BLACKTOP: Writings From the Road

Escalations and Working Hours

When you use escalations with working hours you might not get the behavior you expect if you don't pay attention. Here's an example. Let's say you have defined working hours as 9AM-5PM Monday-Friday--that's 8 hours a day. If you set an...

Published Fri, Jan 8 2010 7:30 AM by DavidL

TIP: Limiting Memory Use for SQL Server 2008

You can use the script below to limit the maximum amount of memory used by SQL 2008. While this can be important on a VPC where you have mulitple applications requesting memory, I would use the default settings on a dedicated SQL box. Replace xxx below...

Published Tue, Jan 5 2010 8:21 AM by DavidL

Kerberos: Duplicate SPNs

One of my favorite new features of Windows Server 2008 is the addition of the -X parameter to the SETSPN command. It finds duplicate SPNs. This can be very helpful when setting up and troubleshooting Kerberos. Except it doesn't always work. Instead...

Published Thu, Dec 24 2009 7:32 PM by DavidL

IIS 7, Kerberos, And the Checkbox of Doom

When configuring a web site to use Kerberos authentication on IIS 7 you might be tempted to use Kernal Mode Authentication. There is a bug in HTTP.SYS that can cause your server to frequently blue-screen and reboot. By frequent I mean every few seconds...

Published Mon, Dec 7 2009 2:04 PM by DavidL

Some rules were not applied

That's my all-time #1 favorite InfoPath Forms Services error. Really, what could be more useful and informative than that? If you've used Forms Services with K2 very much, you've seen this annoying, frustrating, useless error. Forms Services...

Published Sun, Nov 8 2009 9:28 PM by DavidL

The Best Way to Register a Service Instance

When you use a dynamic service like the built-in SharePoint service or the DynamicSQLService on blackmarket, you can run into trouble when moving between environments if you don't know to the best way to register the service instance. There are actually...

Published Wed, Sep 23 2009 11:11 AM by DavidL

Interesting blog on Workflow Complexity

I just read this interesting blog post on workflow complexity that I thought I would share: http://www.bagofspanners.com/2009/09/01/granularity-versus-pragmatism-translating-paper-workflow-to-a-business-process-management-system/ I think this blog makes...

Published Tue, Sep 1 2009 9:45 AM by DavidL

Installing SilverLight 3 Visual Studio Tools Offline

I recently needed to install the SilverLight 3 Visual Studio Tools in a VPC that was not connected to the internet. Unfortunately, the installer wants to connect to the internet to download the SilverLight SDK and won't complete without a connection....

Published Fri, Aug 28 2009 2:59 PM by DavidL

TIP: Accessing Resources as the Web Application Pool Account Instead of the Current User

Generally custom web applications that interact with K2 impersonate the current user for security by setting this attribute in the web.config file: <identity impersonate="true"/> But sometimes you want to perform some code in the security context...

Published Fri, Aug 21 2009 9:44 AM by DavidL

(Almost) Any Port in a Storm

I was working with a customer recently who was having authentication problems on their development environment. All K2 Components and MOSS were installed on the same server. However, whenever they went to K2 Workspace or opened an InfoPath form that used...

Published Mon, Aug 17 2009 1:12 PM by DavidL

Where did that activity data field go?

Every once in a while when I'm writing a server code event I have trouble remembering whether a particular activity data field is a destination instance field or an activity field and which API syntax is used to access it. Things like that happen when...

Published Wed, Aug 5 2009 1:47 PM by DavidL

Microsoft Virtual PC and FAT32 Disks

When you run MS Virtual PC on a drive formatted for FAT32 you might get some unanticipated behavior. The maximum file size on FAT32 is 4GB - 1 byte. If your .VHD file needs to grow beyond this limit, VPC will start creating files that have the same name...

Published Fri, Jun 26 2009 3:08 PM by DavidL

SharePoint Document Upload-Part 2

TIP: When you upload a document to a SharePoint library that has versioning enabled and requires check-in/check-out the document will not appear in the library until after it is checked-in. On the document upload wizard, check the box to create a K2 Content...

Published Fri, Jun 19 2009 11:33 AM by DavidL

SharePoint Document Upload

I was using the SharePoint Documents upload event wizard to upload an XML document to a Shared Documents library. When the process ran, there were no errors, but the document did not appear in the library. To make a long story short, the default Shared...

Published Thu, Jun 18 2009 12:26 AM by DavidL

How to Version InfoPath Forms Used in K2 Processes

You have a K2 process that uses InfoPath integration. It’s been in production for 6 months and working fine. Along comes Mr. Customer and he’d like to add some new fields to the form and change the process. Existing processes that have already started...

Published Fri, May 29 2009 4:55 PM by DavidL