Itchy Hand on Kerberos Service

I was setting up a demo for a talk today. Normally my VPC environment will be 1 Domain Controller (DC) and another server for SharePoint and Visual Studio.

Then out of sudden I went to disable the Kerberos service on my DC just to avoid the startup error created by Kerberos service. Note: VPC start up is slower and for DC, normally Kerberos service startup will timeout but eventually it will get started.

Without Kerberos, I still managed to sign in to my SharePoint VPC with no problem whatsoever. It is until I start developing a VS2008 SharePoint Workflow project, then I realize the IIS restart fails to response until VS2008 returns a SharePoint Server not found error.

It took me a few hours to find out what happen until I check my event logs and realize I notice my SharePoint app pool user try to start certain services but hit authentication error. This is when I realize it must have something to do with the Kerberos service being disabled.

Ta! Ta! Once the Kerberos service got started, everything returns to normal and my day got saved!

.NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta out in the wild.

Visual Studio 2008 together with .NET 3.5 was released about 1/2 year ago. However there are a host of planned features not able to make it to the release, for example:

• ASP.NET 3.5 Enhancement Features
  • ASP.NET MVC (Model-View-Controller) Frameowrk
  • ADO.NET Data Service
  • Dynamic Data
  • Entity Framework
• SQL Server 2008 CTP support
• and more! Read up Scott Guthrie’s blog post.

.NET Client Profile

Then not long ago I got news that another new .NET features will make it to this SP1 release which is the .NET 3.5 Client Profile. Well, Windows Vista comes with .NET 3.0 but the world out there is mostly running Windows XP which does not have any.NET Framework installed at all! (unless you are  a geek head). The .NET Framework 3.5 Client Profile (BETA) contains a subset of features contained in the full installation of the .NET Framework. The subset of features are the Common Language Runtime, ClickOnce, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation. Hollay!! Consider the fact that full .NET 3.5 requires .NET 2.0 and 3.0 installed then those 2 package already take up >100mb of downloads. You can check out Scott Guthrie’s blog here. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/19/net-3-5-client-product-roadmap.aspx

Web Install Only

The Beta bits is available as a web install but there was ways for you to download everything and save them locally. Check out this knowledge base article. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945140

Update Details

There are a few KB articles out there listing down all the changes

1. VSTO http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949258  | http://blogs.msdn.com/vsto/
2. Visual Studio Team System http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951845
3. C# http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950263
4. Visual Basic http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950264
5. ASP.NET/Visual Web Developer http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950261
6. .NET Framework http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951847

Download here!

You can download the bits here

• VS 2008 SP1 Beta VS90sp1-KB945140-ENU.exe
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta dotNetFx35setup.exe