before?

How about having such wild examples:

• Administrator\ComputerName
• Administrator\DomainName
• In Domain environment I guess we cannot have User Name same as the Domain Name – CONTOSO\CONTOSO

Comparison of SpeedTest Results – ACT and BSNL (Bangalore)

Ping results are coming amazingly on ACT.

Update – 28-Apr-2013 – As requested by one my blog reader, I am sharing the same result with a Netherlands server.

Speed Test using a Netherlands Server

As you notice, the PING Tests are not attractive.

Out of the 4 sessions, Deepthi spoke about SSDT (SQL Server Data Tools).  I was keen in trying out this practically, so later in the evening, I went ahead with Google Search to download the SSDT setup.  The search result showed up an interesting result with Date Problem.

Google Search result shows a future date

The first entry appears with 03-May-2013 and its using Google India website to render the results.  I navigated to this page and found that the Microsoft website also is using en-in locale to show the details on SSDT download page.

The date displayed in Quick details section is using Indian date format. My immediate next step was to manually change the locale in browser URL and refresh this page. So I changed en-in to en-us and hit Enter.  The results are below:

It now shows date in US format.  Does this mean that Google Search is getting confused with Locale setting and showing up incorrect date in its search result.  Or, there is something wrong with Microsoft Download site date locales.  Leave your comments!

Reference Links:

• SQL Server Data Tools Team Blog announcement on December 2012 release
• SSDT for Visual Studio 2012 | Direct Link ISO download - SSDTDec2012_VS2012_EN.iso – 445 MB
• SSDT for Visual Studio 2010 | Direct Link ISO download – SSDTDec2012_VS2010_EN.iso – 1.69 GB

Here is my download experience on my CDMA based Data Card, which promises speed upto 3.1 Mbps.  I was not using my Internet for any other parallel downloads during this time.

• Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 - Screen 1
• Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 - Screen 2
• Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 - Screen 3
• Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 - Screen 4
• Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 - Screen 5
• Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 - Screen 6

1 2 3 4 5 6

HTML Image Gallery Template by WOWSlider.com v3.3

I could not track the last part, as it was too late to keep myself awake.  Approximately, I guess it took around 15 hours to download all the packages.  At times, in between, I felt the download is hanging. But I did not loose my patience and continued.  The screenshots running above were taken at random intervals, as I was busy doing other work in parallel.

Here are some facts on setup size:

Base Version – Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate ISO (RTM) – 1.48GB
Updates – Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 – 0.98GB
Updates – Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 – 1.80GB

Update cycles are sometimes very confusing.  When it is a major updates, Microsoft uses R1/R2 for Windows Server / SQL Server.  But for Visual Studio, they still call it as Update 1 or Update 2.

How was your Download experience? Leave your comments.

Screenshot of SharePoint Color Palette Tool (Click to enlarge)

To install/work with this tool, you need not require SharePoint server installation.  However, the system should have .NET Framework 4.5 and Internet Explorer 8 or higher browser.

Download: SharePointColorPaletteTool_Setup.msi (1.14 MB)

Quick steps to publish Excel data into SharePoint: File -> Save & Send -> Save to SharePoint -> (Select your location) – (Use Publish Options to select the scope of excel data)

By the way, I used the instructions in Chapter 1 of Real World SharePoint 2010 book to build my SharePoint 2010 virtual machine for development.  I guess I created multiple AD users (sp_farm, sp_serviceapp, sp_apppool,  SQL_service) and messed up with some settings. Let us forget the past and move ahead to troubleshoot the above error.

1. Quickly searched Internet and got multiple ways to resolve this problem.  I was not sure which one will suit my need.
2. Thought why don’t I first get the exact issue in the log file.  Went through the Log file in SP_ROOT\Logs folder, but it didn’t help.
3. Got an idea of trying verbose logging for Excel Services.  SharePoint 2010 Central Administration -> Monitoring section -> (Reporting Section) Configure diagnostic logging . Selected Excel Services Application and changed the two drop-down values to verbose.
4. Performed the action of save/publish from Excel again to repeat the error with additional logs.
5. This time I managed to get the below error message in the Log File: Error initializing Safe control – Assembly:Microsoft.Office.SharePoint.ClientExtensions
6. This error is well documented on this Microsoft KB983007. You will get a hint here that this is due to security issue with your Managed Accounts setup. Meanwhile, do not forget to revert back the verbose logging settings that you performed in earlier Step 3.
7. My next task was to find out the Managed Account which is responsible for Excel Services.  To to this, I went back to Central Administration -> Security section -> Configure managed accounts option.
8. Clicked on Edit option against each account and reviewed the farm components using this account. I found that WROX\sp_serviceapp account was using Excel Services Application.
   
9. My next task was to review the security settings of sp_serviceapp user in SQL Server.
10. I launched SQL Server Management Studio and connected to the default instance which is used by SharePoint.
    
11. Reviewed its permission as shown below:
    
12. Noticed that this account didn’t had permission to WSS_Content_3000 and WSS_Content_Team databases, which were the actual Content Databases used by the Web Applications on which I was trying the Excel save/publish operation.
13. Went ahead and assigned db_owner and public roles for both these databases for the user sp_serviceapp.
    
14. Save the above changes by click OK button. (No reboot / iisreset is required)
15. Tried the Excel save/publish operation once again and it worked now!  Below is the expected result:
    

I hope that some of the above steps that I shared above will help you to resolve similar errors in your environment.

My environment consists of:

• Hardware – ASUS Laptop, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD
• Software – Windows 8 Pro 64-bit (Hyper-V role enabled)
• Networking – Wired LAN and Wireless LAN (I want to network between Host and Client without connecting the wired/wireless networks)

Before I begin with the steps, let me inform you that Microsoft Loopback Adapter is now renamed as Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter in Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012.   I am not sure why did Microsoft changed the name of this adapter now.  This KB article gives the official details about the name change.

Step by Step Instructions:

1.  Launch the Add Hardware Wizard from control panel.  Being a keyboard user, I prefer Win+R (for run command window) and type hdwwiz command.
   
2. This will bring up the Add Hardware wizard.
   
3. Click Next, to Continue.
   
4. Select “Install the hardware that I manually select from a list (Advanced)” as shown above and click Next.
   
5. In the above screen, select “Network adapters” option (as shown above) and click Next.
   
6. In the “Select Network Adapter” screen, select Microsoft as the Manufacturer and then choose “Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter” and click Next.
   
7. The above confirmation screen will appear.  Click the Next button to continue.
   
8. The installation step proceeds by showing the file copy progress bar indicator (as shown above)
   
9. The above is the last screen of Add Hardware wizard, which indicates that the Microsoft KM-TEST Loopback Adapter is installed successfully.

Once these steps are completed, you can go ahead and assign a local IP address to this adapter.  I am using this Lo0pback Adapter to use Remote Desktop Client to a SharePoint Virtual Machine which is running in Hyper-V.  I will be sharing more details about this in my future blog post.