Prashanth Palakollu's Blog

Install a bunch of assemblies to GAC

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Tue, 10 May 2016 14:11:00 +0000

Simple command to install a bunch assemblies to GAC....Make sure to have gacutil in the correct location.

get-childitem $basedirectory "*$filter.dll" | foreach-object -process{ WRITE-HOST -FOREGROUND GREEN "Processing $_"; gacutil.exe /i $_.FullName /f}

Thanks to the original author: http://stackoverflow.com/a/679116

Latest file in a directory with subfolders

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 01:26:00 +0000

Very often we need to find the latest/most recent files in a folder. You can use the below script to copy the files into a directory. This will only copy the latest file to the directory.

get-childitem $sourceDir | where {(!$_.PSIsContainer) -and ($_.FullName -like '*.filetype*') } | sort-object lastwritetime | foreach {Copy-Item -Path $_.FullName $_.DestDir -Force }

Error with timer job, deploying solutions and get-sptrustedtokenissuer

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 04:30:00 +0000

Note: Below recommendation should never be tried in a production environment. Completely unsupported by Microsoft.

My colleague recently ran into an issue with deploying solutions and running Powershell commands related to Trusted token issuer...The error message was very cryptic, "Invalid URI: The URI is empty".

Below is how the Powershell command looked like:

We googled and found lot of articles related to timer job and clearing cache by going into C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\ folder. But none of suggestions worked. Looking at the logs, we found the below:

The SPPersistedObject with Name CustomSTS, Id b98a7f69-5c38-46dd-9be8-4f8aaced5233,
Parent 3e0eff9b-340a-46ce-95ca-6142cea8fe4f failed to initialize with the following error:
System.UriFormatException: Invalid URI: The URI is empty.
at System.Uri.CreateThis(String uri, Boolean dontEscape, UriKind uriKind)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPAutoSerializingObject.DeserializeBasicObject(XmlElement xmlValue, Boolean isMerge, Boolean bResolveMissingTypes)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPAutoSerializingObject.SetStateXml(XmlNodeList childNodes, Boolean isMerge, Boolean bResolveMissingTypes)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPAutoSerializingObject.SetStateXml(XmlDocument value, Boolean bResolveMissingTypes)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPersistedObject.Initialize(ISPPersistedStoreProvider persistedStoreProvider, Guid id, Guid parentId, String name, SPObjectStatus status, Int64 version, XmlDocument state)

System.UriFormatException: Invalid URI: The URI is empty.
at System.Uri.CreateThis(String uri, Boolean dontEscape, UriKind uriKind)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPAutoSerializingObject.DeserializeBasicObject(XmlElement xmlValue, Boolean isMerge, Boolean bResolveMissingTypes)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPAutoSerializingObject.SetStateXml(XmlNodeList childNodes, Boolean isMerge, Boolean bResolveMissingTypes)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPAutoSerializingObject.SetStateXml(XmlDocument value, Boolean bResolveMissingTypes)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPersistedObject.Initialize(ISPPersistedStoreProvider persistedStoreProvider, Guid id, Guid parentId, String name, SPObjectStatus status, Int64 version, XmlDocument state)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPConfigurationDatabase.GetObject(Guid id, Guid parentId, Guid type, String name, SPObjectStatus status, Byte[] versionBuffer, String xml)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPConfigurationDatabase.FetchObject(Guid id)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPConfigurationDatabase.GetObject(Guid id, Boolean checkInMemoryCache, Boolean checkFileSystemCache)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPConfigurationDatabase.Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.ISPPersistedStoreProvider.GetObject(Guid id)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPersistedObjectCollection`1.get_Item(Guid objId)
at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPersistedObjectCollection`1.d__0.MoveNext()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell.SPCmdletGetSPIdentityProvider.RetrieveDataObjects()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell.SPGetCmdletBase`1.InternalProcessRecord()
at Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell.SPCmdlet.ProcessRecord()

Just before we decided to rebuild the farm, I decided to look at the SharePoint Configuration database as last resort (again strictly not recommended for production database)

I ran the below query:

SELECT [Id]
      ,[ClassId]
      ,[ParentId]
      ,[Name]
      ,[Status]
      ,[Version]
      ,[Properties]
FROM [dbo].[Objects]
where properties like '%CustomSTS%'
GO

Replace CustomSTS in the query with whatever you think is appropriate. Sometimes you might not see any rows come back. You will need to re-start your research at this point.

