Koen Vosters

Sorry, this site hasn’t been shared with you - Host Named Site Collections

2013-04-30T07:23:19Z

So, Host Named Site Collections are the new thing. You’ve created your web application and created a host named site collection through PowerShell. You browse to the site and it renders nicely. Yet when you expect to see the site, you get the standard SharePoint screen which tells you that you don’t have access to that site. This can be resolved easily. Check your IIS bindings. You forgot to remove them. So even though you have a DNS pointing to *.myhncsites.contoso.com and you created a site banzai.myhncsites.contoso.com your IIS bindings need to be modified so that there are no host headers defined.

Dell XPS12 : Wireless network not showing any networks

2013-04-22T07:55:14Z

I recently got a Dell XPS12 device as my new laptop at work. I like the device a lot, especially since I am travelling by plane a lot lately. Today, for some reason, the wireless network did not detect any networks. Other devices had no problem detecting all the wireless networks, but the Dell just gave me the notification Wireless (Off). Turning flightmode on and off didn’t bring any resolution. Looking online didn’t really b(r)ing a solution, apart from the fact that I could identify that the device could decide itself when the wireless connection was put off. You can look at that yourself by going through the following options.

Right click on your network connection (which should show with a red cross on the right bottom corner)

Open network and shareing center

Click on change adapter settings.

Rightclick your wi-fi adapter and select properties

Select configure

Select the power management tab and untick the box if it is ticked.

After this, your wireless will still show as off. Even using the function keys to turn wireless on and off will not get you there. Press the windows key and type wireless

Select settings and then choose the option Turn Wireless On or Off

And there, you will see that the wireless is off. Put it to status on.

I’m not the only one who experienced this problem. And this fix seems quite easy. For some reason the wireless on / off key on the keyboard doesn’t seem to properly enable the wireless.

The Subscription Settings service and corresponding application and proxy needs to be running in order to make changes to these settings.

2013-04-11T15:57:00Z

This is the nice screen I got when I wanted to finalize the configuration of a blank SharePoint 2013 development environment at the customer that was already “partially prepared”. Even if I was quite sure I checked those to see if they were running. I checked again:

Looking in the Manage Services Screen:

Going to System Settings – Manage Services on this Server

Seems like everything is running. So where does this come from? As I am so used to follow the Technet blog post (and that this step is a little bit less obvious when fastscrolling through the page), it took a while to realize we are missing a service application. Even though the Subscription Settings Service is running, there is no corresponding Service Application. This service application can only be created in PowerShell:

Get-SPManagedAccount COMICS\spsap.dev
$appPool = New-SPServiceApplicationPool -Name SubscriptionServiceAppPool -Account $account
$serviceApp = New-SPSubscriptionSettingsServiceApplication -ApplicationPool $appPool -name "Subscription Settings Service Application" -DatabaseName "SP2013DEV-SubscriptionSettingsDB"
$serviceAppProxy = New-SPSubscriptionSettingsServiceApplicationProxy -ServiceApplication $serviceApp

Once this is done, you should see it pop up in your service applications:

Now we are able to set up our app domain

Installing Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 offline

2013-03-28T08:40:39Z

Quite a few customers have SharePoint 2013 developer environments that do not have access to internet. That poses no problem to install Visual Studio 2012, but installing the Microsoft Office Developer Tools requires internet access as it makes use of the Web Platform Installer. But, appearantly Web Platform Installer has an offline mode:

http://www.iis.net/learn/install/web-platform-installer/web-platform-installer-v4-command-line-webpicmdexe-rtw-release

The article shows the commandline options to create an offline cache. Either for all products (not recommended) or a specific product, which is the Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 in our case. A big thank you to Mauricio Ordonez for sharing this.

SharePoint 2013 : Cannot connect to the targeted site.

2013-03-27T13:08:48Z

While creating a new development environment I ran into the following error:

Cannot connect to the targeted site. This error can occur if the specified site is not hosted on the local system. SharePoint solutions work only with locally-installed versions of SharePoint Foundation or SharePoint Server. Remote development is supported only for apps for SharePoint 2013.

Usually this error pops us if you did the following:

Edit host file

127.0.0.1 urlofmywebapp

However, as my development machine is running in my own domain, my hostfile is empty and the site is accessed through the DNS. The fix is however the same. Adding the IP of the server to the host file did the trick.

10.0.0.100 urlofmywebapp

This is supposed to get fixed in a future version of the Office Developer tools.

[Quick Fix] Windows 8 - Keyboard stopped working

2013-02-19T08:06:00Z

This might be catalogued as random stupidity from my part, but Binging for it didn't really bring me to the information so here goes. I'm currently working on a 3 year old laptop that has been travelling with me pretty much around the world. 16GB, Core i7, 2xSSD, it never lets me down. Yesterday while I just stepped off the plane and arrived at the customer, booted my pc and cleaned up the inbox something strange happened. All of a sudden my keyboard stopped working. Everything else worked fine, but typing just wasn't happening.

