Dev Team Assemble

SharePoint, Webservices and URL Rewrite…

Calvin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:55:01 +0000

So I was having a strange problem in SharePoint the other day trying to run a webservice from a client script. Every time I called the service (in this case and .asmx in the layouts dir) it was doing nothing...no communication at all with the service. What made this particularly strange is that this exact same setup was working fine for everyone else in my team...figures.

When I ran the web methods from the service page itself (which loaded just fine) I got the following error : Request format is unrecognized for URL unexpectedly ending in '/[webmethod_name]'. Didn't make sense...I checked my web configuration and compared it against the other people in my team and all was well. I tried following Microsoft's recommendation of adding the following snippet to the system.web section of the config file.

<webServices>
<protocols>
<add name="HttpGet"/>
<add name="HttpPost"/>
protocols>
webServices>

All the above did was give me a 500 error.

After spending waaaaaaaaay to much time on the problem...a colleague of mine and I finally discovered that it was due to the Lower case rewrite inbound rule (converts the entire address to lower case). Apparently webmethod names are case sensitive in the address bar (this was not a SharePoint problem)...the documentation is here on msdn: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0c515353(VS.71).aspx

So turning off the rule and everything started to work again.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint, url rewriter, WebServices

Great Post on ASP.NET Caching

Calvin — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:46:12 +0000

I came across a great post today that talks about ASP.NET caching (applies to SharePoint) and what to look for. Thanks to Gunnar Peipman for the great insight.

http://weblogs.asp.net/gunnarpeipman/archive/2010/04/02/measuring-asp-net-and-sharepoint-output-cache.aspx

Basically you need to setup the following performance counters in windows:

Total number of objects added
Total object discards
Cache hit count
Cache hit ratio

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET, IIS, Windows, windows 2008 r2

SharePoint Web Part Maintenance Mode

Calvin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:48:17 +0000

Here is something I always forget....when a page fails to load because of a web part that has gone awry you can enter the maintenance mode by adding the ?contents=1 to the end of the address.

Simple...just the way I like it!

Technorati Tags: webparts sharepoint development

Installing MS Office Communicator on Ubuntu – Linux

Calvin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:49:41 +0000

One of the guys I work with told me about running the Microsoft Office Communicator in Linux. Its actually quite easy to install. Simply go to The Sipe Project website on sourceforge and follow the instructions. For me it was dead easy.

Add a couple of sources to the /etc/apt/sources.list file ( deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/aavelar/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main AND deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/aavelar/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main)
Run an apt-get command to install it. sudo apt-get install pidgin-sipe

Once the install is complete you can now add Microsoft LCS/OCS as an account type in the list. Simply fill in your creds and you are off to the races.

Technorati Tags: Linux, Microsoft Office Communicator, pidgin

SELECT TOP n ROWS – DB2

Calvin — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 13:53:17 +0000

One thing I always seem to forget when moving from one db system to the other (not using DB2 all that often) is how to select the TOP n rows from a query.

In MS SQL Server this is expressed as SELECT TOP n * FROM [table] ...

the equivilent in DB2 is SELECT * FROM [table] FETCH FIRST n ROWS ONLY

Technorati Tags: DB2, SQL Server

SharePoint 2007 on Windows 2008 R2 x64

Calvin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:11:00 +0000

I was trying to install install SharePoint 2007 onto Windows 2008 r2 and was getting a strange error referencing KB article 962935. Funny enough this article is not live yet so it left me a little unhappy. Apprarently Microsoft does not support the distributed SP1 installation package of SharePoint for this version of the OS. Turns out Jei Li posting on his msdn blog detailing how to go about creating a slipstreamed installation for SP2 on this server Click here for the article. Basically the steps are (pretty much word for word from Jei Li's blog):

Install .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 in the features applet
Copy the installtion media contents to a folder on the computer (c:\install)
Download the WSS x64 SP package and the MOSS 2007 SP2 x64
Delete everything inside Updates folder in the install folder you setup.
Open a command prompt, change directory to the folder you put the downloaded patches, and run the following two commands:
- wssv3sp2-kb953338-x64-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:[Path to installation bits]\Updates /quiet
- officeserver2007sp2-kb953334-x64-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract: [Path to installation bits]\Updates /quiet
Delete the wsssetup.dll filein the updates dir. This is a very important step so please don’t miss it.
If you also need the Cumulative Updates to be applied when install SharePoint, download the latest Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007 Cumulative Update packages and extract them into Updates folder like step 4.
Your slipstream build of SharePoint Server 2007 is done!
Go and install it on your Windows Server 2008 R2 box, after the installation, the site version will show 12.0.0.6421 or possibly a higher version.

Please reference Jei Li's post for furthur instuctions. I only posted all the steps here because things have a mysterious way of dissappearing or not appearing at all on Microsofts site.

