GrinGod [dot] Com

This morning I ran into a problem when running a repair on my broken SharePoint installation.  Everything seemed to be going well until the setup needed to restart the World Wide Web Publishing service (IIS).  The error message was rather cryptic, say that it might be due to my login account not having service start permissions – but I know I have.

Debugging step 1:  Look in the windows services list and see if I can manually start the service. This was a little more helpful as it told me it couldn’t start due to a dependency not starting.

Debugging step 2: Check the service dependencies.  It appears that the Windows Process Activation service (WAS) wouldn’t start, although it only returned the message “Error 13: The data is invalid”.

Debugging Step 3: Check the system event log.  Here I found the most helpful message so far:

The Windows Process Activation Service encountered an error trying to read configuration data from file ‘\\?\C:\Windows\system32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config’, line number ‘0′.  The error message is: ‘Configuration file is not well-formed XML’.  The data field contains the error number.

It seems that at some point the applicationHost.config got trashed.  Luckily, when you make changes to web applications in IIS it creates a backup of the applicationHost.config file in c:\inetpub\history.  All you need to do is copy a good copy from the history and put it into c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\config.

And Roberts your mothers brother, WAS starts, IIS starts and the repair of SharePoint can continue!

ps. I’m running IIS7 on Windows 2008 Server.

I have just leant the hard way that you should always check the name you have given your feature before deploying it to a server.

Quite stupidly I created several features, at least two of which I now know conflicted with existing SharePoint features.  I used the xcopy method of deploying the feature on my local dev machine with the “/Y” switch to suppress prompts when over-writing existing files, so at the time I didn’t realise what I had done.

It was only when I can to create a new site collection that everything call falling down.  I’m currently downloading the SharePoint installation DVD from Microsoft in the hopes that a re-install will fix the problems.

From now on I’m going to be prefixing all features I create with the clients name.  This will provide two benefits:

1. It will greatly reduce the risk of a feature name conflict.
2. It will group all the directories together in explorer for easier deletion.

One of the things I’m working on is Event Receivers in SharePoint but I’ve found registering the event receivers to be a bit on the annoying side.  Yes you can do it with the feature.xml Receivers section and there is the great El Blanco Event Receivers Manager.

I personally prefer desktop GUI applications and so, based on code by Liron, I’ve created my own desktop Event Receiver Manager.  It allows you to select site & list, browse for an assembly so it can give you the full assembly name and a list of classes inside, and a list of receivers you can attach to.

The current version only allows adding new event receivers.  Before adding a new receiver it will check to make sure the same receiver doesn’t already exist.

Future plans for it include listing existing receivers to allow users to delete them but as I don’t need to do that myself yet I haven’t implemented it.

Download a copy of EventReceiverManager.

These are a selection of list of links that I acquired on a recent SharePoint developer course with Patrick Tisseghem of U2U.  This is part 4 of a 4 part series:

• Part 1 – Articles & Blogs
• Part 2 – Utilities
• Part 3 – Workflow, Search & Silverlight
• Part 4 – Handy Hints & Books

Handy Hints

aspnet_regsql.exe
creates sql server database for builtin ASP.Net features such as membership database for forms authentication.  Found in %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727

To upgrade webpart assembly numbers (incremental version numbers)
deactivate feature -> remove webpart from webpart gallery -> upgrade webpart solution -> add old version back into web.config safe controls -> add bindingRedirect from old version to new version into web.config

EventReceivers for ContentTypes
These are same as for lists and libraries but information is stored in XmlDocument section of feature.

[assembly:System.Security.AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers()]
Attribute in asseblyinfo.cs to allow webparts to be installed and run from bin folder

Use Frontpage RPC for uploading documents
e.g. migrating files from other systems.

Books

Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Microsoft-Office-SharePoint-Server/dp/0735623686/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213365634&sr=8-2

Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development
http://www.amazon.com/Professional-SharePoint-Content-Management-Development/dp/0470224754/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213365743&sr=8-2

These are a selection of list of links that I acquired on a recent SharePoint developer course with Patrick Tisseghem of U2U.  This is part 2 of a 4 part series:

• Part 1 – Articles & Blogs
• Part 2 – Utilities
• Part 3 – Workflow, Search & Silverlight
• Part 4 – Handy Hints & Books

Utilities

STSAdm extensions
stsadm.blogspot.com
A set of extensions to STSAdm.exe that make just about any SharePoint administration task a piece of cake.  The extensions are packaged as a SharePoint solution package (.wsp) and are installed with the STSAdm.exe utility itself.

Sharepoint Project Utility
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/ACs-VS-SharePoint-Project-Utility-Tool-Window-for-SharePoint-Developers.aspx
A utility for VS developers for creating the standard directory structures and default files for various SharePoint development scenarios.  Requires the installation of the DX Core VS addin.

