Haiku #116

[NextHop_Team]

First published on TECHNET on May 23, 2011

If you can't trust your

Application then who can

You trust? Trusted apps.

Just to bring a little closure to our continuing saga concerning the weather here in the Seattle area, we're happy to report that last Friday the temperature did, indeed hit 70 degrees Fahrenheit. That was pretty exciting, although our excitement was tempered a bit by the fact that, thanks to a 70 degree day on Thursday, Fairbanks, AK got to 70 degrees before we did.

Yes: Fairbanks, Alaska .

At any rate, sometime in the late afternoon on Friday we hit 70 degrees; fortunately for all of us here in this area, by 4:30 PM the clouds had already started rolling in and the temperature mercifully began to drop. Saturday we had a high of 56, and Sunday a high of 60 degrees. At that point, we could all breathe a sigh of relief.

And in case you're wondering, yes, the only thing that people in Seattle like more than complaining about the rotten weather we're having is this: complaining about any good weather we might have. In this part of the country, we complain about it being cold and then, as soon as the temperature climbs above 70, we start complaining about it being too hot. If it rains for 10 straight days we complain about that, but if it doesn't rain on the 11 ^th day we start saying things like, "We really could use a little rain." If you're one of those who think that people who live in the Seattle area are weird, well, you're absolutely right.

Note . A couple years ago, the temperature here actually hit 100 degrees. The author of today's haiku walked down to a park on Lake Washington, a park that is usually overflowing with people. That day the park was completely deserted: it was apparently too hot to go swimming. There weren't even any cars out on the road: it was apparently too hot to drive an air-conditioned car.

Did we mention that people in the Seattle area are weird?

The current temperature here in Redmond is 51 degrees, which means we can kick back, relax, and do what we do best … well, OK, we couldn't actually come up with anything that we do best. So let's just talk about the CsTrustedApplication cmdlets ( Get-CsTrustedApplication , New-CsTrustedApplication , Remove-CsTrustedApplication , and Set-CsTrustedApplication ) instead.

To tell you the truth, we had a bit of an ulterior motive in choosing to discuss the CsTrustedApplication cmdlets. Late last week we received an email telling us that one of our examples was wrong, that we didn't specify a valid Identity for a trusted application. As it turned out, however, it wasn't one of our examples that was wrong, it was actually an example written by the Exchange team. So does that mean we're writing this article simply so we can gloat a little at the misfortune of the Exchange team and, while we're at it, show off our knowledge of trusted applications? You bet that's why we – um, no, of course not.

That never even occurred to us.

At any rate, a trusted application is an application that isn't part of Microsoft Lync Server 2010, but has been given a trusted status that allows it to run as though it was a built-in component of Lync Server. We should note that you can't just set up any old application as a trusted application: it has to be something that was written specifically to work with Lync Server. But assuming that you have such an application, here's how you can give it trusted status:

New-CsTrustedApplication -ApplicationId FabrikamMessagingApplication -TrustedApplicationPoolFqdn TrustPool.litwareinc.com -Port 6000

Two important things to keep in mind when creating a new trusted application: First, the TrustedApplicationPoolFqdn must point to a, well, trusted application pool. That's not necessarily the same thing as your Registrar pools; instead, it's something you need to create using the New-CsTrustedApplicationPool cmdlet. If you aren't sure if you even have any trusted application pools, try running this command:

Get-CsTrustedApplicationPool

Second, the ApplicationID parameter specifies the name of the trusted application. This is where the Exchange team went wrong. In their documentation, they gave the following as an example of an ApplicationID:

Outlook Web App

What's wrong with that? That's an easy one (well, for us it's an easy one): you can't have blank spaces in the ApplicationID. Instead, you need to use an ApplicationID like this one:

OutlookWebApp

Why can't you use blank spaces? Well, when you create a trusted application, Lync Server constructs an Identity consisting of three parts:

· The fully qualified domain name of the trusted application pool.

· The string value /urn:application: .

· The ApplicationID.

If you include a blank space in the ApplicationID, that results in an invalid URI:

trustpool.litwareinc.com/urn:application:outlook web app

That's just not going to work. Instead, you need a URI that doesn't have any blank spaces:

trustpool.litwareinc.com/urn:application:outlookwebapp

That URI will work.

Oh, and here's another little tip: after you create a new trusted application, you might need to run the Enable-CsTopology cmdlet in order to get that new application incorporated into your Lync Server topology. How hard is that going to be? Well, not too terribly hard:

Enable-CsTopology

As long as we're on the subject, we might also mention that the Get-CsTrustedApplication cmdlet provides a number of options that make it easy for you to retrieve the trusted application (or applications) that you're most interested in. If you want to, you can specify the entire Identity when trying to retrieve information about an application:

Get-CsTrustedApplication –Identity trustpool.litwareinc.com/urn:application:outlookwebapp

If you don't like doing all that typing, however, you can specify the ApplicationID and the trusted application pool separately, like so:

Get-CsTrustedApplication –ApplicationID outlookwebapp –TrustedApplicationPoolFqdn trustpool.litwareinc.com

That's a little bit less typing, especially if you don't spell out all the parameter names:

Get-CsTrustedApplication –A outlookwebapp –T trustpool.litwareinc.com

Or just use the Filter parameter and a couple of wildcards, like so:

Get-CsTrustedApplication –Filter "*outlook*"

That's pretty much all you need to know to get started using the CsTrustedApplication cmdlets. And here's pretty much all you need to know about the upcoming weather in Seattle:

Date	Predicted High Temperature
5/24/2011	65
5/25/2011	59
5/26/2011	55
5/27/2011	56
5/28/2011	56
5/29/2011	58
5/30/2011	58
5/31/2011	62

Don't you just love spring?