When I tried to launch my app that I sideloaded to my Windows Surface or a Windows 8 machine, I started getting the following dialog on launch of my app:

This app can’t open

Check the Windows Store for more inform about [Your App]

Thanks, Microsoft, this error message couldn’t be more helpful. Checking the Windows Store doesn’t give you any idea of what the actual cause of the problem is. Don’t bother.

Actual Cause:

Your developer license has expired and you need to renew it.

Solution:

1. From the Windows 8 startup screen, swipe in from the right, click the Search charm.
2. Type in “Powershell” in the Search box, and make sure Apps are highlighted.
3. On the left side, find the “Windows Powershell” item. Click and drag drop down slightly about 1/4 inch until it is selected (checkbox appears ).
4. Now select the “Run as Administrator” icon from the bottom App Bar
5. A command prompt will appear and “Administrator:Windows PowerShell” will be the title.
6. If administrator is not in the title go back to step one, and try again.
7. Type in Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration (there is a dash after show)
8. Enter in the Microsoft account that you used to get your developer license
9. Go back to Windows 8 Start Screen and launch your app again.

Kudos to Anthony Baker – For blogging how to register from your developer license from Powershell.

http://blog.anthonybaker.me/2012/05/windows-8-tricks.html –

One note: If you read his blog post, I couldn’t find a Windows 8 “Powershell As Administrator” icon on my start screen running the Windows 8 RTM build – he may have been using a Beta or Beta2 build of Windows 8.

#Windows8

“The tool was unable to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 Native Client”

I found that if I downloaded the Native Client directly from the web here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=26728

and installed only the sqlncli.msi native client,

Note: I use all the defaults and only installed the Client Components feature.

When finished, I reran the prerequisiteinstaller again and got past the error.

Before running the SharePoint installer, I always reboot after the prerequisiteinstaller.

HTH – Tom

The Scenario:

User starts a simple SPD workflow, which basically has two simple steps:

Create List Item – basically copies a list item from List1 to List2

Set Field in Current Item – add a Lookup to List2 (a forward ptr to the newly created item in list 2).

The workflow does NOT have “Require Manage List Permissions” checked

Behavior Seen:

Admin users (those with “Full Control”) were able to run the workflow successfully.

Site members (those with “Contribute”) permissions were able to run the workflow and create the list item in the second list, but failed on “Set Field In Current Item” but failed with

“Access Denied” Error.

After narrowing the “Access Denied” error to the “Set Field in Current Item” step in the workflow, I had one of the site members try to manually update this field by directly editing the List Item. The EditForm on the first list was a simple custom InfoPath form. This time the error was slightly different:

The form cannot be submitted.

The form cannot be submitted to the specified SharePoint list or document library. The SharePoint location may be read-only or you may not have permissions to access it.

An entry has been added to the Windows event log of the server.

Log ID: nnnn

 Correlation ID: xxxx-xxxx-xxx-xxxx

Root Cause of the Problem:

The first list has its Item Level Permissions set to “Create items and edit items that were created by the user” set! Thus, since the workflow were trying to set a field in the current list item, he/she did not have permissions to edit the item if he/she was the not creator of the original item.

Two possible fixes:

1. Grant the group with “Contribute” permissions (who needs to run this workflow) the “Manage Hierarchy” permission
   

   
   

    
    

    
    

    
    

2. Modify the Item-Level Permission to allow all users to “Create and edit all items” –
   
   1. Go to List Settings –> Advanced Settings
      
   2. Change the “Item-Level Permissions” back to allow all users to “Create and edit all items” – this assumes you don’t need item-level permissions on this list.
      

–Tom

For example:

You can easily workaround this issue by:

In IE8, change Zoom factor to something other than 115 or 125%, like this:

View –> Zoom –> 100%

Problem resolved:

Microsoft has confirmed this is an known issue with IE8 and a Browser zoom factor of 115/125%,

and provided me the above workaround. But good news I verified the tabs view correctly when

browsing with the IE9 release candidate with a zoom factor.

HTH someone.

Tom

When studying for this exam, I found very little in term of guidance on how to study for this exam.

