Last night after attending the SharePoint User Group meeting in NYC Jason Medero, Randi Parrish and I went to SHIMIZU for dinner. This has to be one of my most favorite sushi places in NYC but that’s another post. Once I got back to the hotel after dinner I trolled the net for new information on SharePoint and InfoPath like I do every night and I was quite surprised that Microsoft InfoPath blog was active again and currently has a great series on “Designing browser-enabled forms for performance in InfoPath Forms Services”. It was a nice surprise for me because next week I’m starting a brand new project and its going to be very heavy in InfoPath 2007/InfoPath Form Services and workflow and have some new material to read is nice. Below is a list of all the links to the series at this point.

http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2008/05/09/designing-browser-enabled-forms-for-performance-in-infopath-forms-services.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2008/06/19/designing-browser-enabled-forms-for-performance-in-infopath-forms-services-part-2.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2008/06/24/designing-browser-enabled-forms-for-performance-in-infopath-forms-services-part-3.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2008/06/25/designing-browser-enabled-forms-for-performance-in-infopath-forms-services-part-4.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2008/06/26/designing-browser-enabled-forms-for-performance-in-infopath-forms-services-part-5.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/infopath/archive/2008/06/30/designing-browser-enabled-forms-for-performance-in-infopath-forms-services-part-6.aspx

Cheers,
Michael

The SUGDC Regional SharePoint Conference was this weekend (Friday and Saturday) and to my understanding from talking to people that attended both days it was a great SharePoint conference.  I didn’t get to attend both days but just Saturday when I was speaking but I had a great time on Saturday hanging out with Paul Galvin, Becky Isserman and Bob Fox during the afternoon.  This conference was a little different for me because it was the first event I ever spoke at that people actually paid money to attend.  I’m really curious what people thought and I’m hoping that I’ll get some evaluations from the people that attended my session.  I really want feedback from people good or bad so I can approve on things.  When attending some of the sessions with Paul and Becky one thing that I noticed was that I really need to spend a lot more time on getting my slides to look a lot nicer and probably slow down a little when I speaking.  One of the things that I keep catching myself doing is speeding through my sessions trying to get as much content in a session as possible instead of maybe spending little extra explaining things.  One of the things that I really enjoyed besides speaking on InfoPath was having the extra time talking with Paul and Becky and a few other people at the conference.  It is really nice to sit down and speak with people that do the same thing you do and listen to what they are saying and pickup new ideals and making new contacts.  It's too bad that I didn't have the chance to come on Friday so I could see Paul's session because I really think he has done a lot of cool things and I think it would have been a great session.

When preparing my presentation I did a lot of research qualifying everything I would be presenting and I was really impressed with all the detail information on the MSDN site.  I found so much information in the MOSS and WSS SDKs that I was really impressed.  I remember doing SharePoint 2003 it took forever for any good stuff to appear but that’s not the case for MOSS and WSS v3.  Anybody trying to learn SharePoint shouldn’t have any problem doing so anymore.

During the Roundtable session that Becky and I were doing on Ajax and InfoPath Paul asked some really good questions and I will be blogging about them over the coming days because I've had a little time to think about them and do some research.  I truly still can't believe how big InfoPath 2007 and InfoPath Form Services really is.

The conference was a blast and I would like to thank Bob Fox, Gary Blatt and Gary Vaughn for giving me a chance to talk at the conference and I hope they let me come back in the fall.

Cheers,
Michael

For all the people that do InfoPath 2007 development and deploys forms to InfoPath Forms Services this is something that you should be aware of. I’ve know this for quite awhile but for some reason I’ve never blogged about it and I’m not sure why. Well that might not be totally true, I think I’ve not blogged about it because I’ve never fully tested all the scenario’s to get a definitive answer and unfortunately I still haven’t done that testing but I still wanted to mention this because I thought it was important. The below scenario doesn’t happen if the form is brand new but only if you are updating an existing form.

Have any of you ever seen the below screen after you updated a form that’s all ready being used by InfoPath Forms Services?

 

If you say yes then don’t feel bad because you’re not alone because everybody else has the same problem as far as I know. I’ve seen this same error is several environments that I’ve worked in with InfoPath Forms Services and that’s what makes me believe this is happening to everybody. The reason that you are getting the above error is because InfoPath Form Services is automatically recycling the IIS application pool for at least the Central Administration machine but it could also be happening to the WFE or WFE’s but I’m not 100% sure because I haven’t completed my testing. The below images display what the w3wp.exe process id’s are before uploading a form and then what they are after I uploaded the form. As you can see the id’s are different after the form has been uploaded to InfoPath Form Service. From my experience it only happens to forms that already exist in InfoPath Forms Services and not new forms.

