Snow Leopard 64bit kernel mode and VMWare Fusion.

Looking around on the internet I discovered that by default Snow Leopard boots into 32bit kernel mode (I wondered why I wasn’t getting any incompatibility issues) and to force OSX to boot into 64 bit kernel mode you need to hold down the 6 & 4 keys on startup.

I tried this out and it worked I confirmed this by going to System Profiler and checking whether 64 bit kernel mode extensions were loaded.

I thought cool maybe 8GB RAM will work now I have booted into 64bit mode but I wanted to try out all my critical applications first because theres no point having 8GB RAM if I can’t run any of my programs.  One of my most critical applications is VMWare Fusion which threw the following error message when I tried to open it.

Looks like VMWare doen’t support 64bit OS X yet so I won’t bother trying out the extra 4GB module yet as there is no point if I can’t run VMWare.

Installed Snow Leopard and still 8GB not supported

As an update to my blog post yesterday I have installed OSX Snow Leopard today and retried my MacBook with 8GB RAM and still no joy.  Think this is ridiculous from Apple and they should release a statement to say whether 8GB of RAM will ever be supported on these machines or not.

Looks like I’m sticking with 6GB for the time being anyway.

8GB unstable using OSX Leopard on my MacBook Pro

I bought a MacBook Pro in December 2008 and at the time Apple was saying that 4GB of RAM is the limit on these machines. Then mid 2009 Apple released a revision of the MacBook Pro that supports up to 8GB RAM. Since the architecture of the systems are the same I thought I would purchase a 4GB module and upgrade to 6GB RAM.

This worked perfectly, I got a well needed performance boost on my machine and as I run Windows constantly in VMWare Fusion this helped out a lot.

So being brave I ordered another 4GB module hoping that 8GB should work fine, I installed the module and booted up, so far so good. I looked at system profiler and 8GB of RAM showed up and both module had an OK status. After about 60 secs the machine froze, I rebooted and tried again, same thing. I took the RAM out and made sure it was seated properly and tried again, same thing.

So my conclusion is that OSX Leopard doesn’t support 8GB of RAM on my late 2008 MacBook Pro. I’m eagerly awaiting Snow Leopard and hoping that this addresses the issue if not then I’ve just waste hoping that 8GB should work fine, I installed the modules and booted up, so far so good. I looked at system profiler and 8GB of RAM showed up and both module had an OK status. After about 60 secs the machine froze, I rebooted and tried again, same thing. I took the RAM out and made sure it was seated properly and tried again, same thing.

So my conclusion is that OSX Leopard doesn’t support 8GB of RAM on my late 2008 MacBook Pro. I’m eagerly awaiting Snow Leopard and hoping that this addresses the issue if not then I’ve just wasted 270 pounds. Nice

Registered for Microsoft PDC 09

Registered to attend the Microsoft Professional Developers conference in Los Angeles in November. Hoping to learn a lot about programming for Windows 7 and Server R2 and also want to get a lot more knowledge on Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0.

Looking forward to this along with the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas in October and this is my first time to the big developer’s conferences in the U.S; it should be a good experience.

You can more info at the PDC site.

Localizing a SharePoint UI using ASP.Net Resource Files

I have a requirement for a project I’m working on to make all strings in the UI of a SharePoint 2007 site localized. The problem was that the rest of the site collection needed to stay in English, this meant all the system and admin pages needed to stay in English while all the user interface needed to be localized. The requirement also stated that an admin of the site collection could change this is the admin pages.

I immediately turned to ASP.Net resource files as this would achieve exactly what I wanted, I wanted to use the Regional Settings -> Locale setting in the site collection to determine the locale to show. The problem with this was that changing the sites Regional Settings Locale had no effect on the CurrentUICulture that the current ASP.Net thread was running under, this meant that ASP.Net would load the resource file for the user’s browser not the resource file for the locale of the site collection.

I used the following blog post from Mikhail Dikov which is a good example of how to use ASP.Net resource files in a SharePoint site. The blog post fails to mention however that for the culture to change within a SharePoint site you need the language packs installed and this would affect the whole site collection, admin pages and all.

So the following is an outline of how I achieved my goal:

• First I created a default resource file which contained all the English strings and then resource files for each locale I wanted to support.
• Next I deployed these resource files into my SharePoint web applications App_GlobalResources folder (see Mikhail’s blog post on how to deploy your resource files using a SharePoint feature).

