Today, Chris came to me with one of those WTF issues… He is developing a SharePoint application which communicates with WCF services hosted in a separate IIS Web Site on the same physical machine.  Both websites are bound to the same IP Address and are using host headers to distinguish themselves. Also, both Web Sites disallow anonymous access and enforce Windows Authentication.  Chris was working on deploying his services and invoking them from the SharePoint site.  He first tested the services from his local dev machine and everything worked.  When he published the code to the SharePoint instance on server the code was failing with a HTTP 401.1 error.  Invalid credentials…

To get the root of the problem we created a simple HTML file and placed it in the root of the directory.  We were still getting the same error.  The next step was to enable logging in IIS which provided us with a little more information, including the exact error 401.1 / 2148074252.  After some head scratching and googling, we ran across this knowledge base article KB896861.  A quick modification to the registry, a reset and we were back in business. 

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Catalyst Software Solutions is a member of the International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners (IAMCP) and we are active in events within the Chicago-land area.  The IAMCP is a community of partners who work together and with Microsoft to facilitate mutual growth and business development among partners.

Last month they asked if anyone would be willing to give a presentation on the new features of Windows Server 2008.  I took the challenge and created a presentation on the two features that I feel have the greatest impact.  My two points of focus where Hyper-V virtualization and IIS7.  My boss, Ken, added to ‘Green IT’ topic to the presentation which I had completely skipped over.  Green IT is becoming a strong driver in the IT community and I am glad he suggested it.

Hyper-V

We have been using virtualization at Catalyst for about 3 years and we have found it to be a great technology for both production infrastructure and development scenarios.  We are currently running 3 VM hosts with roughly 15 guest OSs using Virtual Server 2005 R2 and are looking forward to upgrading to Hyper-V and eliminating the poor web based configuration user interface.

IIS7

I have been running IIS7 under Vista for a long time and couldn’t wait to be able to actually deploy web applications to production servers under IIS7.  Microsoft did a good job of taunting the developer community for over a year before this finally became a reality.

Presentation

Here is the power presentation I used on 3/18/2008.  A majority of the slides are ones that I found on the Ready-To-Go campaign web site. The presentation went about 70 minutes with an additional 10-15 minutes of Q&A afterwards.  Overall people liked the presentation and felt it did a good job of describing the business and technical value of Windows Server 2008.

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