Before:
 
 
After:
 

For everyone that didn’t know about this, this could be a really scary discovery for you because now you know that each time you upload a new version of an existing form SharePoint is recycling the AppPool’s on the server that hosts the Central Administration web application. I’m hoping that I might get some extra time to do some more testing in the future and give a more detail answer on which servers this really affects and what Web Applications.

Cheers,
Michael

Last weekend Nas and I were speaking at the Pittsburgh Code Camp and we had a great time and we meet a lot of great people.  While in the speaker room we met Amanda Launcher and she introduced us to http://twitter.com/.  If you don’t know anything about it I would suggest going out and taking a look because to my understanding it’s the next new fad.  I would think that “twitter” is something that could complement a blog or if you don’t have much to say at one moment.  To my understanding you are only allowed 140 characters per post and you can do it from either you’re phone or IM.

Nas and I didn’t have a chance to sit in on any other sessions because we were doing some deep dive discovery on FBA and MOSS (MySite) configuration and trying to really understand how and why it’s configured the suggested way.  I must say its pretty complex at first but it gets a lot simpler once all the SQL permissions are set correctly on the FBA database.  Once we got done with this I spent more time on InfoPath Forms Services/FBA and got everything working correctly for my demo but when I tried to do the demo I couldn’t get logged into the SharePoint site because of some “unknown exception”.  When adding FBA to SharePoint it has been really unpredictable and frustrating for me.  I’m hoping that I can get all the bugs worked out by the Richmond Code Camp on April 26^th.

Cheers,
Michael

Last week B&R Business Solutions won a contract for a SharePoint and FBA installation and that got me on the kick of FBA again. Last weekend I built some code to retrieve the username for a FBA user and during that process I ended up wanting to debug my browser based InfoPath 2007 form. This was going to be the first time for me to try this because in the past I've always made my forms code free because I never wanted any of my clients to maintain code for InfoPath 2007 form if it could all be built in Visual Studio Web Service or Class project. My thought was it should be extremely easy to do because I had a Visual Studio 2008 VSTO InfoPath 2007 project and the form was web based. I was hoping debugging was going to be as easy as SharePoint debugging is and believe it or not it was. To debug my web based form all I had to do was attach the w3wp.exe process where my InfoPath 2007 web based form was running under to my Visual Studio 2008 VSTO InfoPath 2007 project and set my break point in the code. I was really surprised it was this easy to do because I was guessing that there had to be something funky to make it work but I was totally wrong.

Since I'm doing this extra SharePoint/FBA project with Nas, I only suspect that I will do more things with InfoPath and FBA. Most likely I will end up building a new .NET Class for retrieving FBA user information based off user id for pre-populating web based InfoPath 2007 forms.

Well it's time for me to get some sleep because I've a lot of things to do tomorrow. I hope everybody has a great weekend.

Cheers,
Michael

This for all you know administrators that have SharePoint 2007 installations and use InfoPath Forms Services. Josh and I working in our development environment on Monday and we had issues uploading, upgrading or deleting forms from InfoPath Forms Services. We could see the jobs in “Solutions Management” but not in the Timer Jobs but we also could manually get the jobs to execute when we ran “stsadm.exe –o execadmsvcjobs” command. We started to Google and everything else that we could possible think of but we didn’t have any luck until this morning. Josh wrote Jason Medero (brother) a long email about our problem and he said to make sure we had the DST patch installed. When we checked are environment this morning and we didn’t have that installed. So with little searching we found these 2 links that guided us how to install the patches and now everything works great.  We didn't have this issue in production because we installed the patches already but forgot to do it in development.

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/10/16/sharepoint-faq-on-dst-and-october-9th-public-update.aspx

http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2007/10/18/please-install-the-sharepoint-updates-on-your-server.aspx

This week has been a pretty interesting week for me so far because I'm training a new guy on InfoPath 2007 and InfoPath Forms Services and we are getting new errors and I wanted to share one of them.  "There has been an error while loading the form" was an error that we got today when launching one of his forms.

After doing a little investigation we discovered it was a old form that he deployed and activated to a Site Collection through InfoPath Forms Services but then decided to remove it from InfoPath Forms Services before deactivating it from the Site Collection.  I was pretty amazed that he was able to successfully remove the form before deactivating all instances.  When I looked for the deployment files in the Features folder they weren't there so it appears it was removed successfully.  To resolve the problem we delete the form entry from the Form Template library on the main site and deleted it from the Site Content Type gallery.

Cheers

Just last week an old existing SharePoint 2007 environment was re-introduced into the InfoPath development process for my current client and this morning when trying to preview a form either through InfoPath 2007 designer or InfoPath Form Services and using the InfoPath function "UserName()" the below error was given (error when viewing through InfoPath 2007).