• I then added the following code to my page layout which changed the current ASP.Net threads UI culture to the same culture of the SharePoint site collection:

<script runat=”server”>
protected override void InitializeCulture()
{
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContext.Current.Web.Locale;
base.InitializeCulture();
}
</script>

This made sure that each time the page loads the ASP.Net culture was set to the correct site collection culture.

• Now that the correct ASP.Net culture is selected in the page we can go ahead and localize our strings in the page layout like this:

  <asp:Literal runat=”server” Text=”<%$Resources:MyResourceFile,MyLocalizedStringKey %>“ />

  Note that we can also just use “<%$Resources:MyResourceFile,MyLocalizedStringKey%>” in any ASP.Net web controls property if you don’t want to use a Literal control.

And that’s all there is to it, I think it’s a clean and simple way to localize the SharePoint UI without using language packs and localizing the whole site collection including admin and system pages.

SharePoint 2010 overview videos

Microsoft have released a site for SharePoint 2010 that has some videos with overviews of the new stuff coming in the next version of SharePoint.

The videos cover both features for I.T. Pros and Developers so head over to the site and check them out asap!

SharePoint Conference 09, Bangkok and Sketchflow

This is my first blog post since February which is rubbish but I’ve been so busy with work and stuff in my personal life like getting married I just haven’t had the time.

I’ve been working on a pretty big Web Content Management system for a large company which I can’t say much about at the moment as it’s under wraps but I’ve been learning a lot of useful stuff developing this solution and increased my skills around SharePoint especially in the WCM area so will hopefully be blogging some more SharePoint stuff soon.

I registered to attend the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 09 in Vegas so looking forward to that and I’m off to Bangkok next week to do some work I’ve just come back from Barbados for our honeymoon so I’m doing a lot of travelling this year which is all good to me.

I attended the London DotNet User group meeting last week at which the infamous Scott Guthrie did a talk on Silverlight and showed us some new features of Silverlight 3. He also showed us a new product which looks like it’s coming with the next version of the Expression Suite called Sketch Flow. Sketch Flow basically allows you to quickly mock up UI’s and allows you to obtain feedback from clients and customers then allows you to turn this mock up into a real Silverlight application. It looks quite useful and I look forward to trying it out myself.

Anyway hope to be blogging some new technical articles in the near future and you can always follow my tweets at twitter.com/leejdale

Web.config Transformations with Visual Studio 2010

When deploying a web application across your organizations hosting environments you need to make sure you make the correct modifications to your web.config on each environment. Currently with Visual Studio 2008 this means hand modifying each web.config to make connection strings point to the right database servers, changing the debug compilation attribute to false etc. Doing this for each deployment can be a major pain and can allow bugs to slip into your environments, for instance you may forget to modify your connection string and have your production application pointing to your staging server or have your application underperform because you have left debug compilation on.

Thankfully the Visual Studio team has come up with a great feature to be included in the next release of the IDE that allows you to keep a copy of transformations for each web.config. Your transformations will get applied to your main web.config when the application is deployed to each environment. This should greatly improve the deployment experience and help keep deployment errors down to a minimum.

Channel9 have a video all about it so head over to there and check it out.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/10-4-Episode-10-Making-Web-Deployment-Easier/

New website: www.moggymart.com

A while back I decided to build a website for allowing people to post free classified advertisements for pets and animals; I decided to use ASP.Net 2.0 with AJAX Extensions and SQL Server 2005. User registration and authentication was done using the ASP.Net Forms Based Authentication with SQL Server Membership Providers.

As normally happens with side projects I gave up on it because I was too busy with my day to day projects and never touch it for a long while. Lately I picked it up again and decided to at least finish what I started so the first release looks like this www.moggymart.com

I plan to add more features when I get time and would be grateful for any feedback on the site.

Creating an Enhanced Rich Text Field in your SharePoint Content Types

When creating custom content types inside your features or site definitions you need to specify field definitions to define your custom fields. I was trying to create a Enhanced Rich Text field within my Content Type but was struggling to find the right XML.

Eventually I found out you need to include the RichText=”TRUE” and RichTextMode=”FullHtml” attributes within your field definition as shown below:

<Field

    ID=”{8A2EA652-DDCB-4bf7-84EE-129E7B7A5403}”
    Name=”ArticleBody”
    Group=”Reuters columns”
    DisplayName=”Article Body”
    Type=”Note”
    Sealed=”FALSE”
    ReadOnly=”FALSE”
    Hidden=”FALSE”
    RichText=”TRUE”
    RichTextMode=”FullHtml”
    DisplaceOnUpgrade=”TRUE” />

I can’t understand why this information isn’t more readily available and well documented on MSDN.