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A while ago I wrote about chocolatey and how to install a lot tools automatically. Thats especially handy if you have to set up a new environment for SharePoint 2013 RTM… Now even more Today and yesterday I added two more packages - two tools that I always use and now I can add them in my scripted setup: ULSViewer and CKSDEV (Server) CKSDev The Visual Studio Extension is installed if you have a Visual Studio 2010 or 2012 installed.

Icon madness I uploaded a PDF to SharePoint 2013 and noticed that the PDD icon is not the official and recognizable Adobe PDF icon. In this article I will tell you how to replace the SharePoint 2013 PDF icon. OOTB PDF icon from SharePoint 2013 Is it a document with a belt or what ? Nevermind I don’t like it and I am very certain that most of the users out there do not recognize the icon – and that is the main purpose of the icon right?

Okay I am in love with a new tool called chocolatey – its a package manager like “apt-get” for windows systems based on the very awesome nuget – and this neat piece of software can install other software. Its very easy to add software or packages and there are even galleries (340 packages in the main gallery yet) or feeds where you get a good start. Chocolatey So installation of this package manager must be very complicated….

Writing SharePoint 2013 feels very new to me, but I created my first Demo environment and tried to set up search. What needs to be done? 14 steps for a simple Search Topology - 1 powershell can do them all. Create a Service Application Pool for the Search Service Application (15-22) Create a Search Service Application (22-28) Create a Search Service Application Proxy (30-36) Get the current Search Instance (38) Save the current Search Topology for later use (39) Create a new Search Topology (40) Create all the Search Components (Analytics- , Content Processing, Query Processing, Crawler-, Admin Component) (42-46) Remove the Index-Folder and recreate it (50-51) Create a new Index Component (53) Activate the new Topology (56) Call the method synchronize on the old topology - this errors but forces an update on the old topology object (59) The “forced updated” Topology object becomes inactive and can be deleted.

Last day at TechEd – today it will be an asp.net-ish day! First Session: Microsoft ASP.NET and the Realtime Web (Brady Gaster) This gotta be SignalR – hopefully with cool demos. Actually they forgot the SignalR part in the title, the whole thing is about it. Okay, first demo is SignalR with Kinect. Kinect detects a person, takes a picture, the picture is uploaded to azure and the link to the picture is pushed to “subscribed”, open browser.

Third day at TechEd, not getting more sleep here but coffee keeps us going! The delegate party was in the AJAX Amsterdam soccer arena – private public viewing style. First Session: Best Practices for Building Your Website for Scale with Microsoft SharePoint 2012 (Spencer Harbar, @harbars) At first I thought “Why isnt he talking about User Profiles, Sync or something – he is Mr. UserProfiles for me. Key messages: Capacity Planning, Architect Scale, Pilot & Test, Deploy, Monitor & Validate, and repeat.

Second day at Teched. Keynote: Windows 8 Lots of different features of the new Windows 8 are shown. Windows 2 GO demo was cool – you can boot an entire Windows from usb 3.0 stick. If you unplug the stick you have 60 seconds to replug it and everything continues to work. First Session: Introducing the New Visual Studio 2012 Unit Testing Experience (Peter Provost) Peter showed some new features of the new Visual Studio – looks great.

Yesterday was the 180th day without problems on my DEV/DEMO environment – until my eval expired without noticeable warning ahead. The whole thing just locked down and of course my SharePoint doesn’t like that: Great, just great. Because Alegri is a Microsoft Partner, we do have valid SQL Server 2012 codes – so I asked for one, received one and tried to upgrade my license from EVAL to ENTERPRISE. So I started the installer of R0, clicked on the “change license” link entered the code – everthing ran green.

I will blog a bit about the sessions and stuff I saw at TechEd in Amsterdam – all from the perspective of a SharePoint guy. Keynote (Brad Anderson) Its all about cloud and virtualization. Broad coverage of all the new stuff, quite like the new Visual Studio features (List definition builder integrated, wondering how it will work with taxonomy fields) First session: What’s new in Windows Azure (Scott Guthrie) Provisioning of Azure virtual machines with a new and lean HTML5 web interface – metro styled of course.

I uploaded my first video to youtube today: Apparently the captions were lost during the upload, next time I will explain a bit more 🙂 Maybe next weekend I add some code examples and further details.