Rich Finn

My datacenter is looking to upgrade our Windows 2008 servers to Windows 2008 R2 to solve a couple issues that currently require patches that take longer to install than it takes to just do an upgrade. They’ve been hesitant to upgrade the SharePoint farms because, according to them, SharePoint is some kind of voodoo app that gets angry if you don’t properly care and feed it according to the written Word. So, I pointed them to an internal single machine farm that is used for testing and SharePoint newbies to get their feet wet in the 2010 version.

The upgrade went very smooth, and after I was given the machine back the first thing I did was go on and try to access Central Admin.

Boom!

Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies

Searching on that error pointed me to the following blog post by Sensoft2000: http://sensoft2000-sharepoint.blogspot.com/2010/06/could-not-load-file-or-assembly.html

Looks like the solution is to install the Windows Identity Foundation.

After the install, everything seems to be working fine so far. Will update if I find anything else.

When deploying a SharePoint farm solution from Visual Studio 2010 today using the Deploy command in the right-click context menu on the project node:

I got this error: Error occurred in deployment step 'Recycle IIS Application Pool': <nativehr>0x80070005</nativehr><nativestack></nativestack>Access denied.

Turns out I wasn’t a site collection admin. Seems easy enough, but my local dev environment is a domain controller, and I hadn’t given the account I was logged onto the machine with access to the site.

Recently a client has been having issue with page layouts that contain a UserField control (People Picker). Sometimes, the People Picker will loose the resolution of the user selected and instead display a bunch of strange XML/XSL along with the message 'You are only allowed to enter one item', as shown below:

As you can see, there’s also a reference to the css class ‘ms-entity-resolved’ in the XSL.

It turns out that the issue is due to a conflict between the Content Editor Web Part and the People Picker.

The path to duplicate the issue in a clean environment is as follows:

1) Create a new page layout containing a single web part zone and add the Contact field to the layout, which adds the People Picker to the page.
2) Create a page using the layout, go into edit mode, and select a user in the People Picker.
3) Add a Content Editor Web Part to the web part zone, and modify the part.
4) Open the Rich Text Editor, add some content, click OK which will refresh the page.

After the page refreshes, the user selected in the People Picker shows like it does in the screen shot above.

Here are some links I’ve found with other people who have seen a similar behavior.

MOSS 2007 – SP2 / April CU Publishing Bug (Team Eli’s blog)
Problem adding alerts after installing SharePoint Service Pack 2 (Bamboo Nation)
Issue with Content Editor Web Part and UserField (MSDN SharePoint forums)

Looking at the posts, it seems this issue was introduced with Service Pack 2 for SharePoint. As of the December 2009 Cumulative Update (CU), however, it’s still an issue. Luckily, it looks like the February 2010 CU fixes it.

I recently installed Office 2010 on a secondary machine at work that had a fresh install of Windows 7, and I was able to experience the Social Connector in all it’s glory against my primary corporate Exchange inbox. Very cool stuff!  At the bottom of the Reading Pane, a new pane called the People Pane lives that groups all emails, attachments, and meetings you have in common with the people who are listed in the email you’, as well as items the person has published on their SharePoint 2010 MySite page. There are also other connection providers available for connecting to social networking sites LinkedIn and MySpace, and Facebook and Windows Live providers are currently in the works

The strange thing is that it wasn’t present on my primary machine, and I couldn’t figure out how to turn it on. It showed as an Add-In that was installed and running, but it wasn’t showing up at the bottom of the Reading Pane, nor was the option present on the view tab!

Turns out that there was a setting turned off in the registry. I found the post “How to use Group Policy to Enabled/Disable Outlook 2010 Social Connector (a.k.a. People Pane)” by Ben Ball, and it contained the nugget that I needed.

From Ben’s post:

However some (out of touch) IT organizations might not want this feature enabled in your organization and so there is a registry kill switch that can be controlled via group policy to enable/disable this option.
Key: HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\SocialConnector
Value: RunOSC (REG_DWORD)
Data: 0 = Disabled
Data: 1 = Enabled

Sure enough, my registry had this switch off. I’m not sure what turned it off, but I have a have a feeling it wasn’t group policy that disabled it.

Just remember – don’t mess with the registry unless you back it up first, and feel comfortable enough to change settings inside it.

