Ok, so I will be the first to admit that I am a Microsoft developer. Sure we work on pretty much any platform across the board, but if you had to pin me down to a specialty it would be using Microsoft products.  Why am I sharing this tidbit? Well, it may color the opinions below regarding my first impressions of the IPad.

Yesterday I received the two IPads we pre-ordered for development. They came via UPS in good order and I was eager to get them up and running. I turned on one of the IPads and it showed me the “Connect to ITunes” graphic. I am a little miffed I need to register it before using it, but hey, why not. Luckily I remember that I upgraded ITunes to 9.1 the day before and was ready to go. So I fire up ITunes on my Windows machine and plug in the IPad using the USB connector.

How to register it?

Before I go any further I have to admit: I hate ITunes for Windows.  It is slow, unintuitive, and does not make it easier for me to get to my media.  That’s right, I see it as a hindrance not a help. And as a Windows user who is not a fanboy of Apple, ITunes for Windows does nothing to win me over to the other side.

So when I plugged in my IPad in order to register it on ITunes, whammo! I received an application fault from ITunes. The error was about an exception with a data services provider.  Undaunted, I closed out ITunes and restarted it. Same error. So like any good Windows user I rebooted when faced with the unexplained.

After reboot, ITunes worked a little better. It did not throw an exception, but it hung saying “Accessing Services”. I tried reconnecting several times but to no avail. It just kept hanging.  So how could I sync up my  new IPad?   It seems like ITunes is buggy (no surprise to me) and will not work with the IPad under Windows 7 - 64 bit.

Well, I just happen to have access to an OSX virtual machine on my desktop. Don’t ask me how I  built it (there are plenty of tutorials on the web).  I thought that since I cannot register it on ITunes for Windows, maybe I can try to register it using OSX on my virtual machine.

Pay dirt. It worked flawlessly. Not only that, but I noticed that ITunes for OSX appears to be more responsive than its Windows counterpart. Registration went quickly, and I was even able to go back to ITunes for Windows and perform a sync.

“So Apple (clears throat), what happened to the ‘It Just Works’ motto that you use to justify your prices?”  Apple is in charge of developing ITunes for all its supported platforms, but yet it appears they dropped the ball here. It didn’t “just work” for me and my guess is that it won’t “just work” for many other people.

How to charge it?

So once I got my IPad registered and synced using the USB cable, I noticed that the icon in the top right corner of the IPad kept saying “Not Charging”. This puzzled me. It should be charging since it is plugged into a USB 2.0 port. This is the same port that charges all my other devices, including an IPhone and IPod Touch.  What is going on? Is my IPad broken?

As it turns out, the IPad needs more wattage than a typical device and not all USB hubs are able to deliver the necessary power.  As a result, most (it appears) USB ports will not charge your IPad. You are stuck charging it via the wall adapter that comes with it.

What is interesting is that if you are an Apple user (meaning you spent ALOT of money on an Apple desktop), you can probably charge it from your machine.  But if you have a non-apple machine your are most likely out of luck. I say “most likely” because there is possibly some USB hardware that it works with, but the data is not yet in as to which ones will work and which ones do not.

So I have another big beef with Apple regarding “It just works”.  Not only does this not just work on a bunch of standard USB hardware that PC users have been using without issue, but it appears your IPad only charging using your own hardware. That plain stinks.  Not being able to charge on any USB 2.0 port is quite the letdown and in my opinion a very questionable design decision.

Update: On a hunch, I did a test. Last night I took the IPad down to 75% power then plugged it into my normal computer USB port. The IPad said “Not Charging”, and I left it overnight. This morning, it was at 100% power. So some degree of charging IS happening and the IPad is not correctly stating the situation. Go figure.

Is it all bad?

No. The IPad itself is very, very nice. The machine is responsive, easy to use, a great form-factor to hold, and I can see many great new uses for it.  It is definitely a kindle-killer and will give the popular netbook market a run for its money. Heck, even the digital frame makers who have been charging $300-$500 for networked photo frames should feel threatened.  This is one very nice piece of hardware.

It makes me feel like I am holding  a piece of the future, and I like that feeling.

