Kent Brown has recently published a great MSDN article on how to decide which technology (either BizTalk or WinWF) would be appropriate for particular business scenarios. If you do get into Business Process Improvement implementations (and hey, if you are implementing SharePoint then you are improving Business Processes, right?) then make sure you check it out.

Cheers!

I've just completed a Dual-boot deployment of 2008 server on my home PC (so I can gradually migrate from Vista to 2008 server) - one of the first things I needed to do is fire up MSN Messenger, so I kick off the deployment package... WTF is this message?

Sorry, you can't install Live products on server Operating systems.

So I quickly call my home boys (Fired up Google) and got the low-down on the shiz-nit (searched for "Windows Live Writer 2008 server"). Sure enough, the Live auto-downloader rejects anything but desktop OS's, but you can download the MSI packs from Microsoft by following Daniel's guide - here is his post (and another one - use Daniel's Guide first) that explains how to use the WLInstaller.exe downloader tool to download the latest version of all the apps on another client PC (eg a computer running a desktop OS). So now I can msg my homies and rap using Messenger, then blog about my new record contract using Writer.

I have to get some sleep...

Had a problem at work today where one of the staff could not open a site to edit it using SP Designer. One of the other people seemed to have more success (and they were running SP Designer with SP1) but they were still having problems.

The site was a restored site collection from a client's environment (and the other instance of it we restored worked fine with SPD)... tried running an upgrade to SP1 for SPD on the erroring computer, but no dice... we even looked at the web sites to see if one of the app pools was off or the site had lost its application directories, IISReset (so we could check the IIS Control Panel Applet - problem and fix described here) but nothing unusual there...

We were at a loss, until one of the guys said he'd switched on Anonymous Authentication. Aha - I know that page - that's where I stop people using SPD on a site by switching off Client Integration... and sure enough, it must have been switched off by accident when the Anon Auth was activated.

Fixed!

Have seen a few instances of this lately - on 2003 Server running SP1 or SP2 with WSS 3 or MOSS 2007 installed, if you open up the IIS 6 Control Panel applet from Admin Tools, it takes about 20 seconds to appear and displays nothing except the name of the server you are currently on. There are no other nodes that appear - No Application Pool folder, no Web Sites folder, nothing.

According to this article (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/946517/en-us), it seems that the SharePoint timer service (OWSTimer.exe) can compete for IIS with other processes and cause this situation to occur. A temporary fix can be achieved by running IISRESET on your site (and bringing down your sites momentarily), however if you call MS Support they'll send you the fix for free.

I've only seen this on 32-bit 2003 servers running SP2, but it looks like it affects all 2003 server versions running with a service pack.

Good luck and happy troubleshooting!
Brad

PS: As an aside - The MS internal support article indicates that this hotfix is part of SP3 for 2003 server. Huh? I spent half an hour on the phone with Microsoft support (in India over their impressive VoIP system with audio lag) explaining to them that SP3 was not out yet and probably wouldn't be out for another 12 months or so - hell, SP2 only came out mid 2007 and OS SP's seem to roll around every couple of years... They finally came around to my way of thinking, and hopefully will change their internal information. It was only when I rang back again asking for SP3 that they finally admitted it didn't exist yet :)

Hi all.

I recently discovered Paul's Blog and was very interested in his article explaining how to hide page components using JavaScript and deploying the functionality as a feature. In part 3 of the 6-part article, Paul demonstrates a way of exposing Administrative pages in "edit mode" view - a problem I have had every now and again, but I was unaware there was a solution for it except to crack the page open in SP Designer.

Once you are at the page you want to add a web part to, add the following to the URL:

To change everyone's view of a particular page, append ?PageView=Shared&ToolPaneView=2 to the URL.

To change your private view of a particular page, append ?PageView=Personal&ToolPaneView=2 to the URL (this will only work on pages that allow you to have a personal view - to see if you can edit a personal view of a page, go to the page and click on the top right context menu beside the "Welcome, <your name>" link to see if there's a menu option called "Personalise this page").

More info on the URL switches can be found here - http://blogs.msdn.com/danielmcpherson/archive/2004/10/11/240863.aspx - they relate to 2003, but they all seem to work on 2007 as well.

I keep searching for this using google search and failing to find it, so now I'm going to flood it with keywords in the hope it comes up next time I need this string... admin flyout menu page view querystring tool pane shared personal :)

Cheers!
Brad