The full error message is

InfoPath
Your user name cannot be verified because the form's security settings do not permit it.
Error occurred during a call to property or method 'get-UserName'.

The problem started to happen when the "Domain" textbox on the "Preview" screen and "Enter the URL of a server that is running InfoPath Forms Services and can be used to verify compatibility" textbox on the "Compatibility" screen from the "Form Options" menu was set to point to the development SharePoint server.  Below are visuals of the options that I'm talking about.

The error sort of took me back at first because there weren't any problems with any of the previous forms.  Since this was a new form I was thinking that there was a setting that was not correct but that wasn't the case.  While troubleshooting the issue I changed the form security to "Full Trust" from "Domain" and everything was working but I knew that wasn't the solution but it got me thinking in a different direction.  It got me thinking that it wasn't an InfoPath problem after all.  To further that theory I changed "Preview" and "Compatibility" values to point to production and when I previewed the form everything worked with no errors.  This confirmed my theory in my mind that it wasn't an InfoPath problem and I started to think what else is tied into InfoPath. 

So naturally I thought it could be an IE issue because we all know that IE is an integral part of InfoPath. The first thing that I did was open each SharePoint site that I was using in IE and looked at the security zone for each site.  To my surprise there was a difference between them.  The production site had "Local Intranet" and the development site had "Internet".  You can easily tell this by looking at the bottom right corner of the IE 7 browser.  After noticing this I added the development site to the "Local Intranet" zone and then tested my InfoPath form out again and there were no errors this time.

This error was a first for me since I started blogging everything on my experiences with InfoPath, InfoPath Forms Services and SharePoint for my current project.  I started to really think if I ran into this problem before and I'm thinking that it might have happened with InfoPath 2003 when building custom forms for a client or on an ASP.NET project but not a 100 percent sure.  I'm just really glad it wasn't a hard error to figure out.

Cheers

After spending the last 6 months working with InfoPath 2007, "InfoPath Forms Services" and "Content Types" you start to understand lot of the different possibilities that are avaliable and I think it's pretty amazing on how versatile InfoPath 2007 forms are when used as Content Types in conjunction with InfoPath Forms Services.  In the old days which really aren't that old you only had one true way to publish an InfoPath form for viewing from SharePoint but know that has all changed with 2007 version.  Now you have 3 different ways of doing it if using SharePoint Enterprise and InfoPath designer.  You can still publish an InfoPath form directly to Form Library but now you can also publish a form as "Site Content Type" or "Administrator-approved form template" for uploading into "InfoPath Forms Services".  The third option is only available when the "Enable this form to be filled out by using a browser" is checked.  See image below for the actual details for each option.

The "InfoPath Forms Services" approach has pretty much become my favorite way because the SharePoint Administrator has control of which SharePoint Site Collection the form is activated in and the form is also gets installed as "Site Content Type" (Site Collection Feature).  By using this approach with the "Collaboration Portal" template it appears automatically in the central "Form Library" that is automatically created.  This gives everyone one central spot to access all the forms for that site. Clients that I've worked with think this is a dream come true because all forms can be stored and organized in one central location.

Now anybody that uses InfoPath all knows that most forms will need a place to reside once the form has been filled out and submitted for viewing the promoted form data or just viewing the submitted forms.  The above approach doesn't give this capability but just a way to launch the form.  When creating a new "Form Library" for an InfoPath form it can be done from InfoPath designer or specifying the form as a "Content Type" for a newly created library.  The first approach requires additional work from InfoPath and not to ideal from a support aspect because you would need to keep up with 2 instances of the form and this leaves a lot of room for potential problems.  If the form is added to the "Form Library" as a "Content Type" then there is no additional work besides selecting the form from the "Content Types" section on the form library settings page.

If the "Content Types" section doesn't appear then most likely the "Allow management of content types" is not set to yes.  This property can be found on the "Advanced settings" page and this link is available from the form library settings page.

You might be thinking how or when was the form published as a "Content Type" because you didn't specify it to be done because you only uploaded and activated it from "InfoPath Forms Services" in Central Administration.

When the form is activated with "InfoPath Forms Services" to the specified site collection it is automatically added as a "Content Type" (Site Collection Feature).  Now there are no worries about keeping the form in "InfoPath Forms Services" and form library in sync because it uses the same form.  While the form is specified in two different areas it will give the user the capability to launch it from either.

This approach might not be 100% ideal for all instances but it brings great flexibility that was missing.  For a future post I'll try to put together a series of screen shots on how to publish a InfoPath form to be uploaded into "InfoPath Forms Services" and also add it as a "Content Type" to a form library if there is a interest

Cheers