Microsoft releases IT Preview of SharePoint 2016

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced their vision, strategy, timeline and investment in three major areas: familiar and intuitive user experiences, cloud-inspired infrastructure with hybrid at the core and robust security and compliance for SharePoint Server 2016. On that track, Microsoft released the SharePoint Server 2016 "IT Preview" version, which offers a first look at the various improvements in the upcoming version of SharePoint. It includes Integration of cloud services with on-premises with converged codebase between SharePoint on-premises and cloud. SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview has been designed, developed, and tested with the Microsoft Software as a Service (SaaS) strategy at its core.

What’s new?

For End user:  In addition to a consistent cross-screen experience, SharePoint Server 2016 provides the latest technologies and standards for mobile push, information synchronization, responsive design and touch mobile experience.

IT Pros: SharePoint Server 2016 provides new role based configuration wizard and capabilities that enable device-specific targeting of content. This feature brings flexibility in terms of being able to use SharePoint on various hardware shapes, sizes, and capabilities based on the different roles that you have.  The most welcome improvement is minimal patches with Zero Downtime.

Developer: Developers can now extend applications across on-premises and Office 365 as Office 365 API is back to SharePoint Server 2016 on premises. Developer can create applications using common consent, subscription apps and a number of different capabilities that they’re familiar within the cloud. “Build once and deploy twice” feature enables developers to build one application and deploy on both SharePoint online and on-premises.

To get started, download the preview

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48712

For more information about the new features, please refer to the following articles

https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/24/announcing-availability-of-sharepoint-server-2016-it-preview-and-cloud-hybrid-search/

http://en.share-gate.com/blog/whats-new-in-sharepoint-201

Create a common visual studio project to develop different versions of SharePoint solutions

Introduction

The following sample is to illustrate how to create a common visual studio project to develop different versions of SharePoint solutions. In some case we may need to develop a solution that would to be deployed in different versions of SharePoint. In this article we discuss about developing a common solution using Visual studio that can run for both SharePoint 2010 and 2013.

Steps

1.      Launch Visual Studio 2012 from a machine where SharePoint 2010 is installed

2.      Click New project

3.      Select .NET Framework 3.5 and select SharePoint 2010 – Empty Project

4.      Provide the name, solution name and click Ok

5.      In SharePoint Customization Wizard, provide the local SharePoint web application URL and deploy as farm solution

6.      Click Solutions Configuration drop down and select Configuration Manager

7.      Make sure the Solution has 4 configurations Debug_SP2010, Release_SP2010, Debug_SP2013 and Release_SP2013. Copy settings from respective modes.

All added configurations

8.      Right click the Project and Select properties.

9.      Select Build section, select “Debug_SP2010” from Configuration.

10.   Enter the value as “SP2010” for “Conditional Compilation Symbols” field. Give the same value for “Release_SP2010” also. Similarly provide “SP2013” for “Debug_SP2013” and “Release_SP2013” configurations.

11.   Right click the project and create a folders to store the assembly files of both the versions in respective folders.

12.   Right click the project and click unload project

13.   Right click the project again and click Edit project file

14.   Add <TargetFrameworkVersion>v3.5</TargetFrameworkVersion> under <PropertyGroup></PropertyGroup> for both Debug_2010 and Release_2010 configurations. Also add

<TargetFrameworkVersion>v4.5</TargetFrameworkVersion> for both Debug_2013 and Release_2013 configurations

15.   Add Reference to the appropriate assemblies to load from respective folders during compilation.

16.   Add all required artifacts to the project and compile/build by setting the configuration manager to appropriate build version to get respective SharePoint solutions.

The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel

Scenario:

Using SAML Authentication in SharePoint 2013 and was trying to access a service application from SSL enabled Portal.

Exported the service application security certificate and imported into SharePoint Trusted Root Certificate authority

Problem:

Following is the error message when trying to connect to service application from SharePoint.

“The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel”.

Resolution:

The imported certificate is having some validation error. The problem was incorrect host name used in certificates.

We were accessing the URL using the IP and the certificate is using the server name as ip-AC1F08ED. Either we should have service application URL with fully qualified domain name or the certificate issue should point to the server IP.

Following error in event viewer.