Adventures in MS land

I’ve spent the last couple of days fiddling around with Windows Server 2003, Active Directory and SharePoint Portal Server.

Observation #1: It helps to have multiple computers, or alternatively a powerful machine with a virtualization environment like vmware or VirtualPC.

Observation #2: Installing/uninstalling Active Directory (“dcpromo”) changes the security settings on your files, which breaks ASP.NET due to access violations in C:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv1.1.4322Temporary ASP.NET Files. You can fix this by uninstalling and re-installing ASP.NET in Start -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Add/Remove Windows Components.

Observation #3: There is a shiny new version of SharePoint Portal Server here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/sharepoint/download.asp. This version is “Beta 2 Technical Refresh”, which is newer than the “Beta 2” version on our MSDN dvds.