The situation was that I thought I would bring my SharePoint 2013 up to date with the latest cumulative update, at the time of writing December 2013 as we are still waiting for the issue with SP1 to be remedied.

So the cumulative update ran through fine and apart from a few complaints in the upgrade file to do with PowerPivot, all was well. So I went in to a demo site and got an empty screen with the following: Server Error: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkID=177673. When you click on that link it takes you to an update deployment page for SharePoint Foundation 2010.

So I checked central administration upgrade status – nothing. And checked the database upgrade status, all fine. So I went with my cavalier-lazy and ran the SharePoint 2013 Products Configuration Wizard. After the usual multi-stage process it completed with no complaints. Checked my site, no joy – same result.

So I had a hunt around and fired up the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell and Test-SPContentDatabase on the content database for my demo site and nothing. So I ran it as administrator and again got nothing. So I tried Upgrade-SPContentDatabase and it helpfully told me that my content database didn’t need upgrading.

So I had another hunt around and tried psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force and again got no errors. So I admitted defeat and started hunting through my ULS logs. This threw up interesting errors, the start of which was:

04/21/2014 10:55:41.99  w3wp.exe (0x3208)                        0x237C SharePoint Foundation          Database                       880i High     System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): CREATE TABLE permission denied in database ‘

So again I took the lazy approach and fired up SQL Trace on my database and narrowed down the filter to have a Database Name like the content database and ran it up, and assuming it was psconfig related ran that again. The command ran through with no errors reported to the command line and when I stopped the trace and had a look I didn’t see anything. And nothing in the ULS log. So I waited. And the same entry appeared again – don’t you love asynchronous stuff?

So I was a bit more patient this time – I restarted the trace, and ran psconfig, and waited until the error appeared in ULS. Then stopped the trace and went looking. And there it was, a big long SQL statement running under an account that didn’t have sufficient priviledge to create the table. So being a hacker I gave that account dbo priviledge – ran psconfig and after a suitable pause my site is running again.

The interesting bit ? The identity wasn’t the application pool identity of the web application, it wasn’t the identity of the timer service (Ok I know it wouldn’t be, owstimer.exe wasn’t owning up in ULS). On my VM it was the identity of the portal web application / community sites. I’m nonplussed but will put it on my “to learn” list.

I had an interesting chat with our Internal IT guys today about a strange behaviour found with the mixture of software versions that inevitably happen. In our case our desktop kit can be bang up to date, i.e. Windows 8 and Office 2013 or in our technical division our consultants love to install the latest and greatest, with quite a few looking at Windows 8.1. Our Intranet runs on SharePoint 2010 as space for hosting is limited and there is a little little bit of the cobbler’s children effect when it comes to making the upgrade.

Since the combination of Windows 8 and Office 2013 came about there have been reports in to our IT guys about a strange effect in SharePoint document libraries. Browsing in IE 10 to SharePoint would open a document in the registered application fine, but when you tried to open another document (or even the same document) you would get an error saying “The document could not be opened for editing. A Microsoft SharePoint Foundation compatible application could not be found to edit the document”.

The theory was that it was 64 bit related, we had all sorts of problems when our technical consultants (remember them earlier?) all installed 64 bit office to run on shiny 64 bit Windows 7. The control that provides the menu to items in document libraries (open documents class add-on) didn’t work in 64 bit IE, or work with 64 bit office. So we all run 32 bit these days.

Cue a search today and I dragged up a thread on the msdn forums which suggested an issue when you run a non-english US setup and an associated registry hack to fix it. A colleague suggested an alternative fix for Windows 8 which deals with 32 bit add-ins and 64 bit Internet Explorer.

The thread on the msdn forums also suggested that the June 2013 Cumulative Update for Office 2013 would contain a fix. It does, but unlike SharePoint cumulative updates which come in a nice big file, the June 2013 Cumulative Update for Office 2013 is just a big list of hotfixes which come with individual files. So if you are looking for the official fix (not a registry hack, well not directly) then look at Article ID 2726997

Over the last six months or so I’ve been assisting on a project to migrate some old software between data centres. The new data centres have Windows 2008 Server R2 and all the matching versions of SQL Server and SharePoint – not the latest versions but up to date when it comes to corporate land.

Part of my consulting support has involved regression checks of both source and running software in test environments. With the apps being almost 8 years old the support and test machines are thankfully virtual but date back to Virtual Server time. It’s great having the ready built machines available but Hyper-v has a few issues when working with the machines.

One of these is the additions – not the Hyper-V additions but the original Virtual Server additions which will not remove due to an issue in the original setup. And you can’t add the new ones until the old are removed.

So over to a post by Arvind Shyamsunder over on MSDN (Virtual PC / Virtual Server 2005 to Hyper-V Additions) which describes a solution – it’s a hack but it works. It involves modifying the installed installer for Virtual Server additions to remove a check so that it will de-install. Then you have a clean machine which you can install the hyper-v additions on.

ORCA is a tool for working with msi files which is in the Platform SDK – full details in the referenced article.

This is going to be a horrible meta-post, you know the kind that contains little to no original material and points you to other stuff (like your last post I hear you say).

