David L. Walker - .NET Solution Provider

I just received the email below from Sitecore regarding stability issues that .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (Service Pack 1) is causing with all Sitecore products. I am glad they sent this out. Hopefully the companies using Sitecore products will see it before they install the Service Pack and lose a lot of time with the issues it is causing.

There are a couple questions that come to mind, but the first one is this the only product that will have problems?

If you are using a product that is built on top of ASP.NET you may need to be very careful. The bug described and the issues with it have not been reported specifically yet. It has simply been described as a "bug in the LosFormatter class (System.Web.UI.LosFormatter in System.Web.dll, used to serialize and deserialize an ASP.NET ViewState)."

It would be interesting to know if any other products have problems, if you know of any others let us know, via comments.

My most important question though is, could this have been caught in the Beta cycle? Or is this a bug/change put in place since the last Beta release?

Why change how ViewState is serialized and deserialized anyway? :)

ASP.NET MVC is looking more interesting all the time. Just have to wait for the rest of the marketplace to get it integrated into their products. :)

Here's the email:

Dear Sitecore Enthusiast,

You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the Sitecore Product Issues and Patches mailing list.
On Monday, August 4th, Microsoft released the following service packs: Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1.
Sitecore has discovered that these service packs introduce a bug in the LosFormatter class (System.Web.UI.LosFormatter in System.Web.dll, used to serialize and deserialize an ASP.NET ViewState). This bug causes stability issues in Sitecore products. Sitecore has raised this as an urgent priority issue with Microsoft (case number : SRQ080813600454) and is working to help resolve this issue.
In the meantime, PLEASE DO NOT INSTALL .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 on any server running a Sitecore product (including Sitecore WCMS, Intranet Portal, and Foundry) until further notice!
Symptoms associated with installing either of these service packs:

• Memory consumption increases dramatically and single core CPU usage goes up to 100% when opening the Access Viewer or Media Library applications.
• OutOfMemoryExceptions thrown in the Desktop and Content Editor.
• The browser becomes unresponsive when accessing Sitecore.

Just 2 days ago now the SharePoint Pod Show pushed their very first podcast. It was definitely great to listen to it and am very excited about the upcoming shows! They've created a SharePoint Pod Show FaceBook group so you can let them know what you want to hear as well!

A few weeks ago one of the hosts, Rob Foster instant messaged me that he was starting up a SHAREPOINT NATION! FaceBook group and wanted me to start up a SHAREPOINT NATION! LinkedIn group, so I did. It's a term, a chant, a life style, that Rob coined around the time frame of the MVP Summit. You can find some of the history about it on his blog, We are SharePoint Nation!!! In my opinion it is the difference between a "social networking" thing and a real life group of motivated and enthusiastic individuals working together as a community, a REAL community, a NATION.

Since then, SharePoint MVP, Amanda Murphy found the time to create the awesome logo that's now on all the groups and sites and simply says it all: Virtually Everything you need for SharePoint.

On July 16th, 2008, just a few short weeks ago, Bob Fox and crew launched the International SharePoint Professionals Association (ISPA). You can find out the details and plans on his blog post Announcing it.

SharePoint Magazine launched it's first "issue" within the last couple weeks as well. Although, if you follow me on Twitter @DavidWalker you already heard me razz them for running it using WordPress. That is definitely no reason to not read it! They already have some great information. There's many sites that fall victim to this type of technical treachery - SharePointBestPractices.com is built with PHP.

Finally, the open source project that SharePoint MVP - Stacy Draper and I have been hard at work on became publicly available around July 14th, 2008. We still have just a little more work to wrap it up for Release 1.0, typical scope creep issues with guys who are very excited about the project and the functionality that it can provide. The day before we had to make it public, CodePlex forces projects to be public within 30 days after creation or they will be deleted, we added a bunch of stuff that broke the deployment script at the moment. I hope to get his resolved as quickly as possible, so we can release version 1.0. In the mean time, check out the project and what it can do at CodePlex.com/PowerQueryWebPart. Once, Release 1.0 goes live I'll post more details about the making of the project and how this swiss army knife can be a must have in your WebPart Gallery in any SharePoint site.

I stumbled across this survey. Only took a few minutes and I can't wait to see the results!

I just happened to see the blog post by Jason Edwards about how his state, Texas, is ranked # 1  on CNBC's Top States for Business 2008 rankings.

So of course I was curious, how well would Oklahoma rank? Well it appears we've moved up 4 spots from # 32 to # 28.

What's really odd is the really bad drop from # 9 to # 30 on the Workforce category and the huge jump in Economy from # 26 to # 3.

What's disappointing is Education practically stayed flat from # 47 to # 45 and Technology & Innovation did stay flat at # 35.

Remember folks, this is out of 50!

All this and we border Texas (ranked # 1!). I think Education, Technology and now Workforce are the biggest issues with our state at the moment. Economy, Cost of Doing Business and Cost of Living are practically as good as you can get.

To me, what it sounds like this all means, in Oklahoma you can live cheap and run a business cheap in a strong economy, but don't expect many educated, technically advanced workers. Sad.

I had to be in Los Angeles a couple weeks ago now for some cross training and to meet my awesome development team in person for the first time. You have to love the freedom that the internet provides telecommuters. Thank you IM, email, remote desktop, ftp, and on and on.

It just so happened that I found that David Yack, a Microsoft Regional Director and INETA Speaker, was presenting "Exploring the Entity Framework" to the San Gabriel Valley .NET Developers Group my first night in town. It was my first time actually seeing a presentation on the Entity Framework. I was definitely glad that Zain Naboulsi had just presented on LINQ Features in Visual Studio 2008 because he was sure to show the  new LINQ to SQL Classes feature of Visual Studio 2008. You can really see how far the team has come with modeling between the LINQ to SQL Classes and the soon to be released Entity Framework 1.0. Follow them on their new blog: EFDesign.

To put it in away that any developer can understand: DAO, RDO, ADO, ADO.NET and now (ADO.NET) EF (Entity Framework).

Granted there a lot of other options when it comes to separating your data from you business logic, nHibernate, etc. and this is a version 1 product. In my opinion, it looks like it can improve the application architecture in many development departments and across many projects.

There has been some very vocal criticism by way of a "vote of no confidence" mostly from the nHibernate crowd. They do bring a lot of great points and it's obvious from the quick response of Tim Mallalieu, the Microsoft Program Manager leading the team, they are listening and setting their priorities for version 2. This is definitely something I wouldn't sign, because as D'Arcy put it "Our role is to learn." You simply can't move forward if something new is not offered and with my limited exposure to it, I must say it is a very nice step forward.  Kathleen Dollard listed an even greater number of reasons to not sign the petition and I'm sure 99.9% of every developer out there would have to agree with her response to the Entity Framework Petition. Lastly, for those doing their proper research on the Entity Framework, Ward Bell, Product Manager for DevForce .NET by IdeaBlade, made several excellent valid real world business reasons in his response to the petition and why he wouldn't sign it.

I was very excited to hear, the day before flying to Los Angeles, that INETA is sending our first speaker to the Tulsa SQL Server Group. It is none other than David Yack! Woot! It's great knowing what the local developers are about to see in just a few weeks. I can't wait for David to share it with them. Thanks INETA!

I will see everyone on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 6:00pm for this terrific presentation!