November 2006 - Posts

10 Year Anniversary

Just a small note that today, November 28th, 2006, is my 10 year anniversary as a non-smoker.  Hard to believe that 10 short years ago, I made a 250 dollar bet with a pal in my home town (Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada) to quit smoking and have never looked back.  I quit cold turkey, which after 12 years of smoking, apparently was easier for me than it is for others.  Well, at least I can breathe easier, literally.

Posted 28 November 2006 03:02 PM by Dan Attis | 3 comment(s)
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Professional SharePoint 2007 Development - Book

Ok, we've been quiet long enough.  Some of you may already know but myself, Matt Ranlett and Brendon Schwartz are co-authoring a book with John Holliday, John Alexander, Jeff Julian, Eli Robillard and Tom Rizzo entitled Professional SharePoint 2007 Development.

How exciting is that?

This is going to be a super book that will be sure to help anyone interested in SharePoint development do their jobs better.

Don't all run to the bookstore today however, it won't be out until May, but feel free to pre-order!

Posted 22 November 2006 08:09 AM by Dan Attis | 2 comment(s)
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SharePoint 2007 - Office SharePoint Server Beta 2 TR to RTM Upgrade Instructions

Looks like MSFT will be dropping this very soon (maybe this weekend).  Here is a link to the upgrade instructions from Beta2TR to RTM (provided by Joel Oleson).

Good luck!

Posted 17 November 2006 09:34 PM by Dan Attis | no comments
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Windows SharePoint Services v3 RTM - A Basic Installation

I went ahead and downloaded the RTM of WSS v3 last night and did a basic install on a clean vpc.  I chose "Basic" because it was the quickest way to get the environment up to take a quick look at some of the changes since Beta2TR since it installs it with a set of default settings which I can't seem to find documented anywhere.  More on that in another post (well, maybe).

The basic install uses SQL Server 2005 Embedded Edition.  I know very little about this "edition" of SQL Server 2005.  What I have noticed is that I can't seem to find a way to connect to it outside of SharePoint.  This concerns me in such a way that if I wanted to use forms authentication, how do I set up the ASP.NET Membership and Roles database?  Will I be able to do that with this edition or do I have to move to SQL Server Express edition?

Here are the steps to install WSS v3, very simple but I thought I would post them anyways.

1 - Download the WSS vs installer from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=D51730B5-48FC-4CA2-B454-8DC2CAF93951&displaylang=en.

2 - Run the installer.

3 - Accept the EULA.

 

2 - Choose a Basic installation.

3 - Watch the progress bar.

4 - Look at the nice WSS screen that does not have the word Beta in it.

5 - Click Close and the SharePoint Products and Technologies Wizard launches.

6 - Tell the installer that you don't mind if it starts and stops some services.

7 - Watch the installer go thru its 10 "steps", as outlined below (if you are curious).  2 is the longest.

8 - If all goes well, and it should on a clean server, you should see the Configuration Successful screen.

9 - Browse to http://servername (if it doesn't pop up automatically open, I can't remember if it does) and voila, your default Team Site appears.

10 - Check out the version!

11 - Regarding the SQL Server 2005 Embedded Edition, check this out.

There you go!  Your Central Administration port is completely random, so you will have to check it in IIS or launch it from Administrative Tasks to determine that.  If you can guess, let me know.

If anyone knows if it is possible to connect to the SQL Server 2005 Embedded Edition instance to create the ASP.NET Membership and Roles database, please do let me know.  I installed Management Studio Express and could not.  The error informed me that remote connections are not allowed even though I was trying to hit it locally, on the server.  I searched thru the Program Files folders for the SQL Server installation and could not find a tool to change that setting, that you would normally find in the SQL Server 2005 Surface Area Configuration tool on other editions.

Posted 17 November 2006 06:50 AM by Dan Attis | 4 comment(s)
SharePoint 2007 - WSS 3.0 Alerts

I have encountered an unusual error in my staging environment for my current project (Beta2TR).  We are getting ready to pilot the site to a few users and are creating steps for the users to use to test the functionality.