I backed up the database and deleted the entries from the above output. Went back to powershell and ran the command again. Voila ! It ran perfectly with no issues. Same with deployment of wsp files.

Thanks to my colleague who let me debug this for him. His machine will be rebuilt soon as it was completely hosed before this.

Hope you never need to do this !

SharePoint 2013 Search Error

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 21:24:00 +0000

Yesterday, I got a request to check on one our SharePoint 2013 applications which has not been modified in last couple of months. The users were getting an error related to search...

Search has encountered a problem that prevents results from being returned. If the issue persists, please contact your administrator.

Correlation ID: 85a0bd9c-3615-f0f4-b26f-38cd545f34eb

Below are the debugging steps for such an error message:

1) Looked up the correlation id in ULS logs and found an error related to query processing
Saw an error related toaccess denied for the crawler account ( I knew this was not correct because we did not update or change any security related to this account)
2) Looked up event viewer for any error messages and the below showed up
w3wp.exe: All query processing components are in 'Failed' status.
w3wp.exe: Query processing component 'net.tcp://nameoftheserver/D30C5C/QueryProcessingComponent1/ImsQueryInternal' changes its status to 'Failed'.
3) Checked Central admin -> Service applications - > Search Service application for status on search components
4) Notice an yellow exclamation mark next to query processing
5) Restarted SharePoint Administration, SharePoint Timer Service and SharePoint Administration services through services mmc
6) Went back to Central administration to see if the exclamation mark was gone. Nope. Was still there.
7) Went back to services and restarted the Search Host Controller service
8) Opened command prompt and ran the below commands
net stop osearch15
net start osearch15
9) Went back to Central admin and refreshed the search application page
10) Saw exclamation marks on all Search related components - did not feel good at this point
11) Refreshed the page and saw that each of the components were turning green now - felt better at this point
12) After few minutes all components were in green - felt really good at this point
13) Went to the actual site and performed a search - results came back and problem solved

If you see error messages related to search, do not reset the index or re-provision the search application. Sometimes a simple reboot might actually fix the problem.

Hope this helps you !

SharePoint 2013 Preview–Central Administration

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:52:00 +0000

In the previous post, I blogged about the installation process. Now, lets look at the changes in SharePoint 2013 Preview.

SharePoint 2013 Preview

Central admin main screen has few changes:
No Web Analytics reports under Monitoring
New Group called Apps for managing and monitoring apps

Under Application Management, everything seems to be same.

Under System Settings, everything seems to be same

Under Monitoring, the following one’s have been removed:
Review Information Management Policy Usage reports
View Web analytics reports

Under backup and restore, everything seems to be same

Under security, everything seems to be same

Under Upgrade and migration, everything seems to be same

Under general application settings:
Site Directory has been removed
Reporting Services has been removed (unless I missed something during the install)

Apps is completely new in SharePoint 2013. Will discuss more in detail in the next few blog posts.

The last screen seems to be exactly the same.

SharePoint 2013 Preview–Getting Started

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 04:53:00 +0000

SharePoint 2013 just release 2 days back and there is already so much reading material that one can be easily overwhelmed. I have been working with SharePoint for over a couple of years now. But, I have never documented my learning process. Time has always been a constraint for me to do this. This time, I have decided to document as much as I read so that I can refer to it when needed. So, today I will be installing SharePoint Server 2013. Microsoft also released SharePoint foundation 2013 but for now I will stick to the server version since it has lot more features than the foundation version. OK. Enough of the theory, so lets jump right into the installation part. First, let’s look at the Hardware requirements on MSDN.

