9/3/2010As we all know, SharePoint 2010 is still using the .NET Framework 3.5. That means that your servers may not have the latest .NET Framework 4.0 installed. This could cause some issues if you're trying to use APIs from 4.0, or if you are trying to build some new tools using 4.0, like PowerShell management extensions for example. The solution is to install 4.0 on your server. Here's the quick Step-by-Step for doing this on a Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 system with SharePoint 2010 installed. - Begin by downloading the full version of the Framework from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0a391abd-25c1-4fc0-919f-b21f31ab88b7&displaylang=en
- Once downloaded, double click the installer file named "dotnetFx40_Full_x86_x64.exe".
 - Windows may require you to confirm that you wish to launch the EXE. If it does, simply click "Run".
 - You'd have to accept the EULA. Check the "I have read and accept the license terms" check box.
- Click the "Install" button to commence the installation.
 - The installer will crunch away for a while as it installs the Framework.
 - Once installation complete, click the "Finish" button.
 - No server restart is needed. :-)
Later
C
   
6/24/2010This one was a BEAR to work through. There’s not much out there for it and everywhere I turned it seems everyone else was either having the same problem OR suggestion we “start with a clean install”. Nice suggestion that last one. Almost like… try rebooting the computer… but I digress. With three simple hacks, the install can be “guided” to complete successfully. So hopefully this guide will help some other poor soul save some time when they run into the same issue. Read the article here: http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Articles/How%20do%20I%20-%20Install%20PowerPivot%20into%20an%20EXISTING%20SharePoint%202010%20farm.aspx I hope this saves somebody some time and frustration out there. Later
C FOLLOW ME: 5/4/2010As a SharePoint Developer, you may run across this error at some point. 
It is most common when you’re trying to recompile a SharePoint binary, from a Visual Studio session ON the actual SharePoint server. Of course, in most normal situations, it’s unthinkable to run the compiler on the server, but as SharePoint developers, we know there is no other way to code for the platform so it’s pretty much SOP for us. The problem lies in the locks that are taken by the compiler process on the debug info file. Often the locks are taken by your last debug session and unfortunately the locks aren’t always released, even though you’re the same user from the same application. Call it a multi threading anomaly or something. Whatever it is, this happens in Visual Studio 2008. Enter Process Explorer! This little gem by Mark Russinovich from SysInternals, has been around for a long time, now in it’s 12th version. Microsoft bought SysInternals a couple of years ago, and with it, Mark’s great mind. I must say, it was probably one of the smartest acquisitions that Redmond has ever made. But I digress. So, if you have Process Explorer installed (if you don’t, download it now and do so), it generally lives in the C:\Program Files\Process Explorer folder. To unlock your files and resume your compilation, follow these easy steps: -
Open Windows Explorer. -
Browse to the C:\Program Files\Process Explorer location, or any other alternative location where you may have installed Process Explorer to. -
-
Double click “Procexp.exe” to launch Process Explorer. -
Once Process Explorer opens, it will display a list of all active processes on your system. Odds are that your .pdb file is NOT shown here. -
In the top menu, click the “Find” menu item. -
In the drop down menu, click the “Find Handle or DLL” menu option. NOTE: If you’re a shortcut kinda guy or gal, you could have accessed this option with the “Ctrl+P” keyboard hotkey combo. -
-
In the Process Explorer Search dialog window, enter the name of your DLL, or in our case, the name of our .pdb file. -
Click “Search” or press “Enter”. -
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Process Explorer displays the process that has the lock and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Visual Studio itself.  -
Double click on the “devenv.exe” line. -
Process Explorer now closes the dialog window and the “devenv.exe” item is added to the displayed list. -
Right click the “devenv.exe” line in the displayed list. -
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On the popup menu, click the “Close Handle” menu option. -
Process Explorer will display a warning message noting stability and crashes that may be caused by closing the handles on this file. Of course we understand this and we click “Yes”. Or alternatively, we don’t understand but as a Windows user, we blindly click “Yes” to just make the popup go away.  -
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After closing the handles, we return to Visual Studio and press F5 or click Rebuild and tada!  -
Happy coding! Later
