About Setting up a Developer Workstation for SharePoint 2010

You "can" install SharePoint Foundation to Windows 7 but... You have to own Professional edition.

Unfortunately, with my new Windows 7 Home Premium edition laptop I was not able to set up SharePoint Foundation. I found out that on Win 7 Home Premium  IIs supports only Basic authentication and SP Foundation does not work...

I am really angry to Microsoft folks; who forgot to mention about this little issue! I can't use it on my new system, thanks guys...I owe you one :)

How to move reusable workflows between SharePoint farms

Reusable workflows, which  are introduced in SharePoint 2010, are cool!
You can create your workflow in development / test environments and then move it to production like a solution, it is very easy.

You should create the workflow as a reusable workflow from the start if you want to use it on other farms.
When you finish your workflow:

1- you have to export the Resuable workflow via SharePoint Designer. this could be done using the ribbon. select the Workflow you want to export.

Click save as template from the ribbon (as shown in the screenshot above)
Save it on your computer.


2. Open  the site you want to import your reusable workflow.
Navigate to Site settings > Galleries > Solutions
Click upload  solution from the Solution Ribbon. Select your solution and upload it.

3. Activate the solution you have just uploaded.

4. Now go to the site settings, site features. Activate the feature as well.

and your reusable workflow is ready to go!

How to delete a Search Service Application in Moss 2010

After I installed Sharepoint 2010, I tried to figure out how certain services work without Search Services Provider. As we already know, there are no SSP's anymore in 2010 architecture.

So I configured  a FAST Search Connector. But It didnt work quite allright so I tried to delete it. No luck! There were no options in Central Administration to delete a Search Service Application after creating it.

After a quick search on the internet I find that you can remove the SSA by using

stsadm -o deleteconfigurationobject  -id *GUID*


command. This command works by using object id(GUID). In order to get the object ID; the GUID of SSA, I just copied it from IE, central administration Search Service Application URL.

How to deal with faulty features

Before upgrading to SharePoint 2010, you should run preupgradechecker and Test:SpContentDatabase..

Preupgrade checker should be run on the 2007 instance and Test:spcontentdatabase should be run on Sharepoint 2010.

After you run the preupgradechecker, it creates an html file containing your farm details. In my case, there were lots of missing features!
The entries were like these:

Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [5ac519ce-6bf2-842c-485c-04efe522a2dc], Reference count = [1], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing]

Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [c5e293c8-a4c6-8607-5505-7a2a77a9800e], Reference count = [1], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing]

Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [68f713c6-1fc8-d110-e819-ce7d59518f60], Reference count = [1], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing]

Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [564a2b98-aec8-e5f5-7e94-8096d64fe16c], Reference count = [1], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing]

Name = [Unknown], Feature id = [a28a2e77-9525-4c9c-ad79-e0b6252395e8], Reference count = [1], Scope = [Web], Status = [Missing]

While searching on the internet, I found that tool which is very handy to remove problematic features:
http://featureadmin.codeplex.com/

Of course, test it before you try it ;)
In my case I perform a database attach upgrade so it's easier to test.

Page viewer web part problem in Sharepoint 2010

After upgrading SharePoint 2010, the page viewer web parts does not show up. Instead a dialog appears and it tries to download the html file.

This is because of the security settings in Sharepoint 2010
To solve this; you have to navigate to Central administration:

Application Management> Manage Web Applications> select your web aplication & open General Settings

Change "Browser File Handling" to "Permissive.

 

upgrade sp1 content database by adding it with stsadm

If you have a Sharepoint service pack1 content database which you want to move to SP2 environment all you have to do is to run a stsadm command..

stsadm -o addcontentdb -url http://new-site-address -databaseserver your_server -databasename

This will upgrade the SP1 content database to sP2. This is very handy when you want to upgrade a 32-bit SP1 sharepoint 2007 to Sharepoint 2010. First you move it to a sp2 farm by using this command, after upgrade is successful then you detach/attach it again to sql 2008 & sharepoint 2010 backend.

Failure trying to synch web application after attaching new content database to a web application

After restoring a content database from prod to test , and make the web application point to this new database, I started to see errors on Server Event log.



ERROR 1:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: Office SharePoint Server
Event Category: User Profiles 
Event ID: 5555
Date: 06.10.2010
Time: 11:00:03
User: N/A
Computer: xxxxxxxx
Description:
Failure trying to synch web application 7621f35a-0df2-4c88-8f03-0ce546db94bd, ContentDB d9248f2a-523c-4d86-b149-9ccfc08c6466  Exception message was A duplicate site ID e10eb63c-01dd-4227-98db-9fbfa1285ce9(http://xxxxxxx) was found. This might be caused by restoring a content database from one server farm into a different server farm without first removing the original database and then running stsadm -o preparetomove. If this is the cause, the stsadm -o preparetomove command can be used with the -OldContentDB command line option to resolve this issue.

ERROR 2:


Event Type: Error
Event Source: Office SharePoint Server
Event Category: User Profiles 
Event ID: 5553
Date: 06.10.2010
Time: 11:00:07
User: N/A
Computer: TUP03SRV74
Description:
failure trying to synch site 1eeae3e9-9412-4f73-a4df-b752d88c0329 for ContentDB 6a7a4d13-adc5-4605-a056-ae5216498ffe WebApp 3b98938e-c823-4c24-a19f-7c60a73bd306.  Exception message was Cannot complete this action.

Solution:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa
dm -o sync -deleteolddatabases 0

For my case the output was:

Deleted sync information for DB a416fe1d-600d-46ff-a176-8f2fd3f7d454
Deleted sync information for DB 6a7a4d13-adc5-4605-a056-ae5216498ffe
Deleted sync information for DB 208737f0-6795-42ee-badd-dbfcaf0e5d02
Deleted sync information for DB b53fe383-2f27-499b-b612-f09748d90ae2

Then I listed the old databases to make sure that there were none left..


C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>stsa
dm -o sync -listolddatabases 0

Shared Service Provider SharedServices1
No databases match the criteria for this Shared Service Provider