After doing all of this everything seems to be fine...seems to be

Links

Technorati Tags: Configuration, server, SharePoint, Windows, windows 2008 r2, x64

Site Collection Images and ImageFieldValue

Calvin — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 03:33:46 +0000

One of the things I was working on today was trying to get an actual image from the library was that initially I was expecting to get a PublishingImage. All the samples on MSDN and the ones strewn about the web refer to using the ImageFieldValue and getting it from a field in the SPListItem. Like outlined on MSDN :

  // Retrieve the current value from an SPListItem with a
  // column of the ImageField type with the name imageFieldName
  ImageFieldValue currentFieldValue =
        listItemWithImageField[imageFieldName] as ImageFieldValue;

The problem is this only works for images that are in a list, like the PublishingRollupImage of a page that links to an image in the Site Collection Images library. The actual images in the library are stored as documents (Referenced using SPFile) so in order utilize them I need to extract the information out and create an image tag for it...like so:

 
     ImageFieldValue imageValue = new ImageFieldValue(
          string.Format("\"{0}\" alt=\"{1}\" />",
          file.Url, file.Title == null ? string.Empty : file.Title));

Now that I had the ImageFieldValue it was easy to work with. I could manipulate many aspects of the image using this object and then save it for rendering using ToString(). Funny thing is for my purposes (ImageGallery xml generation) I didn't even end up needing this code after all...frustrating but a good learning experience.

Props to Phanat Chan as he did the initial development on this.

Technorati Tags: Development, moss 2007, SharePoint

Building an ESXi 4 Virtual Environment with SSH enabled

Calvin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:11:13 +0000

So a little while ago I was playing around with building a virtual environment using Windows 2008 Hyper-V and while this was an interesting experience I found Microsoft's lack of any Linux distro support beyond the SUSE to be a bit of a pain. That being said I wanted to increase the resources available on my Dell PowerEdge server and thought I would take this opportunity to rebuld it before I get started on building out a SharePoint 2010 beta 2 testing farm....whew, try saying that 10 times fast

I downloaded and installed the new VMWare ESXi 4. It looks like they are really streamlining this technology with the vSphere platform...blah blah blah means they are the same product with license key feature unlocks (from what I understand of it anyways). Not surprisingly this was a lightning fast install. I did have a couple of hiccups trying to figure out a) where to put my free license key in and b) getting SSH enabled.

License Key - like most normal people I thought that after installing the vsphere client onto my desktop that there would be a little section in the help menu for adding license keys (like most software). Turns out you need to click on the host, then the configuration tab and then the Licensed Features option under Software. (OK ... umm forgot to mention...click the edit button on the right hand side!!)

SSH - enabling this took some digging. Not much mind you because there are actual quite a few people out there writing about the same thing... here are a couple that I found:

I don't want to rehash it but here are the steps (in case they take down their postings!)

At the ESXi console ALT+F1 for new session at the console screen
enter the command "unsupported" and type your password
use vi to edit the inetd.conf file so type...vi /etc/inetd.conf
scroll to the areas where ssh is listed and remove the # sign (delete key works!)
type :wq to exit vi and save your changes
restart the server OR do the killing of the process number for inetd and using the correct switches (i just rebooted because I dont care that much

And after the machine comes back up you should be able to connect via Putty or whatever tool you are using no problem.

Technorati Tags: ESXi 4, virtualization, VMWare

Variations Failed: An error was encountered performing this operation. You may re-try the operation…

Calvin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:16:27 +0000

So I got this error the other day when putting together a dev site collection usign varations:

An error was encountered performing this operation. You may re-try the operation, and you may need to clean up the half-created data first before re-trying. If the problem persists, please contact your system administrator

This was actually a fairly easy fix for me. I simply had to enable the publishing features in my site. Which is funny...because they should have been on but I must have overlooked that.

Technorati Tags: Configuration, error, moss 2007, SharePoint, variations

Sharepoint Conference SPC09 Day 3 Review

Calvin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:59:55 +0000

Day three was a lot of fun as I got to spend three hours in the labs and ran through some pretty cool stuff. Linq to Sharepoint, Upgrading sites, REST API etc.

As far as the sessions went I was hoping the MultiLingual sites session was going to make me happy with some great news about variations. Instead it seems to be status quo on that system with MS playing the line that you need to plan ahead for this...makes sense but not always possible. The multi language user interface or MUI for all the chrome is available in every site now and you can switch languages off the site actions bar.

MindSharp had an awesome evangelistical session in the big room on Developiong with REST and LINQ in Sharepoint 2010. This was another really great session on developing against the new Client Object Model, the Server OM, the ListData.svc REST service.

All in all it was another good day...If I didn't have to spend thenight doing homework it actually would haev been mouch more fun

Technorati Tags: conference, SharePoint, web parts