I like the idea of a post over on the MCS UK blog on SharePoint 2013 Development (Apps versus Solutions) as it concisely runs through the thought process when considering how to construct your solution in SharePoint 2013. My caveat is the inclusion of Sandboxed solutions. Sandbox solutions will not be available in the next version of SharePoint, and if you agree with what is said in Sandboxed Solutions are deprecated in SharePoint 2013 they are only included in 2013 as a favour for those upgrades from 2010 (yes – the version that introduced Sandboxed Solutions).

I guess consideration of application longevity is a bit of a moot point in our industry but I’d be inclined to move Sandboxed Solutions down the list as a bit of a dead end.

Ok, a rather long title but I didn’t want to go too far on the paraphrase. If you work with SharePoint I’d recommend a look at the latest blog post by Spence over at Groundhog Day: Configuring Back Connection Host Names using Group Policy .

For one thing it is a nice reminder that SharePoint administrators need to understand their infrastructure. Sure we can’t keep all of the detail in our heads, but at least know the roles of the technology and what to use to do what. In this example Group policy is used to implement something on the servers in a farm.

With the start of the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, the much awaited information on SharePoint 2010 is beginning to emerge from NDA. For those SharePoint community members itching to share information there have been a flurry of obviously pre-prepared articles on the changes and improvements we can come to expect.

My only caveat at this early stage (the product has yet to reach public beta) is that many of the articles are a bit on the light side, so the depth of material like we have with MOSS 2007 is absent at the moment.

Two blogs to check out are those of Spencer Harbar and Andrew Connell. Both have a bit of a history in Web Content Management, but Spencer has also got a good bit of security and enterprise deployment in his background and the spread of articles released by the guys in the last 24 hours is a good taster of what is to come.

I predict the head strain that you get when introduced to Shared Service Providers will continue with Service Applications, but I wholeheartedly recommend sticking with them. I think that the flexibility that you get from them will be really useful and it is worth taking the time to understand them.

And yes, no big apologies for a meta blog entry – I don’t get my hands on SharePoint 2010 until next month, so I’m standing on the shoulders of giants here.

Spencer Harbar

Spencer has blogged a few entries that then link on to articles on the subject matter, I’ve linked to the blog articles which I think is the courteous thing to do:

• SharePoint 2010 Developer Tools Overview – We got a good hint of this in the Visual Studio 2010 introduction at Tech Ed last year, finally SharePoint gets better support as a development platform.
• SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Readiness – I was going to summarise what Spencer had written here, then realised I was simply going to list the whole thing. All of the elements that Spencer has chosen to highlight are real issues with MOSS 2007, it wasn’t impossible with MOSS it is just that things could be better. Managed Accounts and Service Applications are a couple of highlights to take a look at.
• SharePoint 2010 Service Applications Part 1 – Ok, so it is a taster article and leads you in to what is to come. I’m looking forward to what has been done to replace Shared Service Providers – yes those!

Andrew Connell

Andrew has so much to say that, like Spencer, his introductory article is split.

• Improvements to Core SharePoint Platform and how these benefit SharePoint 2010 Web Content Management (Part 1)
• What’s Improved with SharePoint 2010 Web Content Management (Part 2) – Better Content Query Webpart, Cross Browser authoring. Yay.
• What’s new with SharePoint 2010 Web Content Management (Part 3) – Again, just to pick a highlight – the content organiser deals with coordinating all that “stuff” that a big website generates and gets dumped everywhere.
• The new Service Architecture Model in SharePoint 2010 – This is an intro article too, but like the intro article from Spencer above this is very important to getting Architecture correct for a 2010 Deployment and Operation.

So where do I start? I’m in quite a different working arrangement at the moment, spending the working week in Basingstoke of all places. We’ve getting towards completion a project for the website of a High Street retailer and if you know anything about retail you know that the bulk of their annual sales fall around the Christmas period.

I’ve worked on a handful of retail websites in my time, only a handful for a number of reasons. One of them is that there are very few organisations that are big enough to be able to afford to run a sizeable presence on the internet, and of these perhaps one or two are based in Scotland. So the opportunity for a Microsoft based Internet Retail job is quite a rare one.

So I’ve been down in Basingstoke for a few weeks, backfilling for some of the team members who work in the “pre-live” team – the team that handles the final stages of taking a development project to live – checking deployment, managing the pre-live environments which tend to be a half-way house between the free-for-all that is a development environment and the “don’t touch” of a live environment.

My primary role is to do with Microsoft SQL Server administration, so I had to swap my SharePoint hat off and start thinking of life in terms of T-SQL, transactions and general stability. I’ve also had great opportunity to get my hands on environments with replication – another thing that only tends to live in the larger environments. As well as that I’ve also had opportunity to muck in with the deployment of environments – all good stuff for someone with a development background. I’ve always said that a distinction between Developers and Infrastructure consultants is the willingness to subvert change control and make changes to live operational systems, and then to forget what was changed. Infrastructure consultants tend to be a bit more measured in their approach to change. I think this may be because support etc tend to fall more to Infrastructure types and if you have had the joy of live support you learn to be a bit more careful.

Repeatability of complete build is also an interesting situation too – automated build goes a long way to checking over a solution, but getting from a “base” operating system to a running website is a complex beast and demands a combined set of skills to build on a single machine – split this over a number of different servers in different roles and you also have to understand networking, firewalls, and all that stuff too.

Posts will be sporadic while I have a lot more time doing and less time thinking, but keep up with me over on twitter – http://twitter.com/alistairl/