VS2008 Sharepoint Extensions
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/06/04/announcing-the-vsewss-version-1-2.aspx
A set of projects and project items for VS2008 for SharePoint development.  My initial investigation suggests that these may be geared more towards MOSS2007 than WSSv3.

Event Receiver Management - El Blanco
http://chrissyblanco.blogspot.com/2007/08/event-receiver-management.html
Allows management of event handlers to specific lists, libraries, etc.

Application Pool Manager
http://www.harbar.net/articles/APM.aspx
System tray access to IIS Application Pool tasks.  Runs on the machine that SharePoint is installed on.

Fiddler - HTTP Debugging
http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/
Useful tool for finding FrontPage rpc calls for uploading and downloading documents.

Expresso Regular Expressions
http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm
Wonderful utility for developing and debugging .Net regular expressions.  Once you’ve created and tested your regular expression, Expresso can generate stub .Net code to get the regular expression into your project.

Caml Query Builder
http://www.u2u.info/Blogs/karine/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=28
I’ve not had any experience with CAML yet but I’m sure I’ll be using this tool when the time arises.

Word Content Control Toolkit
http://www.codeplex.com/dbe
Assists with binding xml embedded in a Word 2007 docx file to controls in the Word document.  Useful for generating Word documents containing data from SharePoint.

SmartPart for SharePoint
http://www.codeplex.com/smartpart
The SharePoint web part which can host any ASP.NET web user control. Create your web parts without writing code!

These are a selection of list of links that I acquired on a recent SharePoint developer course with Patrick Tisseghem of U2U.  This is part 1 of a 4 part series:

• Part 1 – Articles & Blogs
• Part 2 – Utilities
• Part 3 – Workflow, Search & Silverlight
• Part 4 – Handy Hints & Books

Articles & Blogs

SharePoint Developer Site
http://www.microsoft.com/click/SharePointDeveloper/

John Holiday
http://www.johnholliday.net/

Ted Pattison Group Downloads
http://www.tedpattison.net/downloads.aspx
A host of utilities, demos and articles.  Also, check out the rest of the site.

Ideas & Solutions, Etc.
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnlee/archive/2007/06/24/tips-tricks-from-moss-2007-development-training.aspx
A host of handy hints & tips.

Content Deployment
http://blogs.msdn.com/ecm/archive/2008/06/11/announcing-end-to-end-content-deployment-walkthrough.aspx
A guide to website content management and deployment using SharePoint.

OpenXML Developer
http://www.openxmldeveloper.org
Not really SharePoint specific but a developer site for working with the office documents OpenXML standard.  Useful for developers wanting to tie SharePoint data into Word documents (see Word Content Control Toolkit in Part 2 - Utilities).

Part of my job with Contract5 I have to do development on the Windows Sharepoint Services platform.  In order to facilitate this I setup a VMWare virtual machine with Windows 2008 Server, Sharepoint and Visual Studio 2008.

However, I made the bad error of deciding to change the computer name once all of the above was installed.  Unfortunately I didn’t realise that the computer name was so deeply rooted in the Sharepoint installation.  I also tried reverting the computer name back to it’s original value but this didn’t seem to make much difference, if anything it made the situation worse.

No amount of removing Sharepoint and re-installing it made any difference as the original settings still seemed to be there.  Eventually I gave in and completely rebuilt the VM.

I have since discovered that my problems were all due to the four Sharepoint databases that got installed the first time round which are not removed when Sharepoint is un-installed.  I have found a this knowledge base article on removing the Sharepoint databases: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920277

For my new job, which I’ll be starting in a little over three weeks, I’m going to be working heavily with Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS 2007 - I’ll leave the versions for another post) and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 (again a guide to version can wait for another post).  Whilst there is loads of information out there about development with these two platforms, what someone starting out with these needs to some hands-on experience.  

It’s wonderful reading about creating custom workflows in CRM but right now I’m suffering from serious information overflow because I’ve got all these theoretical concepts flying around in my head without being able to see how they work in reality - a picture is worth a thousand words but an hours hands-on experience is worth a thousand pictures.

Microsoft has been kind enough to provide free pre-configured demonstration Virtual PC disk images for free that allow you experiment and test without the cost or time spent in setting up your own server.  The images themselves are about 4Gb to download.  Considering all the software installed on them that isn’t too bad.  The trouble is that Microsoft has split these images into 700Mb self-extracting rar files that have to downloaded separately and extracted, which requires upwards of 8Gb of free space.

Over the past couple of weeks I have made several attempts to download the files but I have yet to get a working copy on my machine.  I have had problems with disconnection’s, running out of disk space (my bootcamp partition was too small) and corrupted files when they did download.  The fact that I have to download multiple files is a serious pain in the ass.  Why can’t Microsoft provide the disk images as a single file and embrace BitTorrent for distribution.   I’m sure it would be a lot quicker and less error prone.

In the meantime my new employer is sending over a portable hard drive with the disk images on it for me to use.