SharePoint, Office 365, Azure, and Other Musings…
January 26, 2011 Leave a comment
Joel Oleson approached me at the SharePoint Technology Conference in Boston, and asked me to answer a few questions. This would be the result of that…
For some odd reason, I want to head down to Providence to Hemenway’s for some Lobster. I have no idea why…
January 26, 2011 1 Comment
If you’ve created a BCS list before (such as defined by the excellent tutorial put together by Laura Rogers for connecting to a SQL data source using a SQL account – http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/laura/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=90), and received this error on your Read List view page:
Unable to display this Web Part. To troubleshoot the problem, open this Web page in a Microsoft SharePoint Foundation-compatible HTML editor such as Microsoft SharePoint Designer. If the problem persists, contact your Web server administrator.
Correlation ID:117e242f-0985-42e9-9972-b1a879ce7e3b
After investigating the ULS Logs, located in %SYSTEM DIR%\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\14\LOGS, and searching for the correlation id mentioned above. You may find the following error:
Error while executing web part: Microsoft.BusinessData.Runtime.ExceededLimitException: Database Connector has throttled the response. The response from database contains more than ‘2000’ rows. The maximum number of rows that can be read through Database Connector is ‘2000’. The limit can be changed via the ‘Set-SPBusinessDataCatalogThrottleConfig’ cmdlet. at Microsoft.SharePoint.BusinessData.SystemSpecific.Db.ThrottledIDataReader.Read() at Microsoft.SharePoint.BusinessData.SystemSpecific.Db.DbEntityInstanceEnumerator.MoveNext() at Microsoft.SharePoint.BusinessData.Runtime.EntityInstanceEnumeratorBase.MoveNext() at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPListDataSource.GetFilteredEntityInstancesInternal(XmlDocument xdQueryView, Boolean fFormatDates, Boolean fUTCToLocal, String firstRowId, Bo…
Thanks to the wonders of the interwebs, the solution to this is fairly simple, and the error explanation is extremely helpful. Do a search for this: Set-SPBusinessDataCatalogThrottleConfig, which will lead you to a great article on the Microsoft Business Connectivity Services Team Blog by Adam Outcalt here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bcs/archive/2010/02/16/bcs-powershell-introduction-and-throttle-management.aspx which will give you very great instructions on modifying the BCS throttling configuration.
Be careful with this however, the throttling is there for a reason. Not just to give you another option to configure.
January 24, 2011 1 Comment
Although it happened quite early for me in the morning yesterday (January 22st, 2011), SharePoint Saturday EMEA was a great event to be a part of. Although it lacked some of the main aspects I love at SharePoint Saturdays, such as networking, meeting new people, interacting with the crowd, etc., it was kind of nice to wake up, slug down a few cups of coffee, and present my session.
The EMEA team did a great job of managing this virtual SharePoint Saturday, and I hope to be able to present at future sessions. A big thanks to the attendees of my session, as well as the team that put the event together:
Below is a copy of my slide deck from the presentation. Any questions on any of the material, please leave a comment below!
January 17, 2011 Leave a comment
I think the image above says enough for itself. Came across this link today (http://shojeeb.com/sharepoint/custom-social-bookmarking-ribbon-tab-in-sharepoint-2010/) by Zubhair Ahmed. Very cool integration of social media controls into SharePoint 2010, and just had to share.
A few other people think so as well…
January 13, 2011 4 Comments
Let’s face it, both in SharePoint 2007 and 2010, Central Administration does require a bit of clicking around. Some features and functionality you will use on a daily basis, but others, not so much. While the UI for Central Administration got a great overhaul, navigating around can be tedious.
Not that it is any rocket science here either, however, I rarely come across client environments where this is used at all. The list was available in 2007, as well as 2010. When you log into Central Administration, you’ll see the Resources link list web part off to the right. So the quick tip of the day is – make use of this!
For instance, if you need to get down to the user profile service administration screen… you need to do the following:
However, just adding a link to the Resources list for this, and other commonly used items, saves both time and effort, especially if you have trouble locating your service applications. So just copy the URL, go back out to the main page, and add it in as a link.
More ideas? Maybe you need to look at the Job History for your web application each day. Instead of doing the following:
Just copy out the link, and add it into the Resources list for a quick link http://servername/_admin/TimerJobHistory.aspx?View=2
Now, there are many other possibilities to store these links – your bookmarks for example – while that works for you, it does not work for anyone else who needs access to Central Admin.