C 4/27/2010Many people launch new businesses or expand small businesses to the point where IT starts to play a role. It is at that precipice where the question about which software to use and build on becomes evident. As happens in most companies, a software package that most closely does what is more urgently needed, is installed by someone and it starts to gain user traction. This repeats over and over again until at some point, someone has to figure out how to untangle the spaghetti mess that resulted. If only someone had planned the expansion and use of software beforehand, it would have saved tons of time for whoever ends up with that project. And that… is where this series comes into play… I’ve built my career over the last 10 years or so, on Microsoft technologies. There’s always someone out there who’s done what you need, IF you understand what you need. That’s what Enterprise Architects to best. Understanding the business need and marrying that up with technology decisions that will help drive the business forward. I intend this series to provide a road map for anyone who needs to build a business on technology that’ll allow less rework down the road. I will cover all the topics as one may encounter them from the perspective of small (or even one man/woman) IT departments where budgets are tight (especially in the current economy) and getting high priced consultants isn’t always an option. The most expensive thing that’s done in IT, is rework. Doing the same thing over and over again because it wasn’t done properly the first time. My vision for this series is to be a guide that most IT personnel could follow to deploy technologies within their company that’ll be properly positioned to support company growth in the future, requiring little to no rework at any point in time. So without any further delay… here is my Roadmap for this series… Please note that I’ll be updating the Roadmap as time goes on and I write the corresponding articles and link to them. It may be a good idea to Bookmark/Favorite this post for future reference.   
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Installation – Windows Server 2008 R2. Since Windows Server 2008 R2 is the latest and greatest server operating system from Microsoft, we’ll use it as the basis for all our servers. -
Configuration – Creating the Primary Domain Controller – Enabling the Active Directory Domain Services Role on Windows Server 2008 R2. Once we have our first server with an operating system installed, it’s time to create our company domain. We’ll be using Active Directory authentication for our environment. -
Business Continuity – Enabling and Testing the Windows Server Backup Feature on Windows Server 2008 R2. No progress can or should be made until we’re sure we can recover from absolute disaster. That means our server is completely dead and we have to restore onto new metal. Backup and Restore functionality must be tested before we do anything else. -
Configuration – Enabling the Hyper-V Role on Windows Server 2008 R2. Getting ready for virtualization is a key action here. In a small business, there is seldom money for multiple servers so we have to stretch our resources to the max by employing virtualization. Since running absolutely everything on one single server is not only NOT recommended as a Best Practice but also detrimental to scaling with business growth, virtualization is a perfect solution. We will be using Microsoft’s Hyper-V technology to host all our servers on the same physical box. -
Installation – SQL Server 2008 R2 on Hyper-V. Since absolutely everything we’ll do requires a SQL Server database, and since SQL Server 2008 R2 is Microsoft’s latest and greatest database server product, we’ll build on it. Initially we’re not going to cluster or scale the SQL Server, but that will be the first point of scaling once volume and traffic increase. -
Business Continuity – Configuring and Testing Disaster Recovery for Hyper-V Servers. Since our SQL Server was the first Hyper-V server we built, we have to test the Backup and Restore of our Hyper-V server before proceeding. -
Installation – Exchange Server 2010 on Hyper-V. Now that we have a domain and a database server, we need email. We’ll be building on Microsoft’s latest email server for that. -
Business Continuity – Testing Disaster Recovery for the Exchange Server 2010 server on Hyper-V. -
Installation – SharePoint Server 2010 on Hyper-V. After establishing email for the company, we need to work on the web site and collaboration between employees. We’ll use the latest version of SharePoint for that. -
Business Continuity – Testing Disaster Recovery for the SharePoint Server 2010 server on Hyper-V. -
Etc. And so the list will grow and continue over time. I am going to endeavor to post a new chapter in the series every week to two weeks so stay tuned. Later
C
11/3/2009In the 2007 cycle of SharePoint, I released a comprehensive guide to upgrading from 2003 to 2007 because all the upgrade guides I could find were simply using default installs for upgrades. That never reflects the real world scenario and complexities, so I created my upgrade guide. It was very popular and I received many appreciative comments on the post.
