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I had some fun this week setting up SharePoint to run on my Windows Home Server. It actually went very smoothly. I was surprised.
I downloaded the WSS 3.0 SP1 installation package and just went through the standard installation, setting it up as a standalone server. After that completed, I noticed that the install had created a new web application on port 80, and shut down the default Home Server site. This was fairly simple to work around.
I went into SharePoint Central Administration and changed the host header for the default site to "share.mydomain.com”. My goal was to be able to browse to it using a simple to remember URL and be able to also get to the home server’s default admin site via a different host header like “homeserver.mydomain.com”.
In order to get this to work, you have to set the proper CNAME alias in your DNS provider. I use GoDaddy and they have a fairly simple to use tool for setting the CNAME aliases. I just added a CNAME for “share” and a CNAME for “homeserver” and pointed them both to my domain that is provided by Windows Homeserver’s virtual IP service which looks like this: myserver.homeserver.com.
After setting up the CNAME’s in my DNS, I went back to my home server and added the host header to my Windows Home Server default Web via Inetmgr.exe. Remember to set the host header to the full domain name “share.mydomain.com” or else it won’t work! I made that mistake first by setting the host header to just “share” thinking that IIS was actually smart.
Next I just restarted the default web and I was now able to get to both my home server admin page and my root SharePoint web collection. I could keep building on this on my home server by pointing to a blog.mydomain.com, or video.mydomain.com, etc…
My next attempt is to see if I can get PHP running with WordPress hosted on my Home Server as well so I can customize my themes more! The new Microsoft Web Application installer could help me out there. It installs PHP in IIS and also optionally can set up WordPress for you.
Every six-months Microsoft Services hosts a technical readiness conference. I actually had some time today to attend a few sessions and got some very useful links to some resources for SharePoint development that I did not know about.
There is a new CTP for the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for SharePoint. Version 1.3 now available from the Microsoft Connect site. Improvements include installation support for x64 Windows Server (thank you!), and command line building. I’ll need to spend some time checking these out!
Another cool tool that I would love to start using in our own projects is the SharePoint Dispose Checker Tool. It works a lot like FXCop to analyze your SharePoint SDK code and make sure that you are properly disposing of the objects in the SDK. SharePoint objects use a mix of managed and unmanaged memory that is allocated on the heap using malloc calls. The objects that do this always implement the IDisposable pattern… however, a common mistake is to not call Dispose or to not put the objects in using statements. This tool can be integrated into your build to help find those errors early before they bring down your SharePoint server.
Related to the new v 1.3 Extensions, there is a great blog post by Michael Washman that shows how to use the latest CTP to deploy Workflows. I’m definitely going to be walking through this sample later.
Finally, some more reading to pile up on your nightstand… the Patterns & Practices team has a site on codeplex that focuses on SharePoint Architectural Guidance. Their last release was back in Nov. 2008, but I still have not gotten around to reading it. One benefit of posting to my blog is that maybe I will get around to it…maybe. Here is the direct link if you find the time to download it too.
