My Sharepoint Musings

One of those moments where your heart drops : Your using CI on a remote hosting service (like AppHarbor) and your build fails. You look into the fail reason and find out it is because you updated the packages in your build. Wait, my update from nuGet broke everything?! Wtf?! The error looks something like this, putting it in here for search engine's : Build started 6/10/2013 12:30:20 AM. 1>Project "D:\temp\xly5bsff.qvp\input\.sln" on node 1 (default targets). 1>ValidateSolutionConfiguration: Building solution configuration "Release|Any CPU". 1>Project "D:\temp\xly5bsff.qvp\input\.sln" (1) is building "D:\temp\xly5bsff.qvp\input\\.csproj" (2) on node 1 (default targets). 2>D:\temp\xly5bsff.qvp\input\\.csproj(880,3): error MSB4019: The imported project "D:\temp\xly5bsff.qvp\input\packages\Microsoft.Bcl.Build.1.0.7\tools\Microsoft.Bcl.Build.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in th...

Been a while since i last updated my blog -- and i know, most people hate the "I am coming back" blog posts that people put up, so sorry for that in advance :) I have had some life changes in the past year - left a job, started a new one, started consulting, moved across the nation, been to several weddings, moved in with the girlfriend, ect. Now that it has all settled down i figure it is a good time to start blogging again! Now the direction of this blog will be changing a little bit. A departure from the sharepoint side of things for a little bit and into Project Server modifications and changes and answers to questions I have had to look up or figure out myself many times over now.  In the past 6 months i jumped into a new job and hit the ground running as they were freshly deploying project server 2010, and the consulting company they brought in simply did not meet the requirements they asked for by the time they left.   I have had the pleasure of deep-div...

My new laptop, 2xxxx series HP Envy 17 3D has a small problem if you update the ATI graphics drivers, namely: the Brightness hot keys stop working. What to do? Well step in www.Notebookreview.com forums, and the HP Envy 17 (2xxx) series Owners Lounge and a work-around pointed out by Fiver5- Fiver5 pointed me to a display brightness gadget over at edgylogic - Who happen to also share his source code for his console application, this combined together with AutoHotKey , and we have brightness functions working again! Woot! But now for the point of my post - tweaking! The console application allows you to set the brightness value of the screen with a command line argument, but does not allow you to increment up and down automatically... Pretty simple fix, just need to add two command line arguments to the console application, and then change the window behavior to not display the console when the application is launched: Here's the additions to the original code, not the clea...

This is more of a "Coming soon" than it is a detailed post on my next post here. I am going to be making a series post on my experiences trying to solve a problem that I should not have had to solve in the first place: Getting an auto-generated table of contents for sharepoint 2010 Enterprise Wiki Sites. The journey is quite a tale, everything from searching the myriad of solution providers to the scouring the deepest depths of codeplex. Ok maybe not that interesting but it was very puzzling that i could not find a solution to a very basic wiki function. One that should be already included in sharepoint enterprise wiki's to start with! The solution i will be posting about isn't the one i am putting into production but one people can make themselves quickly and easily. It uses JQuery and a plug in, and then some sandbox code to deploy it to a site, and another quick one to put JQuery onto your server farm (I may just point you to smarttools.jquery solution instead how...

Just a FYI since no one knew this from what i can tell already: If you are enabling BCM (Backwards Compatibility Mode) for project 2007 to connect to Project Server 2010, there are a few things you should know first. Right off the bat, clients have to be updated to Service Pack 2 . Next, when your setting up your project server, Note this key fact I could not find anywhere, and did not get hint about in the technet forms when i posted about my problems: You CAN NOT use Claims based authentication on your web application that is hosting Project Server 2010. The 2007 Client will not connect to the server. The 2010 client will connect with no problems. Quick and dirty, hope that helps everyone!

I'v had this solution for a little while now but never wrote it down anywhere for people to see. Here is the situation: In a site collection, you make a new list/document library in any sub-site or the main website. You then add a new item/document to the folder, and then attempt to edit the item You then see something along the lines of "Access Denied" , even if you are on the system account. This happens with every new list you create on any site or subsite. Your problem is a corrupted field definition at the site collection level. Specifically the "Effective Permissions Mask" is missing an attribute in it's xml scheme - RenderXMLUsingPattern="TRUE" The fix comes in 3 steps: 1. Update your server to the most recent cumulative update package (Service pack 2 or greater). You can get more information about this from the Sharepoint team blog post on SP2 . Included in SP2 is a hotfix that prevents this from occurring ever again on any other site co...