As any highly trained IT professional I of course resorted to the one and only possible solution to fix this: hitting every key on the keyboard, with the same "schwung" as professional piano players go from the low note to the high note. And to my surprise at times there was a key popping up. So maybe it wasn't the keyboard. Again, I am a highly trained professional, so solution number two: reboot. In all honesty, this would be the first time that I actually had to reboot Windows 8 to get something to work again. Reboot, the bitlocker unlock window comes up, I type in my code and the keyboard works fine. Problem solved. Logged in to windows, and the same problem comes up again.

No worries, I am still a highly trained professional so I open OneNote and after my piano move I resorted to option three. Push it until it works. I just pressed a key for a long time and to my surprise the character appeared. So I went to the keyboard settings for the repeat speed, but changing that did not resolve it. There was only one thing I could still think about. Ease of Access settings. And there it was: The filter keys were enabled. I don't know how I did it, as the settings were still set to show a warning when the Filter Keys are enabled, but for some reason I did not see the warning or I pressed Enter when it came up without realizing it.

So when you are in the situation of your keyboard no longer working in Windows 8, press a key for a long time and see if it comes up. If it does, that it is probably the filter keys. To go to the settings, press windows key for a long time (filter keys is on) till you get the metro menu if you aren't there yet, press f for a long time, press i for a long time... (you get what the other actions are...) until you have put in Filter Keys in your search window. Click on Settings, Ignore Repeated Key Strokes using Filter Keys and untick Turn on Filter Keys

FAST for SharePoint 2010 : Crawl status recovering

2013-02-14T06:45:30Z

There is a first time for everything, and this was the first time I saw the crawler in the status recovering. The full crawl has been running for 185 hours and users started informing the IT organization of the customer that new documents were not searchable. These are the steps I took to get the crawl up and running again:

Restart the search service on all the servers provisioning search
Try to stop the crawl and reinitiate the crawling
Failure
Restart the FAST Servers
Try to stop the crawl and reinitiate the crawling
Succesful

However, at this stage crawl was running (and ending) but when I checked the crawl log it was only showing the documents that had already been indexed before. Anything after that date did not get indexed. So I proceeded to the next steps:

Restart both the SharePoint farm and the FAST farm
Reinitiate the crawling
Failure
Delete the index (note that this needs to be done both on SharePoint and on FAST, see: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff191228(v=office.14).aspx )
Reinitiate the crawling
SUCCES

SharePoint Saturday Belgium -

2013-01-28T16:39:00Z

As the great guys and girl from BIWUG (http://www.biwug.be) organized a fantastic SharePoint Saturday last year, they are coming back with a new edition this year. For those who don't know SharePoint Saturday, it is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.

On top of that, SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint and broaden your network.

Registrations are open (http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5064387720/mcivte). The number of available seats is limited to 250 and as far as I know only 50 remain as registrations go fast!

Location: Xylos

           Business Faculty Brussel
           St. Lendriksborre 6 Font Saint Landry
           1120 Brussel (Neder-Over-Heembeek)

Failed to instantiate file "ContentQueryMain.xsl" from module "XSLStyleSheets": The specified list does not exist.

2013-01-17T08:20:00Z

When deploying a custom branding solution to one of our customer's environments, we ran into "Failed to instantiate file "ContentQueryMain.xsl" from module "XSLStyleSheets": The specified list does not exist." when we activated the publishing features on the site collection. After some investigation, it seemed that the ContentQueryMain.xsl should exist in a subfolder XSLStyleSheets within the Style Library (which actually gets created by this feature).

This error occurs when the publishing feature sees that there is already a Style Library and does not take the action of putting the files in there, as it assumes that the Style Library has already been created by the Publishing Features. So if you already created a Style Library without the publishing features, then you should either

- move that library to another location

- deploy the publishing feature on another site collection and copy the contents of that Style Library to the one within your site collection

In my case there was no Style Library though. Nevertheless, creating a new Style Libary resulted in the url being "Style%20Library1", which meant that SharePoint did find the Style Library somewhere, I was just not seeing it. Opening the site with SharePoint Designer 2010 as a site collection admin gave me the option to choose All Files to see the content of the site. And there I could see the Style Library. I renamed it to Style_Library_Error and closed down SharePoint Designer.

Afterwards, I created a Document Library called Style Library. Now the URL was showing me properly Style%20Libary.

I went back to the site collection settings, activated the Publishing Features and all was fine. Afterwards, the branding solution was properly deployed and yet another happy customer :)

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

2012-11-29T09:48:30Z

What do you do if you are running powershell on your SharePoint farm and get the "The local farm is not accessible. Cmdlets with FeatureDependencyId are not registered." error. You have someone who has the rights to run powershell add your user as SP Shell Admin.

Add-SPShellAdmin -username DOMAIN\YourUser

That's quite the nobrainer, but what happens if your user is already SPShellAdmin, shown with Get-SPShellAdmin and you get the same error popping up? In that case, something probably happened with the SQL. They restored the farm on another server and did not migrate all the access rights. Just run Add-SPShellAdmin -username DOMAIN\YourUser again and it will set the appropriate permissions.