Top 10 Posts 2014

This year was a lot of fun! A handful of speaking engagements at the Puget Sound SharePoint Users Group, one at SharePoint Saturday Redmond, along with organizing volunteers for SPS Red. And of course, a lot of posts on SharePoint!

Onto the top 10 posts of 2014, view-wise. Overall, view-wise, #1 and #2 were actually from 2013! Old posts get a lot of attention, but they don’t count.

Below are my personal favorite posts of this year.

Streamlined Topology Performance This was another recommendation by Microsoft for SharePoint topologies where we were just told “it is better”. Using Reporting Services as a test for this topology (primarily because the numbers are very easy to access), it shows just how that extra trip between the “WFE” and “App” server (the “traditional” topology) can have a negative impact on performance, and why an administrator should consider converting to the streamlined topology. The Expense of Application Pools Another fun post, using the Sysinternals VMMap tool. I don’t often get to do this type of investigation, simply because it is just so easy to throw more memory at a SharePoint server than to optimize the layout. Hyper-V Private Networks for SharePoint(/2014/06/hyper-v-private-networks-sharepoint/) While a lot of developers will attest to running SharePoint in the cloud (Azure, CloudShare, etc.) for testing purposes, my test labs often involve an entire infrastructure; Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, possibly reverse proxies, ADFS, and so on. While testing just SharePoint environments in the cloud is great, the expense of testing the whole infrastructure is way outside of my personal budget. The strategy outlined in this post was one I used frequently on laptops where I’d move around from network to network, but needed to maintain a private IP range and Internet access for my VMs. SharePoint with Apache mod_proxy(/2014/06/sharepoint-apache-mod_proxy/) I had seen this one, and even received requests of a “how to” from Microsoft employees on information for their customers that already deployed mod_proxy/mod_ssl in their environments and wanted to put SharePoint behind it. What can I say, I like reverse proxies! SharePoint Database Availability Group Cmdlets(/2014/05/sharepoint-database-availability-group-cmdlets/) These cmdlets when unmentioned on TechNet until November of this year, and even then are only mentioned in the Move All Databases TN page. Learning how these cmdlets work is essential for those deploying SharePoint 2013 SP1 or higher against an Availability Group, as it opens up new options for the SharePoint Administrator, and reduces the workload for the DBA. What is the SharePoint Configuration Cache? I still learn new things about the internals of SharePoint and how they work, and this was no different. Tracking down the database trigger and figuring out it’s behavior was a lot of fun. Name User Profile Property Mapping Blank After Reprovisioning(/2014/04/name-user-profile-property-mapping-blank-reprovisioning/) Not a bug, per-se, but behavior that was noted somewhere on the Internet that needed a little investigation. SharePoint 2013 April 2014 CU Claims Conversion Bug April introduced full support for SQL 2014 as well as Read-Only Secondaries (note not read-intent secondaries, SharePoint will only leverage the Primary node as of right now). I really needed this support for the SharePoint 2010 to 2013 upgrades I was helping plan, but because many of the Web Applications were Classic and I needed a fully working fallback SharePoint 2010 farm in case of an upgrade disaster, avoiding this bug was absolutely critical. SharePoint Default Timeouts(/2014/07/sharepoint-default-timeouts/) Understanding default timeouts is often critical to understanding the behavior you’re seeing with any product or protocol. This is a simple Excel sheet of many of the default timeouts one may encounter in SharePoint. It isn’t an exhaustive list, but if I’m missing any, please let me know! The Dangers of AllowHttp for SharePoint(/2014/09/dangers-allowhttp-sharepoint/) I see the use of AllowHttp quite frequently in TechNet, or as a recommended workaround for some sort of issue the administrator is encountering. Even in development environments, it is extremely unwise to leverage AllowHttp as replay attacks are extremely easy with OAuth tokens. For this post, I even got to develop my own automated replay attack utility!

I hope everyone’s year was a great one. It was great to see the community, and those at the Puget Sound SharePoint User’s Group, SPS Red, and of course the Microsoft MVP Summit.

Wishing you all the best!

Trevor