So i have been slacking lately on updating this blog and well, i decided to resolve that now! So today i had an error with an application template on my micrsoft sharepoint moss 2007 server. This came up when i tried to resolve an issue in the bug tracking site template provided by microsoft. Every time i clicked on the yellow button, i got the following error: The resource object with key 'ResolveBugPageTitle' was not found." After some looking around the community, i found this resolution worked perfectly for me: Just type stsadm -o copyappbincontent You do not even need to retract and rebuild sites effected by the problem, after typing the copy command everything starts to work again! Hope this helps other sharepointers!

Been waiting on it all day, service pack 2 download for sharepoint office servers: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970358/ Direct download page link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=B7816D90-5FC6-4347-89B0-A80DEB27A082&displaylang=en I have a test farm set up for this already, it's a mirror of my current farm. Lets see what it breaks! Found the WSS 3.0 Links now as well: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953338 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=79BADA82-C13F-44C1-BDC1-D0447337051B&displaylang=en *update* Project Server: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953334 List of all 2007 Service Pack 2 updates: http://support.microsoft.com/smarterror/default.aspx?spid=global&query=kb%20968170

Why sharepoint, why. Ok so it turns out that the navigation inside of sharepoint, which uses ASP:Menu to generate it's code, makes a ton of tables and is generally a mess to deal with. But it is nice to try to keep things as much out of the box as possible so i left it alone and used the menu. Untill i tried to add divs to the page. The sharepoint menu, for the life of me, i could not force to go above my divs on my webpages. I encased it in a div, set it to 5, 9999, 255, 13 nothing! Changed the css code so it was all over 10, still nothing. Then google chrome came to the rescue, it told me that the div that holds the flyout menu's z-index was set to 1, inline. Inline?! i check the code, nope, i do not see that it is set, there isn't even any style="" tag at all. Then i realized, it was the javascript. I never did bother to fully trace it but in sharepoint's javascript, it changes the div's z-index to be 1. No matter what you do, it will be changed to 1, a...

Heart attack. Our old sharepoint server, i randomly visited a page that is in the proccess of being migrated over and i got this error on all of the webparts: Web Part Error: One of the properties of the Web Part has an incorrect format. Windows SharePoint Services cannot deserialize the Web Part. Check the format of the properties and try again. Quick google searches gave me a ms fix, that didn't work, then it hit me. I can actually just do a iisreset on it and be fine. So i did, reloaded the webpage, and everything worked fine again. Whew

So up till now at my new job, i have been by far more concerned with making sure my sharepoint farm has 100% uptime, is stable, and well working. Now that things are actually configured correctly (for the most part) and are stable i am looking at how much the sever is being used, and how fast it is. What i have found actually shocked me a little, and i have found a few bumps along the road. I know you thinking, "hey doesn't sharepoint have built in usage logs?" Yes, it does. Does it provide alot of information? No. Does it always work the way it is suppose to? Nooooooo. My most recent experience has been with our new landing page push out. Avg hit was in the multiple 1,000 loads perday for the first week. When i noticed this pattern i started to look into "hey, can i cache the page more" and yes, you can. So i turned on page caching for the whole site collection and then the following week, looked at my usage logs and saw something disturbing. My avg hits for th...

Because of various factors, i was forced to make my sharepoint site use basic authentication instead of NTLM, Kerbrose, or any other auth system. This had to do with our novel environment, and a number of user problems, mostly people forgetting to use our domain/username format to log into sharepoint. After reconfiguring everything to use the basic authentication method, i ran into a problem with sharepoint search and it's Default content access account. Namely, you can not tell sharepoint search to not try to log in using the default access account with out the domain infront of it's name. The solution i found on the web was to create a crawl rule for your site, (ex: http://intranet/*) and specify a different content access account for it, and then uncheck "Do not allow Basic Authentication". Problem with this is that in order for sharepoint to search the sites at all, it forced me to check (set) "Crawl SharePoint content as Http pages." That is a problem b...

Here's the situation: I deployed a demo version of a sharepoint webpart as a solution to my webserver before i deployed the full version. So i deploy it, added it to a webpage and tried it out. Afterwards i removed it from the webpage, and deactivated the solution, then retracted the solution. Now is where the trouble came in at: I went to go deploy the full version of it and i got a "dll is in use error". All attempts to remove this dll i got errors, and crashed the server a few times during the proccess as well. Fun stuff. The solution: The solution is remarkably simple that most people will look right over it: Go to the webpart galery for the site(s) you used the webpart on, and remove it from the gallery. After doing this (and making sure it wasn't on any of the other pages on the site) deploying the package went through with out a problem. Wish this was documented better (and the solution providor knew about it more).