I see that Coskun Cavusoglu, Geoff Varosky, Mark Rackley, Shannon Hill and Darrin Bishop are working on the

SharePoint 2010 Developer’s Certification: Certification Toolkit for Exams 70-573 and 70-576, but it won’t be published until September of 2011. Unfortunately, a little too late for me to take advantage!

I could only find one study guide and that was Pedro Pinto’s 50-576 Study Guide, so I thought I would share my study materials:

• Professional SharePoint 2010 Development – A good reference book to read for both 70-573 and 70-576 exams. It is written by Tom Rizzo, Reza Alirezaei, Jeff Fried, Paul Swider, Scot Hillier, and Ken Schaefer.
• Developing Application for SharePoint 2010 – part of the patterns & practice group, basically a deep technical insight into the key concepts and issues for SharePoint 2010 solution developers.
• Implementing Governance in SharePoint 2010 – A white paper which focuses on the “back end” of SharePoint Governance – the technical implementation. It provides high-level guidance about the many configuration options that SharePoint Server 2010 provides to enable you to manage the environment for the benefit of all.
• Best Practices: Using Disposable Windows SharePoint Services Objects – best practices document to follow when using Windows SharePoint Services objects to avoid retaining the objects in memory in the Microsoft .NET Framework.
• Best Practices: Common Coding Issues When Using the SharePoint Object Model – whitepaper that describes common issues encountered by developers who write custom code by using the SharePoint object model.

Besides that, understanding the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SDK, as well as some experience designing solutions on SharePoint, and you should be ready to pass.

To give you some incentive to go do it now, see the second shot and save up to 20% on your exams offer. Hurry, both exams must be completed by June 30, 2011.

Good Luck on your exam.

–Tom

Becky Bertram’s Study Guide

Mike Smith’s Study Guide

Wesley Hackett’s Study Guide 

Thanks Becky, Mike, and Wesley for putting these together.

In addition, I also went thru the following materials:

Professional SharePoint 2010 Development – a great study guide, as week as a good developer reference book

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SDK – of course, the MSDN documentation on the SDK

Getting started Development on SP2010 videos

Channel 9 videos – SharePoint Developer 2010

SharePoint 2010 Hands-on Labs in C#

I also participating in a SharePoint 2010 developer course taught by Microsoft, when SharePoint 2010 was still in Beta.

Hope this helps you pass your exam.

–Tom

When creating a custom content type, derived from the Document Content Type with one additional text field, using Visual Studio 2010 and deploying via F5, the first time deployment will work fine, second time failed with this error:

Error occurred in deployment step ‘Activate Features’: The field with Id {a6a841d7-4067-4519-b794-e25ac438e9cf} defined in feature {a6192d76-512f-48de-9284-251b49902345} was found in the current site collection or in a subsite.

 Microsoft has acknowledged this as a problem, and is working on a fix.

 Workaround

 To workaround this problem and to continue to enjoy your Visual Studio 2010 debugging experience, you will need to follow these steps.

1. F5 (Deploy the solution)

2. Shift +F5 (Retract the solution)

3. Again F5. This time it will fail.

4. Open the task manager and kill VSSPHost4 process.

(Ideally we need to kill the VSSPHost4 process any time you see the error message during the F5 deployment.)

To make it easier on myself, I kill the VSSPHost4 process from an SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, run as Administrator, like this:

stop-process -processname vssphost4 -force

5. Now F5 and the solution will get deployed successfully.

 You could also avoid this error, but installing and deploying the feature outside the Visual Studio 2010 debugger, either thru STSADM or thru PowerShell!

Hope this saves you some time.

Tom

Details on How to Reproduce, if you care.

1. In Visual Studio 2010, create a new “ContentType” project,

    
    

   
   

1. Specify the site and solution type.

   The site should be a site collection, not a subsite.

   The solution should be a farm solution.