One of the steps involves creating an alert on a list.  As I was testing this step I got the following error:

For some reason it seems like the alert template associations are broken in the Beta2TR.  By running the following stsadm script the problem is resolved.

stsadm -o updatealerttemplates -url http://servername -filename "C:\Program files\common files\Microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\template\XML\alerttemplates.xml"

This was tough to track down.  I only found 1 resource in the hour or 2 that I researched this.

After running the script, I now get the create alert page I was expecting:

Phew!

Posted 16 November 2006 07:19 AM by Dan Attis | no comments
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SharePoint 2007 - The missing attribute is found

Read my updated post on the categorization of web part properties.  Turns out it was there all along, just hiding (from me).

SharePoint 2007 - Web Part Property Categorization (or lack of)

Posted 13 November 2006 06:54 AM by Dan Attis | no comments
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Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions

Finally!  This has been discussed for years, I have seen it on peoples machines (those in the know), but now I can finally get it myself!  SharePoint development in theory, should become much easier.  I haven't looked at these yet, but will very soon, like tonight!

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions

What a treat!  You gotta love conferences, they always announce stuff.  This week/month is just going to be insane with new announcements.  I love it!

Posted 08 November 2006 03:38 PM by Dan Attis | no comments
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2007 Office System RTM's

Thanks to Andrew Connell for keeping us updated on the goings on at Dev Connections in Las Vegas this week.

Looks like we are getting the bits a little earlier than originally announced!

Yippee!

Posted 08 November 2006 03:33 PM by Dan Attis | no comments
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SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 - Community Technology Preview (CTP) November 2006

Courtesy of Teo Lachev:

The second CTP (Community Technology Preview) build of the forthcoming SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 was released today. Besides bug fixes, SP2 includes major BI features and enhancements including:

Reporting Services

  • SharePoint 2007 integration – this one is a true enzilla (enhancement Godzilla) and deserves a separate post. Suffice to say that unlike the previous Explorer and Viewer webparts, SP2 will allow you to move the report catalog to SharePoint to enable publishing, viewing, and managing SSRS 2005 reports within SharePoint 2007.
  • Report Builder support for Oracle 9.2.0.3 or above (previously only SQL Server and Analysis Services 2005 were supported for Report Builder models)
  • New .NET Data Provider for Hyperion 9.3 BI+ Essbase Enterprise Analytics
  • Select All option has been restored with multi-valued parameters (it was disabled in SP1 for performance reasons).

Analysis Services

  • Better Excel 2007 integration – advanced filtering, cube formulas, offline cubes.
  • Data mining add-ins for Excel 2007 -- Table Analysis Tools for Excel, Data Mining Client for Excel, Data Mining Templates for Visio
  • Performance improvements with subselects, arbitrary shapes, running sum calculations, visual totals, ROLAP dimensions, cell writeback, many-to-many dimensions, 64-bit NUMA hardware, semi-additive measures and unary operators.
  • Supportability enhancements – enhanced memory dumps, filtered dumps, best practices analyzer

More information about what's new in SQL Server 2005 SP2 CTP2 is available in the readme file.

Posted 08 November 2006 08:31 AM by Dan Attis | no comments
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SharePoint 2007 - When Shared Services Provider creation causes you grief

I just did a deployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007.  As mentioned in a previous post, we are building a customer extranet for our current client.  I have encountered some very strange behavior (which in the end turned out not to be so strange).  Essentially, everything installed fine, up until the point that I created my Shared Services Provider (SSP).  Central Administration works as expected, the system allows me to create an SSP and even tells me its been successfully created, but when I go to access it, I get an access denied screen.

I felt that I had exhausted all options and that it was time to delete the SSP and build it again, along with it's supporting databases.  This shouldn't be a big deal, since this is a new install and no one is using it yet.  Well, thru the admin UI, you are not able to delete the SSP if it is the only one there.  I searched for a while and discovered that this is possible using the stsadm command line tool.  Here is the command: 

stsadm -o deletessp -title "SharedServices1" -deletedatabases

All you do is pass it the name of the SSP and a flag indicating that you want to delete the databases that go along with it.  I did not go thru the trouble of creating another SSP but if I would have, I would venture to guess that the option to delete becomes enabled in the UI (did I mention that it was there, just not clickable), since there is an SSP to fall back on.  I would also imagine that you can change the default SSP if there is more than one and that you would then be able to delete the other thru the UI if you wanted to.