What I do not like is the no-multitasking, censored applications, the “it just works” motto, and my inability to just charge from any USB device.  I feel some of those issues are not as progressive as the hardware itself, and keeps the hardware tethered and unable to reach its full potential.

But, it is darn nice.

There are a number of posts on the web that describe how to setup your SharePoint 2007 site using Forms Based Authentication instead of the standard Windows Based Authentication.  This post will try to consolidate several of those posts and add a few comments, tips and tricks into the mix.

Overall Installation Guides

• FBA for SharePoint 2007 - Installation guide – Simple Talk(recommended)
• FBA for SharePoint 2007 - Installation Guide – Part 1
• FBA for SharePoint 2007 - My Sites - Part 2

FBA?

SharePoint was designed around Windows Authentication which means if you want a user account, it needs to be tied to a machine account. This is unwieldy if you want your site to be a public site where anyone can sign up and create an account, or if a large number of users are external to your domain.

Enter Forms Based Authentication (FBA).  FBA allows you to setup SharePoint to authenticate users against a database using the standard .Net membership and role provider mechanism. By themselves these mechanisms are quite nice, and are even integrated into IIS7 allowing for a relatively easy way to manage users and accounts. But when you pair FBA with SharePoint you run into some issues.

Holes, Holes, and More Holes

Integrating FBA into SharePoint 2007 is certainly doable, but it leaves a bunch of holes open that need plugging. Some of these major holes are:

• The SharePoint search mechanism does not work on a FBA site
• The MySites functionality does not work on FBA
• Managing FBA users and roles is not natively supported in SharePoint
• There is no built-in mechanism for password management and sign-ups.
• SharePoint Designer 2007 cannot open/edit FBA sites.

Sure each of the above issues are fixable to some degree.  In fact the FBA Community Kitalleviates most of the management issues. But the real issue with FBA is that it opens so many holes that YOU need to plug. When configuring your site for FBA beware: it will require much more work and testing than normal.

Tips

When setting up several FBA sites some of these tips may help speed you along:

• Create a single “template” database for yourself that you use to start each site. This database should have at least 1 admin account that you can use to login. If all your sites have several common users, then go ahead and set them up in the database first before making copies of your database. This will make setup MUCH faster.
• Use IIS7 to manage users and roles. Once you have your site installed with the proper membership and role providers in the web.configs, you can use IIS7 to manage the users and roles.  This makes for quick setup of many users ahead of time.
• Create Authentication Zones to allow access to your site using both Windows authentication and FBA. By doing this you will allow not only the use of Windows accounts to access your site, but it will also allow SharePoint Designer 2007 to open and edit your site.  To do this, under SharePoint Central Admin go to the Application Management tab and select Authentication Providers. Make sure your site is selected, and Add a new Windows authentication zone using a different access url name. Note: the new name could be something like http://win.mysite.com where the win denotes windows authentication is used, and http://mysite.com is the FBA authenticated entry point.

Starting at 8:30am Eastern (5:30am Pacific) you can pre-order your very own IPad from the Apple Store.Although this is just a pre-order, shipping units should be arriving on April 3rd.  What (if any) version do you plan to buy?

Here at the DigitForge offices we have projects that require purchasing a couple units. Although the emulators are good, you just never know how well your applications work until you are using it on the device itself. To that end, we will probably be purchasing:

• 1 x $499 basic 16GB
• 1 x $629 16GB 3G with $29 unlimited data plan

What? Why the 3G? How else do you know how responsive your application is in a real-world situation? If it wasn’t for this testing requirement, we would pass on the 3G altogether.

Visual Studio 2010 includes a nifty new feature where you can publish your database to a Host, directly from within the IDE. You initiate this by right-clicking on your database connection in the Server Explorer, and selecting Publish to Provider. The entire process is guided by a Wizard that is loaded with some nice options for getting your database from one place to another. But the question today is "What do I need to do in order to be my own host so I can publish to my own server?"

Note: You may want to check our our companion article that shows how to Setup a Host server for Web Deployment.  The two together make deploying web applications in Visual Studio a snap!

