Next BIWUG Session

BIWUG, the Belux Information Worker User Group – www.biwug.be – is announcing another session about SharePoint 2010 on Thursday September 8th 2011 in the RealDolmen Huizingen offices.

Agenda
18:00-18:30 Welcome with sandwich lunch
18:30-19:30 SQL Server for SharePoint Geeks (Speaker – Thomas Vochten – @Thomasvochten). Topics: which SQL Server editions to use, configuration best practices, common misconceptions and its impact on SharePoint.
19:30-19:45 Break
19:45-20:45 Office 365 – but mainly SharePoint Online – from a technical perspective (Speaker – Joris Poelmans – @jopxtwits) Topics: focus on SharePoint Online both from an administrator and developer standpoint.

Location: RealDolmen Industriezone Zenneveld, Vaucampslaan 42, 1654 Huizingen, Belgium (Roadmap in PDF format)

Entrance: Free but registration is required on the BIWUG site – http://www.biwug.be.

Getting rid of the login boxes when accessing a SharePoint site

It’s amazing how often this question keeps popping up on different forums. It’s not very hard or mystical knowledge, but as I have to type the same information over and over again I decided to post it on my blog. That way I can just reference this post.

What we want Internet Explorer to do is to send our domain credentials to the SharePoint site.

Open your internet explorer and choose Internet Option.

Select the security tab – Intranet – and click sites.

Click on advanced.

Add the website you want to be added to your intranet zone.

Go back to the main overview page and click on custom level

Scroll all the way down and make sure that automatic logon with current user name and password is selected.

Windows Azure Platform Training Kit – February 2011 Update

 

The February 2011 update of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit includes several updates and bug fixes for the hands-on labs.   Most of the updates were focused on supporting the new Windows Azure AppFabric February CTP and the new portal experience for AppFabric Caching, Access Control, and the Service Bus.    The specific content that was updated in this release includes:   · Hands-on Lab – Building Windows Azure Apps with the Caching service   · Hands-on Lab – Using the Access Control Service to Federate with Multiple Business Identity Providers   · Hands-on Lab – Introduction to the AppFabric Access Control Service V2   · Hands-on Lab – Introduction to the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus Futures   · Hands-on Lab – Advanced Web and Worker Roles – fixed PHP installer script   · Demo Script – Rafiki PDC Keynote Demo   The setup scripts for all hands-on labs and demo scripts have also been updated so that the content can easily be used on a machine running Windows 7 SP1.

 

You can download the February update of the Windows Azure Platform Training kit from here: http://bit.ly/WAPTKFeb11. 
We’re also continuing to publish the hands-on labs directly to MSDN to make it easier for developers to review and use the content without having to download an entire training kit package.  You can browse to all of the HOLs here:  http://bit.ly/WAPTCFeb11.  Feel free to blog or tweet these URLs.

 

You can start building your application on it in 3 simple and easy to do steps:

 

1. Download the Tools:

 

Get Visual Studio Express and the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio to start building and debugging applications for the Windows Azure Platform http://tinyurl.com/learnaboutazure.
If you have already Visual Studio installed you can download the tools directly from http://tinyurl.com/toolsforazure.

 

2. Setup an Account:

 

Set up an account and obtain a free subscription for accessing the online portals for Windows Azure, SQL Azure and Windows Azure AppFabric. You can learn more about the accounts http://tinyurl.com/getazureaccount or you can sign up directly and get the trial http://tinyurl.com/getazurefreetrial.

 

3. Create your First application and Deploy it on the Windows Azure Platform:

 

First learn how to create a simple ASP.NET application in Visual Studio for Windows Azure on your local machine http://tinyurl.com/localazureapplication. Once successfully created, learn how to deploy this application on the Windows Azure Platform http://tinyurl.com/deployazureapplication.

 

When all steps are executed successfully you should have running your first application on the Windows Azure Platform!

Error: The file ‘C:\FASTSearch\etc\middleware.cfg’ was not found.

