So that's what the Host-Only Adapter is used for! (Windows Phone SDK VM challenge)

Preparing for a talk this Saturday at Grand Rapids DevDays, I wanted to demo the new capabilities for mobile development with SharePoint 2013.  The Visual Studio tooling (alas, sorry MS people, but I have one of those fruit company phones and I like it!) has a good story for Windows Phone, but for the rest of us?  Another story - white paper forthcoming.

For Windows Phone development, here's the big kicker: can't use that Phone emulator virtualized.  Nope, nada, nil, ixnay, no can do.  The Windows 8 SDK requires hardware virtualization with SLAT support - great on physical iron but not virtual iron, so that's right out.  With the Phone 7.1 SDK, same issue - first there's a big warning about not having a compatible GPU, then the phone emulator would continuously reboot to the OS and my app never came up.

So...this gets us to the point of this post, what's a virtualization developer to do?  Ever notice in VirtualBox you have a bunch of choices for networking?

I've been using VirtualBox since I needed x64 support & Virtual-PC just couldn't do it...I've used NAT, Bridged, Internal Network...but Host-only adapter?  What the heck is that for?  Out of the box it has an IP address of 192.168.1.56, what good is that?

Well, turns out this is your way in from the host to your guest internal network.  I assigned an IP in the range of my guests, assigned the guest DNS and default router, changed the VM's to use Host-only Adapter instead of Internal Network, and look at that, I'm in!  The host is not part of my domain but no worries, I need to use Forms Based Authentication anyway for my mobile testing, so we're good to go.

The only other change is to add in entries to the Hosts file on the host for the DNS entries you'll need.  I wasn't able to resolve the hosts values otherwise, and no farm in it.

I'm installing the SDK 8.0 now on my Windows 8 VM with Visual Studio 2012...got a feeling this will work, I'll let you know.

Update: Strike One.  SDK 8.0 enables Hyper-V.  Not a good thing for running VirtualBox VMs.  And there can be only one hypervisor - if Hyper-V is enabled then VirtualBox can't run.  Uninstalling SDK 8.0 and VS 2012, going back to VS2010 and let's hope SDK 7.1 behaves better.

Update: Strike Two and probably three...the good news is I can start up Visual Studio 2010, connect to my SharePoint guest VMs, get list data, prepare my app, but then when I start up the emulator - wham!  There go the VMs.  Seems the VS2010 Windows Phone Emulator is also using the same virtualization VirtualBox needs, and so it knocks out my VirtualBox VMs.  I guess the answer will be to go to Hyper-V with the SDK 8.0 version, but I won't get to that til next week.  Oh well!

SharePoint Foundation 2013 Service Applications list

Below is a screen capture of the set of service applications available with SharePoint Foundation 2013:

Available in Foundation are:

• App Management Service - used for the new Apps feature set of SharePoint 2013
• Business Data Connectivity Service - get at that external data through external list definitions
• Secure Store Service - store credentials and other data centrally and with encryption
• Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service App - created with the farm
• Security Token Service Application - used for authentication.

Here's the list of services available on the server - including SharePoint Server Search:

Here the list is:

• App Management Service
• Business Data Connectivity Service
• Central Administration
• Claims to Windows Token Service
• Distributed Cache
• Lotus Notes Connector
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming E-Mail
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Settings Service
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Workflow Timer Service
• Request Management
• Search Host Controller Service
• Search Query and Site Settings Service
• Secure Store Service
• SharePoint Server Search

Plenty more when you enable Standard and Enterprise features, but I was trying to find out specifically what we get with Foundation.

VirtualBox - SetHDUUID COM error

Quick tip in case you have the same issue.  I use VirtualBox as my server virtualization tool - it's a bit nicer on the laptop than running Hyper-V, but that's a whole other discussion!  With VirtualBox, when you set up a template VHD image, to use that image for a new virtual server, you need to assign a unique ID to the VHD image.

Usually, no problem.  VirtualBox has two ways to do this, either the CloneHD command or a SetHDUUID command:

c:\program files\oracle\virtualbox\vboxmanage internalcommands sethduuid

So what's the problem?  I had opened up a command prompt, entered in these commands, but got an error back that the VirtualBox COM server was not running:

VBoxManage.exe: error: Failed to create the VirtualBox object!
VBoxManage.exe: error: Code CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE (0x80080005) - Server execu
tion failed (extended info not available)
VBoxManage.exe: error: Most likely, the VirtualBox COM server is not running or
failed to start.

The solution?  Since this is an admin sort of thing to do I had opened up the command prompt as administrator (Windows 8 - type in CMD, right click Command Prompt, choose Run as Administrator)...and apparently that was the wrong answer!  Open up a regular ol' Command Prompt window and the command goes through just fine.

I'm sure this is a permissions issue - next slow rainy day I'll crack open ProcessMonitor and see exactly what VboxManage can't grab, but for now we're good to go.

Test Lab Guides for SP2013

Looking for some help setting up your SharePoint 2013 environment?  Microsoft's published a series of guides to walk you through the process of setting up a 3-tier farm, then once you have that done, you can configure Claims, Forms Based Authentication, setting up an intranet, and enabling social features:

Three-Tier Farm Configuration

SAML-based Claims Authentication with SharePoint 2013

Forms-Based Authentication

Intranet Collaboration with SP2013

Demonstrate Social Features for SP2013

Full details on the test lab guides:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12409.sharepoint-server-2013-test-lab.aspx

Setting up Forms-Based Authentication now to get my mobile development environment ready for demo!