Automated builds using VSeWSS 1.3

I stumbled upon this post from John W Powell explaining how to create a nightly build using the Visual Studio Extensions for WSS 3.0. Exteremely interesting and something I’m gonna try out later this week. Let’s hope it’s a bit easier to do so in VS 2010 with MOSS 2010

Authentication problem on MOSS (login box keeps popping up)

Today I had a rather weird problem at a client. Whenever he tried to log on to his new extranet he had a login box coming up constantly, whatever he clicked on. First thought were changing the browser settings to automatically log in when on an intranet, but that didn’t fix it. When I connected to the site everything did work perfectly, so I still searched for a client setting. When checking out online I got some information about this error popping up when you have external content on your site. That was not the case, everything was local. The only thing on the site that wasn’t OOTB were the design elements. Just to try, I removed the design elements. The user tested and the login box disappeared, everything was working just fine. First idea was to check the security of the _layouts folder, but the standard SharePoint images were working just fine, so it couldn’t be the folder. I decided to check out the images in the 12 hive to see if there was something weird with them. And there it was, appearantly by copying the images to the 12 hive only the administrator had read/write acces to the images. Giving the authenticated users reading rights on the images fixed the issue.

Access Denied when using hostname (search and site) on MOSS 2007.

Lately I’ve ran into a weird bug that appearantly has to do with the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack. When I tried a SharePoint site with http://spdev1:35000 everything worked like a charm. However, if I used a hostname http://customerdemo then all of a sudden I got Access is denied. As I used the administrator account with full access that was quite weird. As I didn’t get into SharePoint it meant that the problem had to be in IIS. After looking up some stuff I came to a Microsoft hotfix that sorted my problem : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861

That hotfix does not really mention the hostname problem, but it does fix the problem. Method1 is what you should go for on a production environment, Method 2 is what you can use on a dev box.
Method 2:

Method 2: Disable the loopback check

Follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
3. Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
7. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer.

I recalled seeing this solution on some other Belgian blog post by Sven Gillis. As it turns out there they linked it to the search no longer working (which in my case is quite normal as no account has access to the site). So if you get the following in your search you can use the above solution as well:
Access is denied. Verify that either the Default Content Access Account has access to this repository, or add a crawl rule to crawl this repository. If the repository being crawled is a SharePoint repository, verify that the account you are using has “Full Read” permissions on the SharePoint Web Application being crawled. (The item was deleted because it was either not found or the crawler was denied access to it.)

Quite a few new releases: IE 8.0, SharePoint Themes, Silverlight 3 Beta

There have been quite some releases this week

(Microsoft)Internet Explorer 8.0 out of beta: Link
(Microsoft)Ten SharePoint Themes: Link
(Microsoft)SilverLight 3 Beta: Link

Now all I lack is the time to check them out indepth. Gah.

InfoPath either cannot connect to the data source or the service has timed out.

This error is one we get confronted with quite a lot (especially our juniors ). As a clear fix isn’t really described out there I’ll put it here and hope it bubbles up on google

If you are using http://localhost in your webservice url, use http://servername. That should do the trick.

I’ve finally switched to the Dark Side : using Twitter

As I get more and more social push to use facebook, my blog, twitter, … I’ve decided to start using twitter as well If you want to see what I’m up to : http://www.twitter.com/koenvosters

Approaches to Creating Master Pages and Page Layouts in SharePoint Server 2007

Andrew Connell (Microsoft MVP from the Ted Pattison Group) posted a new article on MSDN regarding the creation of master pages and custom page layouts. It explains the different (two) approaches that you can take to create them. Quite an interesting read, especially if you want to know the consequences (pro’s and con’s) of your choice.

Link : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd164422.aspx#MOSS2007CreatingMasterPagesAndPageLayoutsTwoApproaches

Office 14 (Server and clients) delayed till 2010

Yes, about time to make a new post. I’ve been holding off posting to finish my Barcelona stories but there just aren’t enough hours in a day at the moment and this blog needs to stay alive :) On topic now : Steve Ballmer has confirmed that Office 14 has been delayed till 2010. As it is in TAP at the moment that was to be expected as there still needs to be a beta phase. I do hope it does come soon so I can start playing around with it!