If you are doing a multi-server install of FAST for SharePoint 2010 you may end up with this error. Possible causes:

• You specified the wrong Base Port.
• You did not configure your firewall properly to open up the necessary ports.
• You forgot to reboot your admin server. To make sure that FAST is running properly, use nctrl status on the admin machine.

Using SPModule to install SharePoint – DateTime Issue with the StartDate

If you are getting a datetime issue (cannot convert to DateTime) with the out of the box SharePoint install with SPModule when using the New-SharePointFarm command change line 81 of New-SharePointFarm.ps1 from

    $RunSettings.StartTime = Get-Date -Format ‘dd-MMM-yyyy HH:mm:ss’
to
    $RunSettings.StartTime = Get-Date -Format ‘dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss’

[QuickNews] SharePoint Server 2010 performance and capacity test results and recommendations

Microsoft released the whitepapers regarding the performance impact of specific features of SharePoint 2010. The following whitepapers have been released:

• BCSCapacityPlanningDoc.docx
• DesigningLargeListsMaximizingListPerformance.docx
• LargeScaleDocRepositoryCapacityPlanningDoc.docx
• MySitesSocialComputingCapacityPlanningDoc.docx
• OfficeWebAppsCapacityPlanningDoc.docx
• SearchforSPServer2010CapacityPlanningDoc.docx
• SharePointServerCachesPerformance.docx
• VisioServicesCapacityPlanningDoc.docx
• WASCapacityPlanningDoc.docx

 

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=fd1eac86-ad47-4865-9378-80040d08ac55&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MicrosoftDownloadCenter+%28Microsoft+Download+Center%29&referrer=swamii.com#tm

unable to start debugging. the silverlight developer runtime is not installed.

If you get the message: "unable to start debugging. the silverlight developer runtime is not installed." after installing the Silverlight 4 Tools, it might be that something went wrong with the installation. Install the Developer Runtime from this link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=188039 and everything will work just fine.

Crawl status The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component. Verify that the administration component ‘guid’ in search application is in a good state and try again.

I got this error on a freshly installed SharePoint 2010 environment at the customer location. We tried quite a few things to resolve the error, we checked the application pool identities but nothing seemed to be fixing the error. What we tried: – check the identities of the application pools of the search service application and the search administration – added the identity to the local admin group(bad, I know, but we had to try stuff) – re-run the configuration wizard In the end we decided to remove the Search Application and add it again. Once we did that everything the same error popped up. But when we checked 3 minutes later everything ran perfectly fine. In the end I can’t say if it was a combination of things that fixed the search or if it was just the re-adding of the search application. My advice, re-run the configuration wizard, and if that doesn’t do the trick, remove the search application and add it again.

Multilingual Settings in SharePoint 2010

A quick blog post on how to enable (and how to select) multilingual settings on a SharePoint 2010 site.
Go to Site Actions, Site Settings

Select Language Settings under Site Administration

 

In the settings, select the languages that you would like to add (I only installed the Dutch Language Pack)

Leave the Overwrite Translations as it is for now, I’ll get back to that in a sec. Now go back to your original site. On the top right, select your Username. There you should now be able to select in which language you would like to see the site:

 

Leave it at English for now. Open the document library Shared Documents and add a column named MySpecialColumn, type text.

There we go, now change the site to Dutch (or whatever language pack you have installed). You should now see that the column names are being translated, but your new column’s name is not being translated.
Go back to the Document Library settings and change the name of the column to the translated name.

If you now switch to English you will see that the column is called MySpecialColumn, while in the Dutch site it will be called MijnSpecialeKolom. This enables the users to do the translations themselves. It would have been nice if in the interface, when we added a column that we could enter all the translations at creation, but it’s another step in the good direction More on the multilingual aspect soon!

Exception: System.SystemException: The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed.

As I installed the language packs for SharePoint 2010 I ran into the Exception: Exception: System.SystemException: The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed.

The cause of this error, in my case, was that the SharePoint 2010 server was unable to contact the Domain Controller. Once that was sorted, I could run the configuration wizard just fine.

