Tag Archives: CloudShare

Cloud Development for Community Projects

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How CloudShare has enabled me to contribute to SharePoint community projects

Until recently if you wanted to contribute to an open source or community-based software project in your spare / volunteer time it often meant having to build a full-scale software development environment on your home / personal computer, including substantial CPU cores / RAM / disk hardware and numerous software licenses, with a potential cost of thousands of dollars. Fortunately the recent rapid growth in cloud-based IaaS / PaaS offerings such as CloudShare, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to name but a few, has dramatically changed this situation. Now the software hobbyist or software engineering professional volunteering their time can contribute to nearly any project with no more equipment than a modern web browser.

These cloud-based IaaS / PaaS offerings are a huge boon especially for community projects targeting enterprise software systems such as Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Both SharePoint Server 2013 and the upcoming 2016 versions have hardware requirements that generally exceeded the specs of most home office computer equipment, for example a single server farm with all services requires 24GB RAM. Furthermore, when your focus is on rapidly enhancing a community project then the time and effort to install, configure, tune, and patch server software such as the operating system, database server, and SharePoint Server is an overhead cost that does not directly advance the project.

Why CloudShare?

Two important consideration when I’m volunteering my spare time on an open source or community project are:

  • Ready availability of a pre-configured virtual machine suited to the community project’s technology stack – so I don’t have to spend hours or days building up a standard development environment before I can even begin making my volunteer contribution
  • Rapid provisioning and resumption of the virtual machine – which allows me to eke out useful contributions in spare moments of 20-30 minutes at a time

For my cloud-based custom software development platform I chose the CloudShare Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product because it offers the best fit for me as an independent software developer.

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Bulk Provision User Profiles in a CloudShare SharePoint VM for Demo/Test Scenarios

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A CloudShare hosted environment is a great way to quickly and easily provision virtual machines for demo and testing. In order to present realistic demo and test scenarios you will want a variety of Active Directory user accounts and SharePoint user profiles including My Sites profile information.

A brand new CloudShare environment virtual machine comes with only a few system accounts defined, eg Administrator. You can certainly develop and provision additional user accounts and profiles yourself, along with the scripts to repeat the provisioning each time your environment is refreshed. However, this will take time and effort, which you would probably rather spend on your core business activities. So why not leverage and re-purpose a ready-built alternative from Microsoft.

Microsoft publishes “content packs” to provision several of its popular demo environments (WingTip, etc) that you may have seen at the SharePoint Conference and in other training and demo presentations. These content packs generally include all the installers, scripts, and user accounts data files necessary to fully automate deployment, configuration and provisioning of the various bits of server infrastructure.

In our case we have the server infrastructure already deployed and configured thanks to CloudShare. So we are going to cherry pick out of the content packs just what is necessary to provision a predefined set of user accounts into Active Directory and user profiles into SharePoint. This will save us quite a bit of time over developing similar capability from scratch.

Before starting, download the required content packs from CodePlex. From the SharePoint 2013 Business Intelligence Demo Builds with SQL Server 2012 SP1 CodePlex project,

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download the following two content packs and extract their zip archives:

Don’t be confused by the name of this CodePlex project. The various content packs in this project can be used somewhat independently of one another, for our purpose to provision Active Directory user accounts and SharePoint user profiles in a CloudShare environment SharePoint farm.

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Presenting at the Ottawa IT Community on Thu, Nov 7 at 5:45pm

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Come out to hear me present at the Ottawa IT Community on Thursday, November 7th at 5:45pm on the topic of “Cloud-based development for .NET / SharePoint using CloudShare and Team Foundation Service.”

Cloud-based developer environments are a hot topic these days. Why bother hosting, managing and licensing dev project VMs and software yourself when they are often only required for a few months. Explore the possibilities with CloudShare for your .NET / SharePoint development environment and Team Foundation Service for your TFS infrastructure.

CloudShare is offering a door prize for this event: a free one (1) year subscription for an 8GB environment. Be sure to attend for your chance to win.

The presentation will take place at the Microsoft Canada office in Ottawa at 100 Queen Street, Suite 500.

Presenting at the Microsoft Federal SharePoint User Group in Ottawa on Tue, Sept 24 at 5pm

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Come out to hear me present at the Microsoft Federal SharePoint User Group in Ottawa this coming Tuesday, September 24 at 5pm on the topic of “Cloud-based development for SharePoint / .NET using CloudShare and Team Foundation Service.”

Cloud-based platform and software environments are a hot topic these days. Why bother hosting, managing and licensing VMs and software for your development projects and test labs when the VMs are often only required for a few months or a year. Explore the possibilities with CloudShare for your SharePoint 2013 development environment and tools and Team Foundation Service for your source control and ALM infrastructure. We will examine the types of environments and virtual machine templates available and how to create your own custom templates. We will demonstrate how to spin up, configure and manage a SharePoint 2013 development virtual machine, and how to collaborate in a team environment, both with active collaborators who fully control the SharePoint VM and more passive collaborators who are sent their own private snapshot of the SharePoint VM.

The presentation will take place at the Microsoft Canada office in Ottawa at 100 Queen Street, Suite 500. Refreshments and pizza will be provided.