Hard Knocks - Ben Sufit’s Technical Blog

I once had an engineering professor that said ‘It is easy once you know how to do it.’   Obviously, but first you have to know how to do it. This is pretty basic but if you are learning SharePoint administration but I figured I would throw it up here in case someone needed to learn it.   Deploying and retracting a WSP in SharePoint 2007 is makes managing customized SharePoint sites much easier to maintain and manage.   Instead of dropping DLL’s in the GAC or bin, and adding features to the site manually, the WSP or solution package wraps customizations up into a nice portable package. There are three steps to deploying a WSP in a Farm 1.        Add the Solution to the Farm (this is the only step that must be done with the stsadm command line tool, all others can be done via the GUI in central admin) Go to a command prompt and type: stsadm –o addsolution –filename “C:\yourWSPpath\yourWSPname.wsp” 2.        Deploy the Solution to the Farm or Web app depending on how it is scoped. This i

Doing work as a developer and system administrator has some advantages.   One being that if I don’t like some of the tools that are available to system administrators, I can write my own.   We have all kinds of monitoring tools in place at my company that email me everything from drive space issues, event logs errors, ping responses and just about everything else except if the application is actually up and displaying expected information.   This means I get 200+ emails a day from systems, fine on workdays, but not so good on weekends.   The solution I came up with was to write a custom console application that reads in the HTML counts the charters.   Based on the number of characters or if an error is returned the code sends an email and a text message to specified accounts.   The reason I count the characters is because an application can throw up an error page like the IIS default page or ‘cannot connect to content database’ SharePoint error without throwing an exception.   If neede