HOWTO: Create a List and bind a Content Type to it in SharePoint 2010

In the following HOWTO I will explain how you can create a list declaratively on a SharePoint site by making use of the Visual Studio 2010 Tools. In that list we will give automatically add the hotel conten type to the list so that the user can only add “hotels” to that list. If you do not know how to create a content type to achieve this, read the following blog post: http://koenvosters.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/howto-build-a-deployable-content-type-for-sharepoint-2010/

We will start from an Empty SharePoint Project. Rightclick the project, select add new item, List Instance.
Add the display name and description and change the list to instantiate to Custom List. If you want a specific url, make sure you specify this in the wizard.

This should result in the follwing xml being generated for you:

Code Snippet

1. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
2. <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
3.   <ListInstance Title="List of Hotels"
4.                  OnQuickLaunch="TRUE"
5.                  TemplateType="100"
6.                  FeatureId="00bfea71-de22-43b2-a848-c05709900100"
7.                  Url="Lists/Hotels"
8.                  Description="List of the Hotels that can be booked by the Travel Agency">
9.   </ListInstance>
10. </Elements>

This List Instance will create a list based on the content type item. Once we deploy the solution we will see that a new list has been created called “List of Hotels”. Now we move to the steps to add this content type to a list. First thing to know is that we need to be sure that the list and the content type have already been installed on the server. How do we do that? We will create a new feature in our project and that Feature will have an activation dependency on the feature with the list instance and the content type xaml definition. At that moment the future binding the two together can only be executed when both content types have been created.

Add the feature, rename it to something meaningfull like ConnectingListCtypes and double click it. In that screen, give it as title Travel Agency. At the bottom of the screen you will see an area called Feature Activation Dependencies. Click on Add on the right side and select the feature with the list instance and the content type in it. Then click Add.

As we have two features it would mean the user would have to click twice to enable our Travel Agency list with content types. To avoid this behavior we will make the feature containing the list instance and the content type hidden. You can do this by going to the properties of the Feature and setting the property Is Hidden to false. That means that whenever I activate my TravelAgent feature it will automatically activate my depencies, invisible to the user.

Ok, so now all is linked together, all we need to do is write the actual code that will link the two together. First, we will add a Feature Receiver to the TravelAgent Feature. You can do this by rightclicking the feature and selecting “Add Event Receiver”. Uncomment the code of the FeatureActivated function.

In the code we will create an object for the list called “list” and an object for the contenttype called mytype. We will add this contenttype to the list and remove the existing content type called “Item” which the list was based on. Do not forget to call the update method on the list or the changes will not be submitted.

Code Snippet

1. public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
2.         {
3.             try
4.             {
5.  
6.                 using (SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web)
7.                 {
8.                     SPList list = web.Lists["List of Hotels"];
9.                     SPContentType mytype = web.AvailableContentTypes["Hotel"];
10.                     list.ContentTypesEnabled = true;
11.                     list.ContentTypes.Add(mytype);
12.                     SPContentType itemtype = list.ContentTypes["Item"];
13.                     list.ContentTypes.Delete(itemtype.Id);
14.                     list.Update();
15.  
16.                 }
17.  
18.             }
19.             catch (Exception ex)
20.             {
21.                 TextWriterTraceListener listener = new TextWriterTraceListener("c:\\customcodelogs.txt");
22.                 listener.WriteLine(ex.StackTrace);
23.                 listener.Dispose();
24.             }
25.         }

As the other feature is hidden you should only see 1 feature to activate in the site settings. Once you activate it, you should have a content type called Hotel in your site collection and a list called “List of Hotels” in your site. Adding an item in your list will present you the new content type. In one of my next posts we will be creating a custom field type so that we can assign “stars” to hotels in an easier way.

Comments are always welcome

SharePoint Saturday in Belgium

On May 8th the first SharePoint Saturday is taking place. Organized by the BIWUG team this event will cover the following topics:

9:30-9:45 Welcome and Introduction

9:45 – 10:30 Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint (Karine Bosch)

10:40 – 11:30 LINQ to SharePoint (Serge Luca)

11:40 – 12:30 Client Object Model (TBD)

12:30 - 13:40 Lunch break  with sandwiches and drinks

13:40 – 14:30 Sandboxed solutions (Steven Van De Craen) 

14:40 – 15:30 MetaData in SharePoint 2010 (Joris Poelmans)

15:40 – 16:30 SharePoint, WCF Services en REST (Stéphane Eyskens)

 16:30 – Closing drink

Don’t miss it, you can subscribe right here.