After some digging it became apparent that Visual Studio's database publishing wizard is written to utilize a series of web service calls. These calls define various operations that can be implemented by anyone who can write web services. After some more digging it became apparent that there is already an implementation of these services that anyone can use to provide basic database services to Visual Studio. These services are called the SQL Server Database Hosting Services, and you can download an implementation of them at the following sites:

• Microsoft Downloads: SQL Server Database Hosting Services
• CodePlex: SQL Server Hosting Toolkit

Read more after the break: More...

If you haven't already discovered it, BlogEngine.Net is an excellent, extensible, and free! blog engine. In fact it is what runs this site.  They just released a new version 1.6 with an updated feature set, but one item we needed was a simple widget to display Google AdSense in the sidebar. To do this, we dove in and made a Widget.

Download it here: AdSense_Widget_1.0.zip (2.22 kb)

Sign up For AdSense

The first task is for you to sign up with Google AdSense and create an AdSense "Unit". This "Unit" is just a description of the ad you want displayed on the site. Once defined, you will be given the code to insert into your site that will display the advertisements.  The code will consist of javacript, and will contain variables something like the following:

google_ad_client = "pub-YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY";
/* MyAd 200x200, created 2/22/10 */
google_ad_slot = "XXXXXXXXXX";
google_ad_width = 200;
google_ad_height = 200;

Install the AdSense Widget

Now that you have an Ad setup with Google, go ahead and install the AdSense Widget. You can download it from the link at the top of this article. The best part of BlogEngine.Net is that installation of widgets, extensions, themes, etc. is a snap!

1. Unzip the file which will give you an AdSense sub-folder.
2. Copy the unzipped AdSense folder into your blog's \widgets directory. It should end up at \widgets\AdSense
3. That's it!

Configuring the Widget to Display your Ad

The final step is to configure your widget and display your Ad. To do this, you must log into the blog as an Administrator and follow the steps below.

1. Navigate to the Home page
2. Scroll to the bottom of the Sidebar and you will see the widget drop-down box.
3. If installed correctly, AdSense should show up in that drop-down box.
4. Select AdSense and click the Add button.
5. You should now see a blank widget box with Move and Edit links. Click the Edit link to configure.
6. A configuration dialog will be presented and offers the following properties:

    

7. Fill out each parameter, matching them to the javascript variables in your AdSense Unit.
8. Click Save.

Enjoy your the Sidebar AdSense goodness!  Note, if you just signed up for your AdSense account it may take some time before you get real ads displayed. 

Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010) has some wonderfully integrated features for building and deploying web sites. The VS team has finally made it easy to get your web site onto someone else's Host server. But what if you want to implement a Host server and allow developers/customers easy access to your server? How do you do it?  You have questions, we have answers.

Note: You may also want to check out our companion article titled: Setting up a Host server for VS2010 web publishing.

More...

If you have a SharePoint site, you need a better editor! Telerik offers a free RadEditor text control and a paid-for upgraded control.  In either case, once you install the control you may notice that the editor font is different than your site theme font (when editing the item). If this is the case, you can fix it by performing the steps below. Just make sure you add the proper text styles for your site theme.

CSSEditor.css - if this file does not exist, create it.

1. Location: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\wpresources\RadEditorSharePoint\5.6.2.0__1f131a624888eeed\Resources\csseditor.css
2. CSS Styles to add/modify:

body
{
    font-family: Arial, Verdana, Tahoma !important; 
    font-size: 10pt !important; 
}

HtmlEditorCustomStyles.css

1. Location: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\STYLES\HtmlEditorCustomStyles.css
2. CSS Styles to add/modify:

body, textarea
{
    font-family: Arial, Verdana, Tahoma !important; 
    font-size: 10pt !important; 
}

RadEditor_Css_Changes.zip (983.00 bytes)

As most of you know, Visual Studio 2010 has moved into RC territory and sports a nifty GoLive license. This means you can download and use the RC for shipping projects.  With this release of Visual Studio, we at DigitForge are looking to fully leverage some of the web and SQL deployment tools built into the VS client.  The tools/wizards themselves are pretty straightforward. But in the next upcoming series of blog posts I will describe how to implement the server-side portion of these tools. Basically we will be looking at supporting these tools from a Hosting perspective.

Web Deploy Tool - this is how you support web site publishing.

SQL Publishing Services - this is how you support SQL publishing.

Each upcoming blog post will outline how to find and install these on your server. Come back soon!