RE: Secure Token Service Basics

Just what is an STS anyway:

A Security Token Service (STS) is the plumbing that builds, signs, and issues security tokens using the interoperable protocols.

 

Difference between Active STS and Passive STS:

 

	Active STS mode	Passive STS mode
Definition(sort of)	In Active Federation your Relying Party (RP) has its login window (web page) and asks the STS for security token. "Active" to anything capable of using WS-Trust which is the protocol you use to obtain a token from an STS.	Passive Federation is when Relying Party (RP) does not have a login page and redirected to the login page located on STS. Since Web browsers cannot directly make SOAP calls they dumbly redirect to an STS and get the tokens.
Examples	Web Services/WCF	web applications(ASP.NET)
Hosting	Self-hosted / IIS	IIS/or any web server.
What protocol is involved?	WS-Trust protocol	WS-Federation passive protocol.   The lack of SOAP capabilities forced some creative solution for "emulating" WS-Trust on top of GET, POST and cookies: the result is the above mentioned dance of redirects, where the browser goes back & forth between previously established addresses on the resource and requestor domains and using cookies for communicating authentication information. THIS is what is meant by passive federation.

 

 

 

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbertocci/archive/2008/06/05/active-passive-and-passive-aggressive.aspx

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View PropertyBag using SharePoint Designer

The Property Bag Settings can store any metadata as Key-Value pairs such as connection strings, server names, file paths, and other miscellaneous settings needed by your SharePoint application.

In SharePoint Designer: To view the property bag. Go to Site -> Site Settings. Then click on the Parameters tab (not sure why they didn't just call it Property Bag). On this tab, you can see the values of all of your custom property bag values (it doesn't show anything built-in). If you need to, you can also modify and remove values from the property bag here. Hopefully this tip is useful sometime in the future when you need to check the values of your property bag. It sure beats the alternative of writing code to display it or firing up the debugger.

There is also a CodePlex project that adds a page in central admin to set the property bag at various levels(server,farm, webapp, site collection)
http://pbs.codeplex.com/
This one for SP2010:
http://pbs2010.codeplex.com/

Cancel a blocked SharePoint Jobs

If a SharePoint solution deployment fails, yet the timer job is created and not running, you will be unable to redeploy or retract the solution. The retract / deploy buttons will not be present in Central Admin and stsadm will declare that a "deployment or retraction is already under way for the solution". You can find yourself in this state if the “Windows SharePoint Services Administration” service is stopped when you first attempt to deploy, but even after you realise your mistake and start that service, the solution deployment is still stuck.
The answer is hidden in that long list of stsadm operations:
use the stsadm -o enumdeployments to get a list of running jobs and the id's and then use the
stsadm –o canceldeployment –id

This command will cancel the timer job that is meant to deploy the solution. Once it has been cleared, you can deploy successfully. Obtain the id parameter from the url to the appropriate deployment timer job in the Operations -> Timer Job Definitions page