 

HOWTO: Build a deployable Content Type for SharePoint 2010

Open Visual Studio 2010, select SharePoint.

Select Empty SharePoint Project.

Right click the project and add a new item

Select Content Type, name it Hotel

Select Item as Base Content Type

This will result in the following xml:

Code Snippet

1. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
2. <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
3.   <!– Parent ContentType: Item (0×01) –>
4.   <ContentType ID="0x01007319db2fac804824ab4fec5c3c2d2208"
5.                Name="Hotel"
6.                Group="Travel Agency"
7.                Description="This Content Type described a hotel that can be booked by the Travel Agency"
8.                Inherits="TRUE"
9.                Version="0">
10.     <FieldRefs>
11.     </FieldRefs>
12.   </ContentType>
13. </Elements>

Note that I already changed the name, group and description to something more meaningful.

A content type is nice, but the real use comes from assigning some fields to it and making it available in a list. (our content type is based on item). The minimal xml for a field in a content type is the following:

1. <Field ID="{8617CAAA-45D0-4C81-85C9-D1F7BAF99580}" Group ="Travel Agency" Name="StarsHotel" DisplayName="Number of Stars" Type="Number" />

You need to give a field an ID (Guid), a name and a type. For a list of the available types you can check out my blog post on available field types. As we are basing our content type on the item content type, we will already have a title field (which we will be using for the name of the hotel. Let’s add the following properties to our hotel

• Number of rooms – Number
• Pool – Yes/No
• Bar – Yes/No
• Stars – Number

Once we added all the fields, we will be adding a reference to these fields (who will result in site columns) in our content type with following syntax:

1. <FieldRef ID="{8617CAAA-45D0-4C81-85C9-D1F7BAF99580}" Name="StarsHotel"/>

If you did all that correctly you should have the following xml.

Code Snippet

1. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
2. <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
3.   <!– Parent ContentType: Item (0×01) –>
4.   <Field ID="{24A3D7D7-EF78-4184-8DA0-E8FC019773AD}" Group ="Travel Agency" Name="Rooms" DisplayName ="Number of Rooms" Type="Number" />
5.   <Field ID="{E76BCA8A-3385-40E2-AC27-2A04F04F7B49}" Group ="Travel Agency" Name="Pool" DisplayName ="Pool Available" Type="Boolean" />
6.   <Field ID="{C0890629-8B34-4713-B8C0-61D0D84B6C96}" Group ="Travel Agency" Name="Bar" DisplayName ="Bar Available" Type="Boolean" />
7.   <Field ID="{8617CAAA-45D0-4C81-85C9-D1F7BAF99580}" Group ="Travel Agency" Name="StarsHotel" DisplayName="Number of Stars" Type="Number" />
8.   <ContentType ID="0x01007319db2fac804824ab4fec5c3c2d2208"
9.                Name="Hotel"
10.                Group="Travel Agency"
11.                Description="This Content Type described a hotel that can be booked by the Travel Agency"
12.                Inherits="TRUE"
13.                Version="0">
14.     <FieldRefs>
15.       <FieldRef ID="{24A3D7D7-EF78-4184-8DA0-E8FC019773AD}" Name="Rooms"/>
16.       <FieldRef ID="{E76BCA8A-3385-40E2-AC27-2A04F04F7B49}" Name="Pool"/>
17.       <FieldRef ID="{C0890629-8B34-4713-B8C0-61D0D84B6C96}" Name="Bar"/>
18.       <FieldRef ID="{8617CAAA-45D0-4C81-85C9-D1F7BAF99580}" Name="StarsHotel"/>
19.     </FieldRefs>
20.   </ContentType>
21. </Elements>

Let’s deploy that to our SharePoint Server.

