I was recently walking a customer through creating an External Content Type [ECT] that uses stored procedures instead of just pointing directly to a table. When we created an External List using the External Content Type, the list didn’t have the option to create new items, nor could we edit items. SharePoint...

I was recently looking into the impact of increasing the Session State size associated with InfoPath forms. The main reason for the investigation was to allow users to attach files up to 20MB in size to InfoPath forms in SharePoint 2010. InfoPath does leverage the State Service to store transient data...

I was investigating a scenario in which someone was seeing thousands of hits to the destination location of an RSS Viewer Web Part. They had the Feed Refresh Interval set to 120 minutes, and increasing the value did not seem to reduce the number of requests hitting the RSS Feed page. We were able to...

Put together a small script that to help automate deployment of a solution.  The script handles the following: Install and Deploy a farm level solution Activate a web application scoped feature Activate a site collection scoped feature The tricky part with scripting this occurs when the solution...

When you setup SQL Server Reporting Services [SSRS] in SharePoint Integrated mode , browsing http://servername/ReportServer will show you a directory listing view of SharePoint Site Collections that is security trimmed to you. However, there are some downsides to this view. Users can probe through the...

Here’s the situation, SSL is setup to terminate at the load balancer.  Sticky sessions are setup as well, so once you hit a particular WFE, your future requests are routed to the same box.  The problem is that there is not an easy way to validate that the sites are responding from a client...

This one came as a surprise to me.  Customer pushes out a master page to all their site collections using a solution and feature.  The master page has a server control that renders some information, so the control should have a SafeControl entry in the web.config file.  Oddly enough, the...

When you try to connect to a SharePoint 2010 site using Report Builder, you may receive the following error : Connection failed. Unable to connect to the server that is specified in the URL, ‘http://teams.jormanvmas.com/’. Make sure that the server is running, the URL is correct, and you...

I was recently working through an issue in which I needed to setup the SQL Membership provider to use SHA512 as the hashing algorithm, instead of the default SHA1. For a normal ASP.Net application, you would set the hashAlgorithmType in the web.config for the application. For SharePoint 2010, you need...

Ran into a problem recently while helping out on a project where web part pages were being dynamically created from a feature receiver.  Once the pages were created, everything works, except for the Title Bar Properties icon in the ribbon. When you click on the Title Bar Properties icon, nothing...

I have some PowerShell scripts that run PreRequisiteInstaller.exe, Setup.exe, and then configure a farm based on an XML configuration file.  I noticed that if Setup.exe did not prompt for a reboot, that my script would fail with the following error directly after Setup.exe completed.  The line...

Spent some quality time configuring a SharePoint 2010 Multi Tenant environment.  It’s a really cool feature for hosting scenarios in which you need to ensure client data is isolated at the service application level.  Check out Spencer Harbar’s Rational Guide to Multi Tenancy and the Microsoft...

When you edit a profile in SharePoint 2010, you may be presented with the following error message : There was a problem retrieving data for this field.  Updating values in this field is disabled temporarily. You can still update values in other fields. This only shows up on profile properties that...

Working with an environment where the QA and development machines are in a Test domain, while the production farm and all the primary users are in another domain.  There is a one way domain level trust where the test domain trusts the production domain.  In SharePoint 2007, we ran SetAppPassword...

While working with PowerShell to build out Service Applications, I managed to get my test farm into a state where I no longer had a User Profile Service Application, but the user profile timer jobs were still around.  Trying to create a new User Profile Service Application would result in the following...

While working through an upgrade issue, we had a need to move about 14 Discussion Boards to a subweb.  We initially went the old school route of saving the lists as a template, including the content, then creating lists using the templates.  The content came across, but the Created By fields...

During some upgrade testing, a customer found one of their custom controls not working in the 2010 environment.  They had built out a custom search web part that contained a custom property picker control.  The custom property picker control allowed users to leverage the Picker.aspx page to...

Recently ran into the need to revert a specific web back to the SharePoint 2007 UI after an upgrade to SharePoint 2010.  The main reason for the change was a custom masterpage that was not ready for the 2010 styles and ribbon.  After the UI was upgraded, the masterpage rendering was pretty...

I had a good time patching my SharePoint 2010 Dev VM today and thought I would share.  This is another good reason that you should detach your content databases prior to patching  I started out with my box at RTM SharePoint 2010.  Downloaded the August 2010 Cumulative Update .  Ran...

The SharePoint 2010 out-of-the box People Search Core Results web part in SharePoint 2010 has the ability to sort search results by name.  The option actually sorts FirstName, then LastName…likely because the XSLT displays the names as FirstName LastName.  A likely common scenario will be to...

Ran into something interesting while trying to script out a farm install. I was trying to generate generic functions to create service applications and start the associated services, and kept hitting issues starting the User Profile Sync service. The first hurdle you have to jump is that you have to...

This was a pretty interesting issue as it caused some unique symptoms, as well as closing up an issue I blogged previously with regards to Self-Service Site Creation Announcements . The symptom we have was that users could upload documents to document libraries, but they could not edit them. For example...

Something I noticed while staring at the Services MMC while waiting for the User Profile Synchronization Service to start is that there is an order of processing in while the service is in a starting state.  Each step seems to take some time, so you can refresh the MMC to see the progress. ...

The User Profile Service - System Job to Manage User Profile Synchronization timer job leverages the winnt:// protocol to lookup an account’s SID . This call uses WINS and RPC to do the lookup. If you do not have WINS configured on the SharePoint server, and there is not a DC in the same subnet...