Enjoy the Social Connector…

I have a machine that’s not on a domain, and I want to have a complete install of SharePoint 2010, not a standalone version. Because of this, I need to use local machine accounts

I followed the post ‘Single Server Complete Install of SharePoint 2010 using local accounts’ by Neil Hodgkinson to perform the setup of the configuration database using local machine accounts, and it worked great, but now I need a managed account.

With the account set up, I try and add the account through the UI and I get this error:
The specified user [accountname] is a local account. Local accounts should only be used in stand alone mode.

Once again, Power Shell to the rescue. Here’s the script:

First – get the credential and place it in a variable using the Get-Credential cmdlet.
$account = Get-Credential “machinename\accountname”

You’ll be presented with a challenge where you need to enter the password for the account

Then, use the New-SPManagedAccount cmdlet, passing the $account variable in for the –Credential parameter:
New-SPManagedAccount -Credential $account

You’ll still will get a warning, but the account will be added to the list of managed accounts.

<update date="May 7, 2010">
I don't recommend using local machine accounts. Turn your machine into a domain controller if you can. While local accounts may have made sense for MOSS in some cases, it's not worth the headache in 2010
</update>

When prepping my Windows 2008 R2 machines for SharePoint 2010, I use McAfee Virus Scan 8.7i for virus protection. Halfway through the install, I always get a error that pops stating:

Error 1920.Service McAfeeFramework (McAfeeFramework) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services.

According to this McAfee KB article, when you see the error, leave it there because you need to make some registry adjustments.

Here’s the steps as taken from the KB article:

1. Start the VirusScan Enterprise 8.7i installation locally.
2. During installation, wait for the 1920 error to occur.
   IMPORTANT: Do not dismiss the 1920 error dialog box.
3. Click Start, Run, type regedit, and click OK. 
4. Navigate to and expand the following key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\
   
5. In the left pane, scroll down and select the sub-key: mfeapfk.
6. In the right pane, right-click ImagePath and select Modify.
7. In the Value Data field, modify the contents to state the full path.
   Example:

   Existing ImagePath:
   system32\drivers\mfeapfk.sys

   Modify ImagePath to include:
   c:\windows\system32\drivers\mfeapfk.sys

8. Repeat the previous steps for the following two McAfee keys.
   IMPORTANT: Do not make this change for any other McAfee drivers:
   • mfeavfk.sys
   • mfebopk.sys 
     
9. Close the registry editor.
10. Dismiss the error and reattempt the installation.

When changing the application pool identity account in SharePoint 2007, you could just change it through the normal process in IIS using the Identity tab of the application pool’s properties dialog:

but you might notice that these changes don’t stick. This is because SharePoint actually manages the settings for service accounts in Central Administration.

Here’s how you change the service account for an application pool:

1) Open Central Administration and go to the Operations tab

2) Click the ‘Service accounts’ link in the the Security Configuration group

3) Click the radio button labeled ‘Web application pool’, select the ‘Windows SharePoint Services Web Application’ item in the ‘Web service’ drop down, and select the application pool that you need to change.

4) The username text box Configurable service section will be populated with the existing service account name, and you can now edit it and its password.

5) Click OK when you’re done, and you’ll be presented with a JavaScript alert that says you need to run IISReset /NOFORCE on all servers in the farm.  Doing this will ensure the cached credentials on the servers are reset with the new ones.

Having heard about a potential Silverlight web part in SharePoint 2010, I was thinking ‘it sure would be nice to have something like that in SharePoint 2007’ A web part with no configuration of anything (except for the Silverlight MIME types) The result - the SPilverlight web part for SharePoint 2007.

Here’s how it works:

1) Get the SPilverlight.wsp file from Codeplex

2) Add the solution to your farm, and deploy it to a web application:

a) In the same directory as the one you placed the wsp file, add the solution using:
stsadm –o addsolution –name spilverlight.wsp

b) Deploy the solution to the web applicaiton using:
stsadm -o deploysolution -n spilverlight.wsp -immediate -allowgacdeployment –url http://URL_OF_WEB _APPLICATION

3) Install the SPilverlight Feature using:
stsadm –o installfeature –name spilverlight

4) Activate the spilverlight feature using:
stsadm –o activatefeature –name spilverlight –url http://URL_OF_SITE_COLLECTION

This will add the SPilverlight web part to the site collection’s web part gallery

5) Add the SPilverlight web part to a page. By default, the part will be in the Miscellaneous web part group

6) Edit the web part properties and add the path to the XAP file
 
The init properties property is the same as the 'param value="””/" name="”InitParams”"' element in the Silverlight object tag.