For various reasons i wont go into it is pretty clear to me that the people who originally set up the search server had never restarted it.. ever. I am having some trouble getting search to function correctly, or even start back up normally after i restarted the search server. What oringally forced me to restart the server was during my morning browsing of the error logs on my servers, i noticed that the search server (MOSS) had no hard drive space left on it's c:\ drive. So after clearing out some *.log files and freeing up alot of space, i tried restarting the server. The error messages i get are as follow: Under Shared Services Administration> Search> Search settings The search service is currently offline. Visit the services on Server page in SharePoint Central Administration to verify whether the service is enabled. This might also be because an indexer move is in progress. On the search server (Moss) event log: The database connection string is not available. Event Ty...

So i'v been battling looking for a solution to this problem all day, then it hit me. So i just made a new server for my moss install, replacing the old search server. And for the life of me after i installed sharepoint on the machine, i could not get through the configuration wizard, it just, would not, go, though! No matter what username and password i put in, it wouldn't work. Solution: I was signed in as the local administrator! You have to sign on a domain account that has access to the sql server for it to work correctly! DOH! go figure. Now if i can just fix this package solution problem with out having to resort to restarting my server.

So here's a new one sports fans, was adding a custom content query webpart for a link list i made, visited the site on a test box to see how it looked and got this when i visited the site using the fully qualified domain name (that is http://intranet.ourdomain.org instead of just http://intranet) Unable to display this Web Part. To troubleshoot the problem, open this Web page in a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible HTML editor such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer. If the problem persists, contact your Web server administrator. Since my page was bound to a page layout, i tried to reproduce the error on another page, and got this error when publishing (using a FQDN): The operation failed because the following URL does not correspond to a SharePoint site collection: http://intranet.domain.org/_layouts/IniWrkflIP.aspx. Ah! Now we are getting somewhere! So lets look up this problem! Found out it has to do with the Access mappings on the server not being configured correct...

So i have been having fun with the stsadm -o export function allllllllll wweeeeeeekkkk llooonnggg. Reference my earlier post about how to fix search not indexing to find out why. Needless to say, trying to export the site has not been... easy, or anything close to that. stsadm -o export -url http://mysite's_sub_site -filename d:\somefile.cmp -versions 2 Error: FatalError: There is no row at position 0. Cause: An item, a list, some object in your site is referencing permissions of someone who simply not in your database anymore. How? Who knows, easy fix tho: Solution: First find the next site it was about to go to, i do it this way personally: 1. stsadm -o enumsubwebs http://mysiteiamexporting 2. find the last site that it was exporting before it errored out. Your problem site is the next site. 3. Go to the site, go to the administration page. 4. Go to Advanced Permissions, Actions -> Edit Permissions, click O.K. 5. Actions -> Inherit Permissions. Bam site is fixed now. Hap...

So there was a mix up to day on the Sharepoint site, apparently a test version of a MAJOR website was being worked on and went "poof". No biggy right? thats what backups are for. Unless the person who set up the backup used his username in the auth part of it and has since left the company. Thats right, since he left we haven't been backing up the sharepoint sites, any of them. Scarry stuff. Lession learned: Look not just at your web-front and your moss server, but your sql back up server's event logs. And DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT use your personal account when setting up mission-critical processes!

So a user of mine tried to edit a page in our massive collection of sites that document software applications and their use. When they went to (in editing mode) Page -> Page setting they got the following in their face: Error returned: User Not Found Source of problem: My predecessor had a search problem after he migrated users over to the MOSS 2007 server. A few users had the same GUID as each other, even tho they are suppose to be unique. So his solution was to delete the offending user out of the database manually... And that is how i got my problem. Parts of the sharepoint sites pull from the tp_ID feild and reference that. Others reference tp_GUID. This page uses tp_ID to pull the information it needs to generate the settings page. My hack-solution: This is unsupported by microsoft, note that i only did this as a temporay measure. I created, manually, a fake user in the database that used the same tp_ID as the one he deleted a while ago.. yes i had to do some annoying sql to ge...

So my problem was i wanted to enable the Site Directory on the old WSS 2.0 page i migrated over, and no matter how many features i enabled on the page, it just would not allow me to create a SiteDriectory template page, even if i forced the issue with sharepoint designer. Silly me, solution is right in the Central Administration: Central Admin -> Operations -> Upgrade and Migration -> Enable features on existing sites. Yes even tho i told it to use the enterprise feature set, it could not do so unless i performed this step first..