Tech Ed Barcelona – Day Two

Tuesday was a very relaxed day, and a bit of a disappointment as well. In the morning I followed the more detailed session on STSDEV by Ted Pattison. The session itself was pretty good, but it left many people wanting. It is often that you use external DLL’s in your SharePoint project (Bamboo, …) and STSDEV doesn’t really support all that. Nevertheless it does help you speed up your SharePoint development and I’ll be doing a short session about it at the office as well. So a bit of a double feeling there. The second session of the day was Creating and Debugging Custom Timer Jobs in WSS 3.0 and that was very interesting. I haven’t coded a timer job myself yet, so I’m definetely going to try that out once I get home. The third session of the day was supposed to be Extreme SharePoint Customization – Understanding SharePoint Custom Fields. Unfortunately it was full when I arrived, so I had to take an alternative and checked out ASPNET MVC. Very nice session, small hickup during the demo but I did learn a lot. Luckily there is a rerun of the Extreme SharePoint Custo session as well so I’ll be able to follow that as wel.

In the afternoon I started with MOSS 2007 as WCM for Internet Facing Websites by Andrew Connell. BIG disappointment. It was the standard presentation of what a MOSS Publishing Site is. So I went to the lab area instead and followed some labs on WCF. Then last, but definetely not least, I took the presentation by Tim Huckaby : Integrating WPF and WCF into your Office Business Applications. And up till now I think that’s the best session I went to. Interesting, well presented and funny. What more do you need to end the day. After a long day of sessions, and the sauna and jacuzzi closing down at 21.00 we decided to do that before going for a bite. As expected, we were exhausted afterwards, went to the big mall right in front of the hotel and had some Burger King. Yes, Burger King, we hardly have those in Belgium so when I’m abroad I try to visit one Only one picture this time, I got a nice SharePoint hat and a U2U T-shirt so it was time for the ultimate nerd pose!

SharePoint Hat and U2U T-Shirt Nerd

Tech Ed EMEA Day One : Keynote and session

And here we are back again, alive and kicking after some good night’s sleep. Today we didn’t do a lot in the morning, we slept till around 10, washed up, had breakfast, finished up some remaing work and posted our previous blog entry. After having it all finished it was time to move to the convention centre for the keynote that kicks off Tech Ed 2008. It was quite interesting as we got to see Visual Studio 2010 and some of the nice and cool features of it, especially the SharePoint Integration. At the end of the keynote it was time to start chosing sessions. I chose a SharePoint track and went for SharePoint : Past, Present and Future in a SaaS world, which spoke exactly about what the title says The session was quite interesting, some Silverlight in combination with Moss 2008 and then a whole lot of information about SharePoint in the cloud. Sadly, it didn’t really bring any new info to me. Iff you follow what is going on from a high level point of view, you would know 99% of what is said during that session. Yanis went for Distributed Embedded Systems – The next big developer opportunity. It gave a nice overview of what can be expected in the future regarding embedded systems and, according to Yanis, a big pile of work is coming our way!

 

Following my SaaS session I had to take a course given by Ted  Pattison (Developing SharePoint Features to create reusable components). It was kind of a disappointment as when you have followed the courses by the Ted Pattison Group you’ll notice that it’s pretty much identical. I hoped for a more indepth course. He did talk about STSDEV though, so that is something nice that I took from that course. Yanis went for Building Data Visualisation Applications with WPF, Silverlight and Surface. It was an ok course where you get an introduction on how to make a rich web tool with little effort. And then was time for a drink! We saw some partners, saw quite a few exhibitants and some interesting tools to help us develop faster and easier.

After the drink we met up with some concolleagues and enjoyed a nice Japanese meal at Cdlc restaurant. This blog is a bit later than usual, as I got ripped off by Telefonica who sold me a 24 hour internet card without mentioning that it is 24 hours in a row and not 24 hours that I can freely choose. See you all tomorrow and enjoy the pictures.

Keynote	On our way to the restaurant	Group Picture
Tajin Morocco	Prawn Shrimps	Waiting for the tram to take us home