2. Inherit this new content Type from the Base Content Type of “Document”
3. Replace the contents of Elements.xml with this contents:

    
    

   <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
   

   <Elements xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/“>
   

   <!– Parent ContentType: Document (0x0101) –>
   

    
    

   <Field ID=”{D6A841D7-4067-4519-B794-E25AC438E9CF}”
   

   Name=”MyCustomField”
   

   StaticName=”MyCustomField”
   

   DisplayName=”MyCustomField”
   

   Description=”MyCustomField”
   

   Group=”abc”
   

   Type=”Text”
   

   SourceID=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3” />
   

    
    

   <ContentType ID=”0x010100b19e17b94ee044778dcffe8f92ce18e6″
   

   Name=”ContentTypeProject2 – ContentType1″
   

   Group=”Custom Content Types”
   

   Description=”My Content Type”
   

   Inherits=”TRUE”
   

   Version=”0″>
   

   <FieldRefs>
   

   <FieldRef ID=”{D6A841D7-4067-4519-B794-E25AC438E9CF}” Name=”MyCustomField”/>
   

   </FieldRefs>
   

   </ContentType>
   

   </Elements>
   

    
    

4. Hit F5 to compile and deploy this Content Type.

1. After the SharePoint site is displayed, verify the content type exists.

1. Back in VS2010, hit Shift-F5 to stop debugging.

    
    

2. Hit F5 to redeploy this Content type and it will fail with the following error:

Error occurred in deployment step ‘Activate Features’: The field with Id {a6a841d7-4067-4519-b794-e25ac438e9cf} defined in feature {a6192d76-512f-48de-9284-251b49902345} was found in the current site collection or in a subsite.

1. Now edit the elements.xml file, by changing the GUID, and set the Overwrite attribute to TRUE, you will not be able to deploy and reploy over and over again.

    
    

   <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
   

   <Elements xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/“>
   

   <!– Parent ContentType: Document (0x0101) –>
   

    
    

   <Field ID=”{A6A841D8-4067-4519-B794-E25AC438E9CF}”
   

   Name=”MyCustomField”
   

   StaticName=”MyCustomField”
   

   DisplayName=”MyCustomField”
   

   Description=”MyCustomField”
   

   Group=”abc”
   

   Type=”Text”
   

   
   Overwrite =”TRUE”
   

   SourceID=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3” />
   

    
    

   <ContentType ID=”0x010100b19e17b94ee044778dcffe8f92ce18e6″
   

   Name=”ContentTypeProject2 – ContentType1″
   

   Group=”Custom Content Types”
   

   Description=”My Content Type”
   

   Inherits=”TRUE”
   

   Version=”0″>
   

   <FieldRefs>
   

   <FieldRef ID=”{A6A841D8-4067-4519-B794-E25AC438E9CF}” Name=”MyCustomField”/>
   

   </FieldRefs>
   

   </ContentType>
   

   </Elements>
   

Then I vaguely remembered reading a blog article, a while back on the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0, and wondered if this would help me. I [ googled |binged] and found Scott Hanselman’s blog article, WebPI20 and VSWebDeveloper2010Express. Well, and look at that – Scott had almost the same problem.

To reiterate:

1. Download the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0
2. Select the Web Platform tab, the Customize link under the Database heading.

1. Click the “SQL Server R2 Management Studio Express ” Option and click Install.

It took the installer about 20 minutes, and a reboot was necessary, but it works like a champ.

One thing I did notice is that the web installer was smart enough to figure out that I had SQL Server Express R2 and it should SQL Server 2008 R2 Management Studio Express, whereas Scott’s had SQL Server Express 2008 w/ SP1 installed, thus the web installer install the SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Express version.

Thanks, Scott – your blog is a great!

Tom

For Windows 7, 64bit, I installed the System Update Readiness Tool for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB947821) [April 2010] . The download links for all other Oses can be found here. This tool didn’t resolve the issue by itself.

I then located this quite old post on the forum: Windows Auto update problem Error 8007000D

Note: don’t bother using the ToggleMUURl.vbs to the beta site as it quite old.

Rather look at the registry change half way down the page.

You can find a downloadable copy of the registry here:

http://www.technipages.com/vista-error-8007000d-during-windows-update.html

Apply this registry change, and restart your machine, and run Windows Update again.

It resolved my issue.

Hope it helps someone else.

— Tom

 
 In Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint 2010 project require you be running Visual Studio 2010
as an Administrator, but VS2010 doesn’t tell you until you try to actually create this
project and then you will get the following message:
 

To avoid this issue each time you create a SharePoint project, you can always
start Visual Studio 2010, but right clicking on the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
program on the Start Menu, select Properties, and the Compatibility tab and
click the “Run this program as an administrator”, click Apply, then OK.