After deleting and recreating my SSP I was still getting an access denied screen.

I mulled over this for quite some time.  A coworker of mine asked me if I had the site in my Trusted sites security zone or in my Local intranet security zone.  DOH!

I had found it odd that I could access the SSP administration site remotely, but could not locally on the server.  At any rate, I felt kind of silly, it was working all along.  So the lesson learned is to add the SSP administration site as well as Central Administration to your trusted sites on the server as soon as you create them.  This won't be happening to me again.

Posted 08 November 2006 04:20 AM by Dan Attis | 1 comment(s)
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SharePoint 2007 - Did I mean to delete that Site Collection Policy?

Throughout the SharePoint UI a user can delete many things.  Site collection policies are just one of them.  In most cases, when a user tries to delete an item, they are provided with some sort of confirmation dialog box (just in case).  In the case of a site collection policy, they are not (Beta2 TR).

This is one of the many items that seem very easy to fix.

Hopefully with the RTM drop so close, these types of inconsistencies in the behavior of the product will be addressed.  If not, I hope that they will be fixed with the inevitable service pack that will be made available at a later date.

[EDIT]  Well this seems to have happened the morning of my post, so we'll have to wait and see,

Posted 06 November 2006 01:52 PM by Dan Attis | no comments
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SharePoint 2007 - Web Part property behavior

While developing and testing web parts, I tend to create public properties I don't need and vice-versa, I tend to not create public properties that I do need.  I have noticed some interesting behavior.

Let's say I include a public property called "Color".  While testing the web part, I populate this property with "Red".  As time goes by I decide that I don't need this property for some reason or other.  At this point I may have tested the web part on multiple sites.  Since I have decided that I no longer need the property I went ahead and deleted it from the web part assembly.  I then continue to test.  A little while later I said to myself, "Self, you forgot to delete the property values in the property (Color) you deleted a while ago.  Way to go, you now have orphaned data somewhere in your content database and have no way to find it, shame on you!"

I looked at my monitor for a few minutes and thought what if I recreated the property with the same name?  Would the data still be there?  I went ahead and did that and lo and behold, my property appeared and all of the data I had previously saved to this property was still there.

I'm sure this is a "Feature".

Do you think this is good or bad behavior and why?

Posted 02 November 2006 11:42 AM by Dan Attis | no comments
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SharePoint 2007 - Beta2 TR COM Server event log entries

I am the type of guy who prefers a clean event log and when an error pops up I do my best to fix it.  Well ever since installing SharePoint Office Server 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh I have been seeing these errors in the application event log.  They look something like this:

ProblemDescription:    Event Type:    Error

Event Source:        DCOM

Event Category:        None

Event ID:        10016

Date:     <somedate>

Time:        <sometime>

User:        <domain\username>

Computer:        <computername>

Description:

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID

{61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1}

to the user <domain\username> SID (X-X-X-XX-XXXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXX-XXXXX). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I had these errors for each of the identities I had created to run the various application pools used by SharePoint.  I searched and searched and have finally found a resolution to this issue courtesy of Harshawardhan Chiplonkar on his blog.

The resolution is as follows:

  • Navigate to Start->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Component Services
  • Under Console Root, navigate to Component Services->Computers->My Computer->DCOM Config.
  • Right click IIS WAMREG Admin service and select properties.
  • In the Property pane, switch to the Security tab.
  • Click Edit on the Launch and Activation Permissions section and you should see that only administrators and network service have rights here. Add your service account(s) in here as well to match the admin rights and those errors should go away.

    What a relief!  The errors are gone and my event log is once again clean as a whistle.

     

    • Posted 01 November 2006 06:01 PM by Dan Attis | no comments
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