My IT Experiences

Sometimes when you login to Central Administration in SharePoint you cannot create, extend, or delete web application because the buttons in ribbon are disabled or grayed out. The same applies to the Authentication Providers button and if you hover mouse over this button this is what you see: This looks weird because you may be the farm administrator but still these buttons are grayed out. This can be solved by running Internet Explorer with elevated privileges (Right Click - Run as Administrator) or by accessing Central Administration website from Start Menu. Here is how you can do it from Windows Server 2012:

I was completely lost when I saw the Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 UI for the first time. It was tough to get used to the tiles and Apps UI. If you are facing similar situation here is a tip to make life easy - Hover mouse on the bottom left corner of the screen, i.e. cordinates X = 0 and Y= 0 in mathematical terms and you get a image like the one below: Right click mouse on this image and you get a menu with all generic options:

MS Word 2010 was acting strange since a couple of weeks, it would crash the moment I add certain quick parts. I was editing a template for content type in SharePoint 2010 document library and it would crash Word. Clicking on the error details shows this: Problem Event Name: APPCRASH   Application Name: WINWORD.EXE   Application Version: 14.0.7106.5001   Application Timestamp: 520b3934   Fault Module Name: wwlib.dll   Fault Module Version: 14.0.7106.5001   Fault Module Timestamp: 520b3985   Exception Code: c0000005   Exception Offset: 000107f6   OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48   Locale ID: 2057 Additional information about the problem:   LCID: 1033   skulcid: 1033 Read our privacy statement online:   http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=104288&clcid=0x0409 If the online privacy statement is not available, please read our privacy statement offline:   C:\Windows\system32\en-US\e...

I hit this issue while publishing a list workflow on our SharePoint 2010 website. It didn't give much of an error so I had no clue what was happening. Apparently I wasn't the first person to experience this annoying SPD limitation. There is an MS KB dedicated to this error but there isn't much of a solution to this. Only practical workaround if you author workflows with large number of steps is to split them in to multiple workflows.

I tend to come across this at times and I always lookup on the internet on how to do this. So I'm writing this blog post so that I can refer back to this next time: Here is how we can add a custom CSS on the SharePoint 2010 MasterPage: < SharePoint:CssRegistration name =" <% $SPUrl:~SiteCollection/Style Library/HREuHome.css %> " After =" corev4.css " runat =" server "/ > The above script could be added right above the closing HEAD tag </head> Here is how we can add a custom javascript file and its better to add it right inside the <form> tag: < asp:ScriptManager id =" ScriptManager " runat =" server " EnablePageMethods =" false " EnablePartialRendering =" true " EnableScriptGlobalization =" false " EnableScriptLocalization =" true ">   < Scripts >   <asp:ScriptReference Path=" <%$SPUrl:~SiteCollection/Style Library/footer.js%> ...

This is one of those funny times where the error you see hasn't got much to do with what is actually wrong! DataSourceID is a parameter in the dataview webpart and it is empty in the view which errors out and the one which works perfectly okay. Check this screenshot of a DataView webpart which works fine: Most of the time it would would be an error in the html tags within your XSL style sheet. Hard to troubleshoot but one of the ways is to copy the entire webpart code from SharePoint Designer on to a Visual Studio - New - XSLT file and see if there any errors highlighted by Visual Studio. This could also be done in SharePoint Designer but its more of a pain that way.

Document Property under Quick Parts sometimes appears grayed out or disabled in Word client and we can see that Compatibility mode written on the Word client on the top part. This happens because Word disables certain features to make our document compatible with previous versions of Office. To workaround we have to change the compatibility feature. To do that click File on the Word ribbon and select Info. Click on Convert button and click OK on the pop up message. This enables the disabled features and now we can access the Document Properties under Quick Part.

I never really cared about learning or using XSL and XSL style sheets in my projects. But then I was wrong, I should have mastered this, it is an important weapon in a SharePoint consultant's arsenal. In this blog post I try to note down my experience with XSL so that I can refer back to this again later. 1. If you see characters like ampersand (&) appearing as &amp; in your List view with custom XSL template then you got to disable output escaping. disable-output-escaping ="yes" 2.   For one of my projects I had to dynamically bind a URL field in a DataView webpart. The requirement was to display different views (InfoPath) of a list based on two column values in the list. One of these values was set by a work flow. There are different ways to do this and there may be better ways of achieving this but this is how I did it:   < xsl:choose >            < xsl:when test ="@Status1 = 4 and @Status2 = 4">   ...

I was working on a List workflow the other day in SharePoint Designer 2010. This list already had a workflow which was working perfectly fine and I needed another manual workflow in it. No matter what I tried the workflow would fail and would log a message in the history list that Workflow failed to start and it was cancelled by System Account . I observed that the same happened with new workflows in that list, new workflows in other lists and I even tried creating new subsites and workflows were behaving the same way. I googled for a while and there were many suggestions to clear SPD cache which did not help me. I played with SPD 2010 for a while and observed that the workflow xml and xoml files were checked out. I read in some blogs that this could cause this issue as well. I tried to check those files in but then I was greeted with a new error! " Cannot perform this operation. The file is no longer checked out or has been deleted ." I had no clue what was happening...

While installing the April 2013 CU for SharePoint 2010 Server a colleague came across this error. He checked with me and I remembered that I had come across the same issue while deploying a CU sometime back. The installer does a version check and there is a command line switch to bypass this check which is: PACKAGE.BYPASS.DETECTION.CHECK=1 To get this to work, navigate to the folder where you have the foundation or the server CU and type the name of the CU package, give a space and copy paste the above text and press Enter. This may not be the most elegant way to get rid of this error but at least it does the job because you don't get much information from the error that the installer throws at you!

To add a custom CSS file in the Style Library to a customer master in SharePoint 2010, add the following line on the Master Page just before the closing head tag: <SharePoint:CssRegistration name="<% $SPUrl:~SiteCollection/Style Library/YourStyleSheet.css %>" After="corev4.css" runat="server"/> This would load the custom style sheet after the SharePoint 2010 core style sheets.