Archive for 'SharePoint'
The SharePoint Development Tax
Posted on 04. Nov, 2008 by bryan.
Typically when you are talking about SharePoint the conversation revolves around all of the great "out of the box" functionality you receive with the product. In no way do I intend to argue against that, SharePoint is a fantastic product that does many things very well.
SharePoint as a development platform… well, that’s a whole different story! Jeffrey Palermo talks about it here, although his primary gripe seems to be that SharePoint has to run on a server OS, which would require using a development VM. I do all development in VMs regardless, so that isn’t really a deal-breaker for me at all. Speaking of which, Andrew Connell has a great blog posting on using differencing disks with Microsoft Virtual PC.
Charles Chen argues the opposite in his blog posting, defending SharePoint as a development environment and taking Palermo to task on a point-by-point basis.
One thing I don’t see mentioned by either is what I am going to refer to as the SharePoint Development Tax(tm). What is this tax? Is a break given to 95% of working families? Well, no. This tax comes in the form of time spent waiting for solutions to deploy, 12 hives to be copied, and app pools to be recycled. When working with SharePoint as a development environment, several times a day you will need to deploy solutions, which cause app pools to recycle, you may need to copy new assemblies to the GAC, again, requiring app pool recycles. So what’s so bad about that? That happens all the time in ASP.NET development, why is it bad for SharePoint? Well. The issue is HOW LONG SharePoint takes to recycle. Sure, you could complain about my development environment, but I am running on a quad-core 2.2 GHz machine with 8 GB RAM, and I give my development VPC 3 GB RAM. How long does it take? On average, a solution deployment takes 45-60 seconds. An app pool recycle takes almost 2 minutes. I probably go through about 10-20 app pool recycles a day, eating up 20-40 minutes of time, not to mention lost productivity due to falling "out of the zone". In Joel Spolsky’s famed blog posting 12 Steps to Better Code there are several mentions of how a 15 second break in concentration causes a 15 minute lapse in productivity.
Perhaps I should quit complaining though… The SharePoint Development Tax has given me lots of extra time to play guitar while watching spinning circle animations!
Continue Reading
Value does not fall within the expected range
Posted on 09. Oct, 2008 by bryan.
I’ve been battling this error several times over the past few weeks in varying contexts. Today’s occurrence was in accessing "Page Settings" of a MOSS Page. Thanks to YongYS for the following fix:
A few weeks ago I was running into this issue after backing up a content database and moving it to another farm. Thanks to Stefan Gossner to pointing out the error in my ways:
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
Custom Workflows with Collect Data
Posted on 25. Jun, 2008 by bryan.
In the past week I have implemented several custom workflows for a client using SharePoint Designer. The workflows were pretty simple: A Forms Services form would be completed, in the form would be a the Manager’s name and e-mail address. The workflow would use the "Collect Data" action to perform an approval workflow, assigning an item to the manager specified in the form. Trouble was, the manager would receive the task notification, click the link in the e-mail to edit the task item, and receive an access denied error.
For the purposes of troubleshooting I opened the permissions on the task list as much as possible, granting nt authorityall authenticated users the Full Control permission. Still the users received "Access denied". Then, I found the following forum thread:
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1838253&SiteID=17
The solution wound up being a combination of two posts, this was by "Vansen":
I opened up the Site using the Sharepoint Designer. Then i right-clicked the workflows folder and chose properties. In the Security Tab i clicked the link "Manage Permissions using the browser". Then a new Browser window opened and i was able to adjust the rights for the Workflow Folder. In my case the rights inheritance was broken. I restored it and it worked.
And this one by "Andre Rentes":
I found a solution but not is the better…
-> Open Sharepoint Designer,
-> right click on Workflow 1 (My workflow)
-> select Publish Selected Files…
-> choose File System and write a location ( c: ) for example
-> Click OK
Combining these two solutions fixed all three of the problematic workflows! Thanks guys!
Continue Reading
Logged in as System Account
Posted on 31. Mar, 2008 by bryan.
Had an issue today where a developer was testing a web part that required a user profile, and an exception was being thrown that the user profile did not exist. We verified in the SSP that the user profile indeed existed, and also used the "stsadm -o sync" command to force a profile synchronization. However, we discovered that SharePoint was not seeing the actual user name that the user was logged in as, instead SharePoint saw it as "SHAREPOINTSystem". This led us to the following forum thread:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1195418&SiteID=1
What ended up being the issue is that the developer had configured the SharePoint application pool to run as the same identity that he was logging into SharePoint as. We changed the configured identity in Central Admin -> Operations -> Service Accounts to use Network Service instead and the issue was resolved.
Continue Reading
Cannot start service SPAdmin on computer ‘.’
Posted on 25. Mar, 2008 by bryan.
Came in the office today to an issue with a MOSS box that was recently stood up in our lab environment. The server was configured to do automatic updates, and installed SharePoint updates overnight. Turns out the upgrade portion of the update failed, and perusing the diagnostic logs revealed the following error:
Cannot start service SPAdmin on computer ‘.’
I came across the following blog posting that ultimately supplied the remedy:
Bill Baer : KB934525 Troubleshooting "Cannot start service SPAdmin on computer ‘.’."
Option #4 took care of things:
- On the machine where psconfig failed to start the SPAdmin service run:
%commonprogramfiles%Microsoft SharedWeb Server Extensions12BINpsconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force
Continue Reading
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
Continue Reading
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.
Continue Reading
“The page you are attempting to save has been modified by another user since you began editing”
Posted on 17. Dec, 2007 by bryan.
I recently ran into an issue where editing content within a Content Editor web part would cause the following message to appear in the Publishing Toolbar:
The page you are attempting to save has been modified by another user since you began editing
At that point you would have to select “Save and Overwrite Changes” in order to proceed. This would happen any time that you edited a page, provided that you first selected “Edit Page” from the Site Actions menu. If you simply clicked the drop-down for the web part and selected “Modify Shared Web Part”, this problem would not appear.
After spending a significant amount of time troubleshooting the issue it was narrowed down to one of the customizations that was made to the master page. The Site Actions menu had been relocated to under the Quick Links menu.
I went back to the default.master page that ships stock with MOSS to try to reproduce the issue. Sure enough, if I put the Site Actions menu after the Publishing Console, I would receive the “page has been modified” error. If I put that Site Actions menu prior to the Publishing Console, everything would work fine.
After a little more than 5 hours troubleshooting the issue, it was determined that simply relocating the Site Actions menu to the top of the page was the simplest solution, however I would like to understand why it cannot follow the Publishing Console, or what needs to be done so it can.
Continue Reading
Cleaning Up Orphaned Webs
Posted on 24. Oct, 2007 by bryan.
Ran into an issue today with installing the October 9th SharePoint Security Patch. During the content database upgrade I received several errors that certain sites and webs were missing. This is due to the staging content database being migrated from a development content database, and there are slight differences in the configuration databases between the two environments. In any event, I found the following posting from Cory Burns that took care of the issue:
How to Clean Orphans from your environment.
(Be smart have backups prior whenever you are performing maintenance on your farm, use suggestions at your own risk.)
Configuration Orphans: These are the orphans that reside in your configuration database but have no child counterpart (contentDB entry). Cleaning these are the easiest of all the orphans. Simply detach the content database from your farm that was included in the result set and reattach it. This will refresh the sitelist that is tied to that content database and will remove the stale entry.
Sharepoint Tips and Tricks : Sharepoint Orphans Explained
Continue Reading
About
Bryan Napier, Software Developer and Technology Enthusiast in Centreville, Maryland. More about me
