SharePoint

Live Chat with the SharePoint MVPs on July 21

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:10:05 GMT

Got a question about SharePoint? Join 18 SharePoint MVPs on a live chat on July 21 where you get to ask the panel questions around SharePoint. Eighteen MVPs are scheduled to answer your questions. The MVPs select for the July 21 chat session include those with administration, development, design and end user specialties.

Visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx for more information.

Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010 Released

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 17:01:44 GMT

Many of you know that I have been involved in an advisory role with the Patterns & Practice team for SharePoint. Yesterday the P&P team wrapped up the 2010 guidance for developing apps using SharePoint 2010. If you are a SharePoint developer then at an absolute minimum, you MUST read the documentation that is included in the downloads. The P&P team has some of the best guidance on the various topics covered. Also included in the download is code that will provide some core infrastructure to your SharePoint 2010 projects such as logging and configuration.

Developing Applications for SharePoint 2010 is located at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff770300.aspx

SharePoint 2010 Hangs after Visual Studio 2010 F5 Debugging

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:58:44 GMT

Lately I have been having some issues with debugging a fairly simple Visual Studio 2010/SharePoint 2010 project. Whenever I deploy the project to the farm, Internet Explorer launches, tries to connect to the SharePoint site and more often than not the web server times out before the debugger is attached and the site is up and running. Occasionally it loads after a long wait period but will normally time out before I get a chance to do any real debugging.

Watching VS 2010 I can see that the Visual Studio has packed and deployed the solution quickly. What I notice was the symbols loading slowly. This was noticeable because VS displays the symbols loading at the bottom of the screen. Normally these will load quick enough that they are hard to read. Now I had time to write them by hand.

Retraction of the solution by VS2010 performed quickly. If I did a Ctr-F5 to Run with out Debugging the solution was deployed and the site was displayed very quickly which makes sense because the debugger was not trying to attach to the process.

After doing some Binging on symbols slow to load there seems to be a set of potential reason why Visual Studio ( and not just VS 2010) will slow down when loading symbols. Most issues relate to someone changing the location to retrieve the symbols such as Microsoft ( internet latency) and having networked drives that were not attached ( time outs waiting on the drives). There was even an article about multiple version of the .Net framework potentially causing an issue. None of these issues appeared to be the cause of the problem. I even went as far as doing a repair on VS 2010.

After more digging, I ran across a single forum thread that someone commented on the fact that the debugger was slow to attach because of a "bad" breakpoint. Basically the post suggested that a breakpoint that might have been valid at one time, was no longer valid for whatever reason and the debugger was stumbling over it slowing down the attachment process.

The solution to my issue? Simply delete all the breakpoints in the project. Right after I deleted all the breakpoints Visual Studio deployed the solution and the site launched in seconds, not minutes. It appears that deleting all the breakpoints using the "Delete All Breakpoints" menu item under the Debug menu removed all valid and "invalid" breakpoints and let me get back to work which for today is a custom Web Part using Model View Presenter.

The local farm is not accessible. Cmdlets with FeatureDependencyId are not registered

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:30:06 GMT

The SharePoint 2010 Management Shell shot me this message earlier this week. I was logged on as a local administrator and farm administrator to boot. I was able to manage the farm using the Central Administration site PowerShell simply refused to load the cmdlets.

This warning is displayed when the logged in account does not have the correct permissions. When you get this warning as show above the simple solution is log in as someone with the appropriate permission - like the setup or farm account and run the Add-SPShellAdmin cmdlet supplying the user name as a parameter. For example to add Dbgdemo\dbishop as a Shell Admin I would run:

Add-SPShellAdmin -UserName dbgdemo\dbishop

To determine which accounts are Shell Admin accounts use Get-SPShellAdmin as shown below.

The Add-SPShellAdmin cmdlet will add the account to the correct database and windows groups. This can all be done manually but it is genreally easier to run the Add-SPShellAdmin cmdlet under an account that can run the managment shell. Once the account has been added as Shell Admin you can switch back the user and PowerShell should load the cmdlets.