Well, fear not, for I will be doing the same thing again for the 2010 cycle. I'm currently working on the post and will publish it soon. Initially it will be for migration to Beta 2, but I'll update it as needed for RC and RTM, so stay tuned!
Later
C
10/16/2009
I received a question about this in the Support Forums today, so I decided to jot down the steps quickly for future seekers of knowledge...
To turn on Content Approval, follow these steps:
- Navigate to the list for which Content Approval is to be turned on.
- Click "Settings" next to the "Actions" menu. If you do NOT see "Settings", it means you are not an Administrator of that list. You must have Administrative rights over the list to be able to do this.
- On the dropdown menu for "Settings", click "List Settings".
- On the List Settings page, under General Settings, click the "Version Settings" link.
- On the Version Settings page, set the "Require content approval for submitted items" option to "Yes" and click the "OK" button.
That's it! Enjoy...
Later
C
6/8/2008
I was asked the following question in the support forums and thought it would be useful to blog about for others to use in the future.
Question: I created a new root site (site collection) and selected the wrong site template during the site creation process or I changed my mind and want to use a different site template than the one used during site creation. The problem is that sub sites have been created since then. How do I change the site template used for the root site of a site collection with sub sites?
Fellow MVP Shane Young blogged an article that comes closest to addressing this scenario here:
http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2006/02/15/83787.aspx
Unfortunately, the scenario is based on WSS 2.0 and if you're working with WSS 3.0, this might not work.
So you are left having to either adapt Shane's article to 3.0 or go with the simplest way possible which is the recreation of the site. Microsoft's conservative recommendation would be, as you already noted, to delete the site and then recreate it using the correct template.
Since you have sub sites in this site collection, you will need to backup the sub sites BEFORE you can do this. Of course, in the process of templatizing/backing up sub site, you could run into problems if you're trying to save a site as a template and it exceeds the 10 MB limit. Given that, I would recommend that you increase your site template site limit before templatizing sub sites. Here are the steps I would recommend to resolve your issue:
- Schedule an outage of the sites and conduct this process off hours in order to ensure that nobody is making changes to the sites while you're doing this. COMMUNICATE this with your users clearly. Users can get very testy about these things. ;-)
- BACKUP YOUR DATABASE BEFORE YOU START!!!
- Increase your site template size limit. Follow the instructions from this article: http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Lists/Posts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=111
- Templatize each sub site by using the "Save as Template" option on the Site Administration page.
- Clearly record the permissions for each sub site.
- Go to the site collection Site Template Gallery and download a local copy of all the site templates (.stp) to your computer.
- Delete each sub site.
- Delete the root site of the site collection.
- Create a new site collection, this time selecting the RIGHT template! ;-)
- Go to the Site Template Gallery of the new site collection.
- Upload all the .stp files you downloaded in step 4.
- Each of the uploaded templates should now show up as options in the Create menu. Recreate each site using its template in turn.
- Recreate the permissions for each site using the information captured in step 5.
- Navigate back to the site collection's Site Template Gallery and delete all the .stp templates you uploaded in step 11. This is to remove the sites as create options and is done for security reasons.
And that should do it!
The hardest part of this process is capturing and re-establishing permissions on the sites, especially if your site administrators use fine grained permissions i.e. grant library, folder or item level permissions. In such cases, it might not be possible to fully capture the complete permissions set without expending massive amounts of time. In cases where granular permissions are in play, I recommend leveraging an automated tool to backup the sites. AvePoint has a good tool that does a nice job of this called DocAve. You can download a 30 day trial of DocAve and use it if this is a onetime occurrence. Of course DocAve has many more features that might well make it worth owning for your environment.
Luckily this kind of scenario doesn't happen too often… right? ;-)
Later
C
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