If you wanted to build a feature or two, you could also implement some Custom Actions here as well…
January 11, 2011 Leave a comment
Wow, it’s been a busy few weeks, and lots of acceptances and confirmations have come through over the past couple of weeks, enough so that I have not been able to get out posts for each one. So, I thought I would cover a few bases at once, and get all of these out there. I also keep an updated speaking and event calendar hosted here: https://gvaro.wordpress.com/calendar/.
More events that I will be involved with, either through sponsoring, hosting, presenting, organizing, or other ways over the next few months are below.
January 4, 2011 Leave a comment
Found out a few moments ago that I am officially slated to present at SharePoint Saturday EMEA.
SharePoint Saturday EMEA is a loosely knit group of SharePoint evangelists from around the world. We are working together, using SharePoint as a collaboration tool to sponsor live, online global events.
On January 22nd, 2011, we will hold our 2nd annual, live online SharePoint Saturday event in the EMEA Timezones.
Oh, and it’s free.
The Ribbon UI and Custom Actions in SharePoint 2010
Custom Actions control features in SharePoint such as the List Item Menu, the Site Actions menu, toolbars, and the links within the Site Settings page, as well as the Ribbon UI in SharePoint 2010.
Learn how to leverage Custom Actions to extend the SharePoint User Interface. This session will describe the basics of Custom Actions, demonstrations to build and apply them in SharePoint as they relate to our lists using SharePoint Designer 2010, as well as provide resources for additional information.
Right here: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/emea/
January 4, 2011 6 Comments
Ever seen this message?
Sure, some simple code to loop through the User Profile store in SharePoint 2010 via a console application using web services. It can be a frustrating message indeed. However, there is a simple resolution.
The problem is – you are not authenticated. Even if you are passing credentials in your code, it is not going to work. You need to be authenticated to get to the web service itself. In this instance – we are using Claims Based Authentication, and mixed CBA, using both Forms Based Authentication, as well as Windows Authentication. So, what is happening here, and you can see in the error below
You’re being redirected to the Sign In page to allow you to select your authentication method – you are connecting to a web page after all, even if you do not see it.
Extend your mixed authentication web application, and create a zone just for Windows Authentication, then change the Web Reference URL in the properties of your web service, to use that extended URL and port. You should have no issues of this kind anymore.
January 4, 2011 4 Comments
I recently did a post on Listing all available PowerShell commands in SharePoint 2010. That is all well and good, if you want to manually browse through all of them. But what if you want to search for them?
Get-Command is a highly useful cmdlet in PowerShell. Today we are just going to use a basic functionality of it, to help us find and locate the cmdlets we need to use. Today, we need to do some work with the User Profile Service. However, we don’t know what the command names are that we need to use, only that we need to use them. For that, we can use Get-Command. If you need to figure out how to use the Get-Command cmdlet, run
Get-Help Get-Command
Which will return the following information about the cmdlet
This will return the usage of the Get-Command cmdlet. We are just going to use the –Noun switch to pass in our parameters.
Let’s start looking at the basics… we’re looking to find commands relating to the User Profile Service. So, let’s try searching for a noun of Profile
Get-Command –Noun Profile
Nothing is returned… oh right, it would appear that the Get-Command is literal, not a wildcard. However, we can use a wildcard character to help us search, as we have no idea what the name of the command is. Let’s try searching for *Profile*, that should do the trick.
Get-Command –Noun *Profile*
Hooray, results! However, we cannot see the entire name of the results returned. For that, we can use the Select-Object cmdlet.
Fore information on using that, try this in the PowerShell console
Get-Help Select-Object
So, let’s only pull the Name property in our results of the Get-Command
Get-Command -Noun *Profile* | Select-Object –Property Name
Much better! We can further refine these by adjusting our Noun, to just look at ProfileService
Get-Command -Noun *ProfileService* | Select-Object -Property Name
And there we go! Hopefully this helps you in your quest to add PowerShell to your arsenal of SharePoint management and development tools.
I’d love to hear what else you would like to learn about – leave me information in the comments!
January 3, 2011 2 Comments
When 
adding a List View Web Part to your pages in SharePoint 2007, you had 3 options:
In SharePoint 2010, things are slightly different. Let’s take a look at our options, as well as how they are rendered.
My big question here is, why leave the “Full Toolbar” option, if it is now exactly the same as the Summary Toolbar? My guess would be for backwards compatibility. Also, if you hadn’t noticed – the ribbon in 2010 also takes the place of some of these options. Go ahead and click into your webpart somewhere, you’ll notice you get the contextual ribbon options for the list and list items, negating the need for the “Full Toolbar” option.
Hope this helps map out what these options are. I had not paid much attention to these as of yet, until it was brought up by a client recently.
Geoff Varosky's Blog 