Of Ones and Zeros

XSL for Displaying Raw XML in XsltListViewWebPart

Posted on 31. Oct, 2011 by admin.

I am writing this post so that I can hopefully save myself time in the future from trying to track down this little snippet that will take the incoming XML to an XsltListViewWebPart and render it out. This is the snippet:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
 <xsl:template match="/">
 <xmp><xsl:copy-of select="*"/></xmp>
 </xsl:template>
 </xsl:stylesheet>

This snippet comes from a community content comment on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff602042.aspx.

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Use A Records for SharePoint Sites When Using Kerberos

Posted on 12. Jul, 2011 by admin.

When given the choice between using an A DNS record or a CNAME DNS record for your SharePoint web applications, favor an A record particularly if you are using Kerberos authentication.  Reference the following TechNet article:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg502606.aspx

Of particular interest in this article is the following passage:

Kerberos authentication and DNS CNAMEs

There is a known issue with some Kerberos clients (Internet Explorer 7 and 8 included) that attempt to authenticate with Kerberos enabled services that are configured to resolve using DNS CNAMEs instead of A Records. The root of the problem is the client does not correctly form the SPN in the TGS request by creating it using the host name (A Record) instead of the alias name (CNAME).

Example:

A Record: wfe01.contoso.com

CNAME: intranet.contoso.com (aliases wfe01.contoso.com)

If the client attempts to authenticate with http://intranet.contoso.com, the client does not correctly form the SPN and requests a Kerberos ticket for http/wfe01.contoso.com instead of http/intranet.contoso.com

Details regarding the issue can be found in the following articles:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911149/en-us

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938305/en-us

To work around this issue, configure Kerberos enabled services using DNS A records instead of CNAME aliases. The hotfix mentioned in KB article will correct this issue for Internet Explorer but will not correct the issue for the .NET framework (which is used by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for web service communication).

What me and my team experienced is that a customer had a customization which interfaced with Exchange.  The browser authentication to the web application appeared to be working fine, but the double-hop to Exchange was failing with a 401 error.  All SPNs appeared to be correct.  We changed the DNS records from CNAME records to A records and the authentication began to work as expected.

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Couple “Gotchas” with Console Applications and SharePoint 2010

Posted on 12. Jul, 2011 by admin.

Wrote a console application today that synchronizes a SQL database with task information from a SharePoint farm as part of a task aggregation solution for a client. Came across two small “issues” with Visual Studio 2010/SharePoint 2010 and console applications. I am primarily writing this to remind myself later, but perhaps it will help someone else as well.

First “gotcha”: Make sure you set the target .NET Framework to 3.5. By default Visual Studio 2010 is going to select 4.0 and it will then do a bunch of complaining about not finding Microsoft.SharePoint.dll. Yes, the compiler will give a pretty detailed error which may or may not reference the fact that you need to target 3.5, but it had me scratching my head for awhile so I figure its worth capturing.

Second “gotcha”: You need to target x64 platform. I was getting all kinds of crazy behavior when targeting x86. When I would try to create SPSite objects I would get “FileNotFound”. If I would try to use SPWebService.Locate I would get permissions issues. Switch the platform to x64 and everything started working like magic!

That’s it, hope this saves someone some time (preferably me on a later project ).

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IIS and Windows 2003 Mismatched Service Packs

Posted on 11. Sep, 2008 by admin.

I have this nagging feeling that I have been down this road before, so I need to blog it so maybe, just maybe, I won’t waste another hour troubleshooting something I’ve done before.

Scenario:

You browse to Central Admin, or any Site Collection really, and you are prompted incessantly for  your user credentials.  After about 5-8 times, the page comes up.  You are NOT presented with a Forbidden message.

You check your IIS log files, and you see several 401 errors for WebResource.axd.

You remember something about installing SP2 when IIS wasn’t on the box, then installing IIS from a source that did not have the Service Pack slipstreamed.  Hmmm.  Might be relevant.

Solution:

Explained thoroughly by Paul Culmsee on his blog www.cleverworkarounds.com, http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2007/11/15/darn-iis-and-service-packs/.  If it wasn’t foreshadowed by the last sentence of the Scenario, reinstalling Windows Server 2003 SP2 was the solution.

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Internet Explorer (IE) crashing accessing SharePoint lists

Posted on 04. Mar, 2008 by admin.

If you have clients with a mix of Office 2003 and Office 2007 components (for instance Word 2003, Excel 2003, but SharePoint Designer 2007), they may experience intermittent Internet Explorer crashes.  The following hotfix from Microsoft corrects this issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938888

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Import Spreadsheet – “Cannot connect to the server at this time.”

Posted on 04. Mar, 2008 by admin.

Ran into an issue today with trying to import an Excel 2003 spreadsheet into a SharePoint list.  SharePoint would load Excel, then you select the cells in Excel that you want to import, you click Import and Excel responds with "Cannot connect to the server at this time."  After a long while searching for a solution, I came across the following link:

WSS FAQ – I cannot import from Excel 2003 to WSS. What’s…

Basically the solution was 2 workarounds:

a.) Import the spreadsheet into a root site, then create a list template and use that to create the list within a subsite.

or

b.) Use Excel’s List Publishing feature to publish directly to the subsite.

I tested both options and they each worked equally well, I ultimately went with option B as it seemed a cleaner solution.

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