7) Enjoy the Silverlight application that you spent so much time on , now running in SharePoint.

This web part uses the createSL JavaScript method that was originally posted by Karine Bosch, and includes the Silverlight.js file that is shipped with the Microsoft Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1. All JavaScript is embedded in the assembly and exposed via web resources.

I’m working on getting my technical blog back online. After crashing pretty hard, I’ve decided to try hosting the blog on my own using 1and1 rather then burden a good friend of mine any longer. Although I REALLY appreciate all Wade did to get me started blogging over two years ago, I just think now’s the time to forge my own way.

I must say though, in the two days I’ve been messing around, it’s been pretty cool!. I like having the ability to control 97% of it (1and1 has the final 3%). I can mess around with Silverlight, too, (check out my main home page) although 1and1 doesn’t serve XAP files (need to rename to ZIP, not a big deal). This blog is running version 2.3 of dasBlog to start out with, and getting it up and running in 1and1 wasn’t that hard, thanks to The Renegade Diaries post on how to configure it.

So, now I’m working on getting the content from my original blog over here so I can at least put back some of the posts that got some decent hits.

I’m a huge fan of the Telerik RadEditor for rich-text editing in SharePoint 2007, however, since it’s release, there has been a very frustrating issue with the Reusable Content functionality in the control.  It hasn’t worked.

The core of the issue is that the relationship between the Reusable Content fragment and the Reusable Content list is severed when the page is saved.

You can read about the issue on WebGrizzly’s blog, as well as on Telerik’s site both here and here.  There’s even a post where Telerik says that they have done all they can and don’t think it’s possible to have Reusable Content in the RadEditor.

I didn’t like the sound of this, as I HAD to have this working in the RadEditor for a custom Feature I was working on, so in I dove.  By walking down the path that the content takes in SharePoint’s default rich-text-editor, I found that it’s a combination of both client-side and server-side code that makes Reusable Content possible.

In order to fix the RadEditor, you have to do a bit of custom coding.  I’m not going to go into Solutions or Features here, as you already should know how to create them if you want to fix the control, and to make things easier, I’ve posted the class file on CodePlex.  Essentially, you need to create your own custom implementation of the RadEditor by inheriting from the RadHtmlField and drawing the code out a little further to add the needed client-side and server-side processing to wire up the functionality.

If the task of creating your own implementation of the RadEditor seems a little daunting, trust me, it’s not that bad, and it’s completely worth it.  As you already know, the RadEditor is awesome, and Telerik’s controls are some of the best out there.  The controls in Telerik’s ASP.NET AJAX suite even work in SharePoint, and if you get the full version of the RadEditor for SharePoint, you actually are getting the full suite.

Download the RadEditor Reusable Content fix

So – you may be wondering, have you shared this code with Telerik?

I actually contacted Telerik and was surprised by the response I got.  I was asked if I had tested this fix with the blog and wiki editors, as well as the web part editor.  Telerik was also curious if I was able to fix the Reusable Content fragment selection dialog box (_layouts/ReusableTextPicker.aspx) in Firefox, as they were hesitant to implement code that still exposed some issues related with Reusable Content. I responded with my opinion that it shouldn’t matter as Reusable Content is a component of the Publishing Feature – the classname of the ResusableTextPicker is Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.CodeBehind.ReusableTextPickerPage – and the button for adding Reusable Content is on the toolbar of the out-of-box text editor for Publishing Fields.  The blog and wiki templates are part of WSS, not SharePoint, and the content editor web part, even added to pages on Publishing sites, does not have the ability to add Reusable Content.

As for the errors on the ReusableTextPicker page in FireFox, I don’t feel that it should be Telerik’s responsibility (or mine of that matter) to fix it. That problem is caused by the JavaScript used to retrieve the values of the expando attributes on the table rows of the page as it’s shipped by Microsoft.  If only they had used JQuery…

One final thing – this is not supported by Telerik!  If you implement, you have to give thought about your upgrade path when Telerik releases a new version of the assembly.  Also, I’m leaving my code in beta for right now as I’m the only one i know of that’s used it, so if you give it a shot, please let me know how it works out for you.