BBB - Bas Blogging 'Bout SharePoint

I'm in the MXP for Architects!

2011-11-17T08:55:00Z

"the what for Architects?!", you might ask yourself? MXP stands for Microsoft eXcellence Program, and is a unique collaboration between my employer (Achmea) and Microsoft, with the aim to train people, who will operate as (technical) leaders within the Microsoft community within Achmea. The participants will be intensively be trained and coached (on the job) for two years, to increase their skill on several competences: leadership communication organizational insights strategic insights...(read more)

Fast Search for SharePoint caveat: Apply a sortformula with managed properties of type decimals

2011-11-05T08:53:00Z

Fast Search for SharePoint provides four great possibilities to influence the sort order of your resultset that was returned: Sort by Managed property Sort by Rank Sort by Formula Sort in Random order When I was working on my presentaion and demo for the diwug (Dutch Information Worker User Group) last week, to show off on how you can improve your search experience by using custom ranking models, custom sort orders and extending the pipeline, I ran into an issue that I wasn't aware off. When...(read more)

How to branch with the SharePoint scenario framework

2011-08-11T21:56:00Z

Waldek Mastykarz posted a superb post about one of those hidden SharePoint gems: the SharePoint scenario framework for multi-page forms. As Waldek showed off, this framework enables us to create some flows, but I was wondering if branched flows (for example, an easy yes/no) were possible. And it seems to be that it is!. This post shows off how to create a branched flow based on webparts and the SharePoint scenario framework. Disclaimer: some code has been taken from Waldek and has been slightly modified...(read more)

Fast Search for SharePoint problems - simplified architecture diagram

2011-08-09T21:54:00Z

Recently I had a few colleagues (and myself) who tried to install FAST search for SharePoint on their development workstation. Despite the well written installation guidelines on MSDN , they had several problems, and sadly enough, they all faced different problems. These problems varied from not able to crawl the content to not being able to query the indexed content. As most of the colleagues weren't too familiar with Fast (and SharePoint search in general), I decided to create a small architecture...(read more)

SharePoint 2010 - Fast Search Center site template not available (bug?!)

2011-07-27T10:08:00Z

Recently I found out that, my Fast Search Center was not available from the “New Site” menu. Both the english as well the dutch fast search template was not available. As I saw this happen before, I checked out the site collection features overview, to enable the “SharePoint Server Enterprise Site Collection features”. I had to scratch my head twice when I saw that that feature was already activated: that feature should add fast search center templates to the available templates...(read more)

Fast Search for SharePoint gotcha - query suggestions

2011-07-19T10:07:00Z

At the company i work for, we do have around 30(?!) different labels and we decided that all websites of those labels, should be hosted on one platform: SharePoint 2010. This consolidation to one platform should really decrease costs, because we now have one generic way of developing, one platform to take care of and we can reuse a lot of components. One of the service applications that we wanted to reuse amongst all applications, is the Fast Query Service Application, as we have a Fast instance...(read more)

SharePoint Navigation broken after migration from 2007 to 2010

2011-07-05T22:02:00Z

When migrating from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, it might be possible that your navigation is broken. The error I encountered was the following, but it can occur in more functions within the Navigation namespace. Object Reference not set to an instance of an object. Stacktrace: at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteWebSiteMapNode.FetchDynamicItems(PublishingWeb pubWeb, NodeTypes includedTypes, Boolean& websFetched, Boolean& pagesFetched) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing...(read more)

Fast: Adding managed metadata properties for the use with scopes in SharePoint 2010

2011-06-03T11:17:00Z

Lately I was working on a project that required to make use of scopes and some managed metadata properties in those scopes. For some reason, those managed metadata properties didnt show up in my scope selection dropdownlist, but I was sure that this metadata property was available in my Fast Managed Metadata properties list: as you can see, this property doesnt show up in my properties list: Whenever the SharePoint Search metadataproperties page is accessed, the option "Use in scopes" for...(read more)

Fast for SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Crawler is Dead

2011-05-19T08:30:00Z

Lately, I installed Fast locally on my machine for development purposes, and it was working as intended. Crawled a lot of local (and external) content, but suddenly, my Enterprise crawler was not working. nctrl status showed me that the Enterprise crawler was Dead but WHY it was dead? I had no idea at all! Checking the event logs only told me: M05020-DHEVMU98:13260: Process crawler was not running, restarting it M05020-DHEVMU98:13260: Process crawler ports are already in use, will not start it After...(read more)

My SharePoint 2010 & Fast session is online!

2011-05-19T08:23:00Z

On the Dutch Microsoft DevDays (or Techdays, as they were called), I had a session about SharePoint 2010 and Fast. It was recorded and is now published on Channel 9. It's pretty weird to see and hear yourself presenting. If you are interested in: Fast Architecture Fast OOTB capabilities Fast configuration capabilities Ranking & Sorting you should watch my session. For your information, it's in Dutch. the presentation can be found at: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/DevDays/DevDays-2011...(read more)

Error when deploying WebTemplate: "Error occurred in deployment step 'Add Solution': Exception from HRESULT: 0x8107026E"

2011-01-14T20:28:00Z

Recently I was working on a sandboxes solution, which included a WebTemplate ( Vesa "Vesku" Juvonen wrote a really nice post about it), but I couldn't deploy it, the followin error was displayed into Visual Studio 2010: Error occurred in deployment step 'Add Solution': Exception from HRESULT: 0x8107026E After checking the Logs (in %SHAREPOINT ROOT%\\LOGS) the following error was found: Failed to open the file 'Features\AD6.Public_AD6_Web\AD6PublishingSite\onet.xml'....(read more)

SharePoint OOTB xsl templates - Hack-Hack-Hack

2010-12-28T12:05:00Z

Today I was working with some collegues on some xsl within SharePoint, and we wanted to know where the following template came from: < xsl:apply-template select = " . " mode = " RenderView " > After some digging through the xsl templates in the SharePoint root, we found %SharePointRoot%\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\XSL\Internal.xsl, which contained the template "Hack-Hack-Hack" < xsl:stylesheet version = " 1.0 " xmlns:xsl = " http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform...(read more)

Console application new SPSite throws a FileNotFoundException

2010-12-24T09:09:00Z

A collegue of mine had the following problem: he wanted to write a console application to test some SharePoint code, but whenever he opened a new SPSite, the following File Not Found Exception was thrown: after being triggered about a possible problem with the wrong Target Framework, as Visual Studio defaults to .Net 4.0 as target framework, I remembered some wise words that were spoken during the Dutch SharePoint Connections 2010: "When you are building a console app to work with SharePoint...(read more)

Upgrading sandbox solutions to full trust solutions

2010-12-04T10:35:00Z

This blogpost describes the problems that could have come up when upgrading sandbox solutions to fulltrust solutions and how i Tested it. Read the conclusion in the end for the pitfalls that have to be taken care of. At the insurance company that I work, Achmea, one the responsibilities that I have include the SP2010 guidelines. One of those guidelines is: use Sandbox solutions. of course this is a guideline, which has some "unless" clauses, because the possibilities for custom solutions...(read more)

Creating site collections: Bug or not?

2010-06-02T07:09:00Z

Yesterday, I ran into a strange problem, which I will try to describe below: We have a nice application, with a custom site definition that makes use of a custom site definition provider. That provider creates a publishing page, based on a custom page layout. This page layout includes the OOTB Content Editor WebPart. (the reason to create this page with the provider is valid, so no discussion about that ;)) When we create a new site collection, based on this site definition, everything works fine...(read more)