In the site settings of the site collection that we are deploying to, you should see the site columns under Travel Agency and you should see the Content Type under Travel Agency as well. You now succesfully deployed your content type. Once you link it to a list you end up with a hotel content type in your list.

In my next blog post I’ll handle linking this content type to a list in your project instead of doing it in the UI.

Available Field Types in SharePoint 2010

This post is a compilation of the fldtypes.xml and the fldtypes_*.xml files in SP2010 that gives a clear overview of the field types we can use. I haven’t added the use of each field yet as I need to test each field to get a good feeling of what it  does.

Out of the box Field Types

Name	Use
AllDayEvent
Attachments
Boolean
BusinessData
Calculated
Choice
Computed
ContentTypeId
Counter
CrossProjectLink
Currency
DateTime
Decimal
File
GridChoice
Guid
Integer
Lookup
LookupMulti
ModStat
MultiChoice
MultiColumn
Note
Number
PageSeperator
Recurrence
Text
ThreadIndex
Threading
Url
User
UserMulti
WorkflowEventType
WorkflowStatus

GROUPBOARD Field Types

Name	Use
CallTo
Confirmation
ContactInfo
Facilities
FreeBusy
Overbook
SendTo
WhereAbout

GROUPBOARD Upgrade Field Types (do not use)

Name	Use
GbwLocation
GbwParticipants
GbwSREnd
GbwSRStart

Hold Field Types

Name	Use
HoldsField
ExemptField

Publishing Field Types

Name	Use
HTML
Image
Link
SummaryLinks
LayoutVariationsField
ContentTypeIdFieldType
PublishingScheduleStartDateFieldType
PublishingScheduleEndDateFieldType
MediaFieldType

SPRating Field Types

Name	Use
AverageRating
RatingCount

TargetTo Field Types

Name	Use
TargetTo

Taxonomy Field Types

Name	Use
TaxonomyFieldType
TaxonomyFieldTypeMulti

Error occurred in deployment step ‘Recycle IIS Application Pool’: The local SharePoint server is not available.

I installed the RTM bits of SharePoint 2010 during the weekend. When I was good to go! I started building my first SharePoint Project. Once I tried to deploy, all I got was “Error occurred in deployment step ‘Recycle IIS Application Pool’: The local SharePoint server is not available.”. It took quite a while to figure out what went wrong, and mainly thanks to this blog post I managed to get my stuff working. I personally don’t like to have to change the rights for every content database I create. Therefor, if you do not wish to dive into your SQL every time you want to deploy your solution on a different content database, give your user in SQL Server sysadmin rights. That way it will work for every content database.

NOTE: I got this behavior from installing SharePoint the way you should install it under a different domain account(DOMAINNAME\InstallAccount) and then using “my own account” (DOMAINNAME\Koen) to develop.

All sites search scope returns results, This Site scope returns no results

I had an interesting issue at the customer. When searching through the search center (all sites scope) it returned results from site X. However, when I did the same query in the This Site:X scope, I had no results returned. The full crawl and the incremental crawl did work fine (as in that case All Sites wouldn’t return results anyway). As it turns out this is also related to the loopbackcheck issue in IIS/SharePoint. If you see this behavior on your SharePoint environment you should see acces denied errors popping up in your event viewer and you can refer to this post to fix it: http://koenvosters.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/access-denied-when-using-hostname-search-and-site-on-moss-2007/

SQL Aliasing within SharePoint

As I recently heard about SQL Aliasing I tried to figure out how it all works. There is a nice post by Thomas Vochten on the subject on how to set it up :
http://thomasvochten.be/blog/post/2009/03/19/Using-SQL-Aliases-with-SharePoint.aspx

Things to take into account :
SQL Aliasing is NOT configured on the SQL Server, it is configured on every server of your SharePoint Farm.
If you want to add servers to an already existing farm and you can’t find any documentation on the aliases, just go to one of the servers in the farm and run cliconfg.exe.
The advantage of this approach is that if you ever want to move your SharePoint databases to a new SQL Server all you need to do is change the SQL Alias.

MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 Version / Build Numbers

Not a very original post, but as I always seem to stumble upon those specific posts that have all the numbers apart the one I need, I decided to add them to my blog as well. I’ll keep this one up to date, for my own sake

12.0.0.6529 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 Feb 2010 Cumulative update
12.0.0.6524 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 Dec 2009 Cumulative update
12.0.0.6520 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 Oct 2009 Cumulative update
12.0.0.6414 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 Aug 2009 Cumulative update
12.0.0.6510 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 June 2009 Cumulative update
12.0.0.6504 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 April 2009 Cumulative update
12.0.0.6421 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 Service Pack 2
12.0.0.6341 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 Feb 2009 Cumulative update
12.0.0.6327 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 Aug 2008 Cumulative update
12.0.0.6318 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 Infrastructure Update
12.0.0.6303 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 post-SP1 hotfix
12.0.0.6301 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 post-SP1 hotfix
12.0.0.6300 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 post-SP1 hotfix
12.0.0.6219 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 SP1
12.0.0.6039 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 October public update
12.0.0.6036 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 August 24, 2007 hotfix package
12.0.0.4518 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 RTM
12.0.0.4407 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 Beta 2 TR
12.0.0.4017 : MOSS 2007 – WSS 3.0 Beta 2

User Profiles not in sync with site collections after a name / property change

At one of our customers we had a sync problem with the user profiles and the wss 3.0 user profile store on site collection level. To check which content databases were out of sync we used the common
stsadm -o sync -listolddatabases 5

This shows a list of all the databases that are out of sync. By using
stsadm –o sync –deleteolddatabases 5
you can delete those userprofilesync databases (not the content database itself and by then running something like)
stsadm –o sync –synctiming M:5
stsadm –o sync –sweeptiming M:5

you should see your userprofile syncing in 5 minutes. Except for the fact that in this case it didn’t do the trick. Whenever I used domain\username in the people picker, it resolved to the old username and not the new one. Some blogs talk about a full server restart, but as it is a large production environment (and the fact that the issue isn’t realy blocking business) that was not an option. In the end, adding the user with the domain\accountname to a SharePoint group it resolved to the old name. However, 5 minutes later the old name was replaced with the new name and the profile was in sync again. So if the stsadm command doesn’t get it in sync, add the user to one of your site collection groups and it will sync afterwards.

CaptureDeviceConfiguration.RequestDeviceAccess() does not show the authorization popup

Today I started playing a bit with Silverlight 4.0 RC. One of the things I wanted to do is to check out how to make my webcam work. If I look at the example code out there, one thing doesn’t really seem to be explained. When you call CaptureDeviceConfiguration.RequestDeviceAccess() in the constructor of your page it will not work as you are not in the UI thread. The authorization popup will not appear and you will not be able to grant Silverlight acces to your webcam.

The Web application at (url) could not be found.

Possible causes:

- You made a typo.
- You made a typo.
- You created a SharePoint 2007 x64 development machine. Don’t do that, make a x86 (32bit) installation and forget about developing under x64 for MOSS 2007.
- You are running a website that accesses SharePoint data and the application pool does not have the same identity as the application pool SharePoint is running under. In my opinion this should work with any identity as long as it has acces to SharePoint but clearly it doesn’t… Rules there are supposed to be that the user accessing the SPSite object should be a site collection administrator?

Note that I added you made a typo twice, it’s because for some reason in my environment the create a new web application page added a dot (.) after my servername, so my web application url was http://servername.:2010 instead of http://servername:2010. Internet Explorer works PERFECTLY when you use http://servername:2010 without the dot (.) but when you copy this into your code it gives an error as it is looking for http://servername.:2010. This one got me stuck for quite a while.

One or more field types are not installed properly. Go to the list settings page to delete these fields.