What can be confusing is the fact that administrators can manage the farm using the Central Administration pages but not using the managment shell. Why is that? When administrators manage the farm using Central Administration pages they are accessing the farm using the Central Administration's app pool account - which has all the necessary privillages on the local macine and the databases. When working with SharePoint using the managmemnt shell there is no app pool to get between the administrator's account and the farm. The account requires the permissions.

To get more deeper into the hows and why's check out Zac's blog post on the topic:
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/zach/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=56

Live Chats to Learn more about SharePoint

Darrin Bishop — Tue, 25 May 2010 18:55:19 GMT

Live Chats to Learn more about SharePoint - with 28 MVP Experts Do you have questions about SharePoint? Want to learn more about the recently launched SharePoint 2010? By popular request, 28 SharePoint MVPs from around the world are participating in two live chat events about SharePoint: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx . These events are a great opportunity to tap into the vast knowledge of these industry professionals who are regarded as the best in their field. Two opportunities are available to join the conversation. Times were chose to accommodate most of the world.

On Tuesday May 25th, tune in between 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Pacific time to chat with the following MVPs:

Agnes Molnar
Bill English
Brian Farnhill
Bryan Phillips
Clayton Cobb
David Mann
Matt McDermott
Paul Stork
Rob Bogue
Rob Foster
Sahil Malik
Saifullah Shafiq Ahmed
Serge Tremblay

On Wednesday May 26, tune in between 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Pacific time to chat with the following MVPs:

Andrew Connell
Becky Bertram
Bil Simser
Chandima Kulathilake
Claudio Brotto
Gary Lapointe
Darrin Bishop
John Ross
Michael Mukalian
Muhanad Omar
Paul Galvin
Randy Drisgill
Shane Young
Todd Bleeker
Zlatan Dzinic

Learn more and add these chats to your calendar by visiting the MSDN event page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx

SharePoint 2010 SneakPeek!

Darrin Bishop — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:38:11 GMT

Head to the SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek to view three videos of what you can expect from SharePoint 2010! These are quick looks into what SharePoint 2010 might ship with. Trust me there are some amazing demos in these videos.

SharePoint Saturday Chicago Schedule Posted

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:57:49 GMT

For those who are registered for SharePoint Saturday in Chicago you can find the schedule and information at :
http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/chicago/default.aspx

Saturday Schedule

SharePoint Team Blog Announces Important SP2 Issue

Darrin Bishop — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:59:54 GMT

Last night Jeff Teper announced a SP2 issue where a product expiration date was improperly set. After installation the licensing may be set to Evaluation which will cause the farm to stop working after 180 days. MS is working on a hotfix, but in the mean time your farms are fine. Even if you fail to install the forthcoming hotfix your farm will not be accessible to users but your data is safe and secure until the patch is applied.

Soon there will be a KB article (971620) that will explain a manual fix. Expect the KB article in the next day or two.

Attention: Important Information on Service Pack 2

SharePoint SP2 is Now Available

Darrin Bishop — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:50:27 GMT

Here are the links to SP2 for WSS 3 and MOSS. Remember to install the WSS SP2 on MOSS before you install MOSS SP2. Lots of fixes and updates to get us closer to SharePoint 2010. MOSS 2007 SP2 contains updates to MOSS, Groove Server, Excel Services, Forms Server, Project Server and Search Server. Make sure you grab the correct platform version -x86 or x64.

WSS 3.0 SP2

MOSS 2007 SP2

vNext SharePoint is Officially Announced

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:41:03 GMT

Sure we all knew the next version of SharePoint is under development but today Microsoft has released an official Press Release refering to the next version of SharePoint as SharePoint Server 2010. Yep the name Microsoft Office is not offically part of the name but I would not read much into that. Read the press release at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Apr09/04-15Office2010.mspx

Adding the SharePoint team blog post url: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/14/microsoft-sharepoint-14-is-now-microsoft-sharepoint-2010.aspx