This blog post (and eventual updates) can now be found at my new blog : http://www.koenvosters.be  Url of this blog post: http://www.koenvosters.be/post/one-or-more-field-types-are-not-installed-properly-go-to-the-list-settings-page-to-delete-these-fields.aspx

Today one of our developers got this error when using an SPQuery. He asked me to help out, and in most cases it means that you are not using the internal name of the field. So that was the first step I took to replace his code and use the internal name of the field. The best way of course would be to use the internal field as a parameter:

q.Query = string.Format(“<Where>” +

“<And>” +

“<Eq>” +

“<FieldRef Name=\”{0}\”></FieldRef><Value Type=\”Boolean\”>1</Value></Eq>” +

“<Eq><FieldRef Name=\”{1}\”></FieldRef><Value Type=\”Boolean\”>1</Value>” +

“</Eq>” +

“</And>” +

“</Where>”, spField1.InternalName, spfield2.InternalName);

After doing that, it still gave the same error. Debugging it showed us that the same error kept popping up, although the internal field names were used. Last resort was to use the U2U CAML Query builder and see if anything was wrong. It appeared that the </Eq><Eq> was missing between the FieldRefs. This is what the correct query string should be:

q.Query = string.Format(“<Where>” +

“<And>” +

“<Eq>” +

“<FieldRef Name=\”{0}\”></FieldRef><Value Type=\”Boolean\”>1</Value></Eq>” +

“<Eq><FieldRef Name=\”{1}\”></FieldRef><Value Type=\”Boolean\”>1</Value>” +

“</Eq>” +

“</And>” +

“</Where>”, spField1.InternalName, spfield2.InternalName);

So even though the error message usually means that your internal names are not correct, messing up the query with the <Eq> tags seems to result in the same error.

SharePoint 2010 install error : The errorData argument cannot be null or zero length

This blog post (and eventual updates) can now be found at my new blog : http://www.koenvosters.be  Url of this blog post: http://www.koenvosters.be/post/sharepoint-2010-install-error-the-errordata-argument-cannot-be-null-or-zero-length.aspx

When I started to install a new clean SharePoint 2010 server I came across this error during the configuration wizard (when selecting the SQL Server instance):

System.ArgumentNullException was thrown. Additional exception information: The errorData argument cannot be null or zero length. Parameter name: errorData.

Googling/Binging it brought me to various solutions about firewalls etcetera, but as this was a local machine install that couldn’t be the cause of the problem. Appearantly this cryptic message just means one thing: I can’t find your SQL Server. Due to changing the development machine to a domain controller after installing SQL, the service account for SQL didn’t have the required access. If you have the same problem, do not change it in your services screen, change it in your SQL Server Configuration Manager. If that fails with an error message (as it did in my case), add the service account to your administrator group, start the services, fake to change it again and remove the account from the administrator group. That should leave you with a running SQL and now you can run the configuration wizard of SharePoint 2010.

I found my theme back!

Yep, after spending some time in the theme selector I found my theme back. I changed it to a nice red for the christmas period.
Today is gonna be a good day :p On a sidenote, I’m looking into MVC and learning some cool stuff, soon back to SharePoint 2010 though

ERROR: Failed invoking job id

This blog post (and eventual updates) can now be found at my new blog : http://www.koenvosters.be  Url of this blog post: http://www.koenvosters.be/post/error-failed-invoking-job-id.aspx

Today my development machine decided to crash and burn down. SharePoint Central admin was no longer working. When that no longer works, step one is to start the configuration wizard and hope it fixes everything. But that failed as well. It did however gave me an exception that helped me figure out what was going wrong: An exception of type System.Security.Principal.IdentityNotMappedException was thrown. Additional exception information: Some or all identity references could not be translated.
In my SharePoint logs I had the following error popping up constantly:

12/14/2009 13:50:01.32 OWSTIMER.EXE (0×0160) 0×0168 Windows SharePoint Services Timer 5uuq Unexpected ERROR: Failed invoking job id {A71C27B4-9023-4727-A90B-3E60171CF790}
12/14/2009 13:50:04.31 OWSTIMER.EXE (0×0160) 0x00DC Windows SharePoint Services General 8e2s Medium Unknown SPRequest error occurred. More information: 0×80070005

So something was wrong with the identities. As it is a development box and no one else touches it but me I knew none of the identies/passwords were changed. I have no clue how it went wrong, but by making use of stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlong -password I managed to get everything up and running again.