In my case, I will use a single server that uses SQL Server with 8 GB RAM and 64-bit 4 cores.
Now, the software requirements. I will be using Windows Server 2012 RC and SQL Server 2012. Both are supported (or will be) on SharePoint Server 2013 Preview. Now, make sure you have Windows 2012 and SQL Server 2012 installed on the machine. Please make sure you are up to date with the the updates. For installing SharePoint, create a domain account just for installation purposes (something like spinstall@domain.com) and give this account admin access to the server. Login to the machine using these credentials and mount the installation iso. When you open up the iso, it should look something like this:

Now, run the prerequisite installer and it click through the next few steps. The server will reboot multiple times before this process is completed.

If prompted for reboot, please click reboot. I had to reboot at least once. After the reboot, when I ran setup.exe, it gave me the below error:
“A system restart from a previous installation or update is pending. Restart your computer and run setup to continue”.

This looked something familiar and I have encountered the same error in 2007. Looking at the logs the error was something like “2012/07/18 23:21:15:840::[2952] File Rename operations are pending a reboot.”
Depending on a registry key, the install complains that there are files which were in use by the system and therefore needs a reboot to replace the file. The registry key "PendingFileRenameOperations" in the location "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager" is responsible for this. So to workaround this issue, open up registry and delete the key. See below:

Now go back to the install folder and run setup.exe. When prompted for the SharePoint Server 2013 product key, enter:
6RNT8-XV26M-GWH36-VMGQH-94MMH (also available on the download site)

When choosing the Server Type, you can select either Complete or Standalone. Complete let you add servers, pick the SQL Server if already installed. Standalone installs Express and configures SharePoint to use it ( I personally don’t like to use express). In this case, I picked the Complete option. Under file location tab, you will have the option to select the location for the install files and the search index. I always change the search index path to a different drive since this might get big for large deployments.

Clicking Install will start the process and you will be ready to install SharePoint 2013.

After the setup is complete, the configuration wizard needs to be run. This will actually configure the farm whereas the previous step installed the required binaries.

In this case we will be creating a new farm and not adding to an existing farm. If you were to add any new servers to an existing farm, then you will need to pick the first option.

Now, you will specify the server name and the database name. Also, if you will specify the domain account as the database access account that will be used to connect to the database server. This account is used to create and access your configuration database. It also acts as the application pool identity account for the SharePoint Central Administration application pool, and it is the account under which the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Workflow Timer service runs. The SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard adds this account to the SQL Server Login accounts, the SQL Server dbcreator server role, and the SQL Server securityadmin server role. The user account that you specify as the service account has to be a domain user account. However, it does not have to be a member of any specific security group on your front-end web servers or your database servers.

Next, enter the passphrase. This passphrase (or secret) needs to be unique for every farm. This is used to configure and add servers to the farm after it is created. It is very important to remember this passphrase. It is used to prevent unauthorized users from adding servers to an existing farm.

Next, enter the port required by the central administration website.

Finally, it will be done with the below Successful message. Click finish to open the central administration window.

When central admin opens up, it will prompt you for username and password. You can use the install account or the farm admin account. Also, when prompted for configuring the farm, you can select either the manual type or use the wizard. I choose the wizard since I wanted to see what it does for us.

When clicked next after entering the new managed account details, it kept on spinning for long time before it comes back. If you are getting impatient, you can event the event viewer for progress or also the SharePoint logs to find out if any progress is being made. It took me approx. 15 minutes for this setup to complete.
When done you will be redirected to create a new site collection as the below one.

That’s it for today's post. In the next blog post, I will post some of the new features & options in the Central administration Site.

Outlook 2013 nice feature

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 21:27:00 +0000

When in the calendar, Outlook 2013 enables you to configure your current location for displaying weather.

What do you have on your desktop ?

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:46:00 +0000

This is what I have on mine !

SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Error

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 09:33:00 +0000

We were upgrading one of our SQL Server 2008 R2 server to SQL Server 2012. Everything went smooth expect for one report in which was using reporting services. This report was calling the reporting service webservice and was passing in a huge xml parameter. This XML parameter would work fine for smaller string lengths but failed for larger strings. The error was specifically:

library!ReportServer_0-2!4ac!05/11/2012-14:26:30:: e ERROR: Throwing Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.InternalCatalogException: Internal error, Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.InternalCatalogException: An internal error occurred on the report server. See the error log for more details. ---> System.UriFormatException: Invalid URI: The Uri string is too long.
   at System.Uri.EscapeString(String input, Int32 start, Int32 end, Char[] dest, Int32& destPos, Boolean isUriString, Char force1, Char force2, Char rsvd)
   at System.Uri.EscapeDataString(String stringToEscape)
   at Microsoft.ReportingServices.Common.UrlUtil.UrlEncode(String input)
   at Microsoft.ReportingServices.ReportProcessing.ParameterInfoCollection.UrlEncodeSingleParam(StringBuilder url, String name, Object val, Func`2 cs)
   at Microsoft.ReportingServices.ReportProcessing.ParameterInfoCollection.ToUrl(Boolean skipInternalParameters, Func`2 cs)
   at Microsoft.ReportingServices.Library.ReportExecutionBase.WriteParametersToJobContext(RunningJobContext jobContext)
   at Microsoft.ReportingServices.Library.ReportExecutionBase.Execute()
   at Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.CancelablePhaseBase.ExecuteWrapper()
   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---;

As you can see, the error message is “Invalid URI: The Uri string is too long.”. We knew the problem was with the huge XML parameter and wanted to find out what got changed from SQL Server 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2012. So, I opened up reflector and started comparing the code in 2008 R2 with the one from SQL Server 2012.

SQL Server 2008 R2 execution path

private void WriteParametersToJobContext(RunningJobContext jobContext)
{
    if (this.EffectiveParameters != null)
    {
        if (this.EffectiveParameters.Count > 0)
        {
            jobContext.ExecutionInfo.Parameters = this.EffectiveParameters.ToUrl();
        }
    }
    else if ((this.RequestInfo.ReportContext.ReportParameters != null) && (this.RequestInfo.ReportContext.ReportParameters.Count > 0))
    {
        jobContext.ExecutionInfo.Parameters = ParameterInfoCollection.ToUrl(this.RequestInfo.ReportContext.ReportParameters);
    }
}

public string ToUrl()
{
    StringBuilder url = new StringBuilder();
    foreach (ParameterInfo info in this)
    {
        if (info.Values != null)
        {
            foreach (object obj2 in info.Values)
            {
                EncodeSingleParamForUrl(url, info.Name, obj2);
            }
        }
    }
    return url.ToString();
}

 
private static void EncodeSingleParamForUrl(StringBuilder url, string name, object val)
{
    if (url.Length > 0)
    {
        url.Append('&');
    }
    EncodeForUrlAndAppend(url, name);
    if (val == null)
    {
        EncodeForUrlAndAppend(url, ":isnull");
    }
    url.Append('=');
    if (val == null)
    {
        url.Append("true");
    }
    else
    {
        EncodeForUrlAndAppend(url, val.ToString());
    }
}

 
private static void EncodeForUrlAndAppend(StringBuilder builder, string unencodedStr)
{
    int length = builder.Length;
    builder.Append(unencodedStr);
    builder.Replace("=", "%3D", length, builder.Length - length);
    builder.Replace("&", "%26", length, builder.Length - length);
}

SQL Server 2012 execution path

private void WriteParametersToJobContext(RunningJobContext jobContext)
{
    if (this.EffectiveParameters != null)
    {
        if (this.EffectiveParameters.Count > 0)
        {
            jobContext.ExecutionInfo.Parameters = this.EffectiveParameters.ToUrl(false);
        }
    }
    else if ((this.RequestInfo.ReportContext.RSRequestParameters.ReportParameters != null) && (this.RequestInfo.ReportContext.RSRequestParameters.ReportParameters.Count > 0))
    {
        jobContext.ExecutionInfo.Parameters = ParameterInfoCollection.ToUrl(this.RequestInfo.ReportContext.RSRequestParameters.ReportParameters);
    }
}
 
 
public string ToUrl(bool skipInternalParameters)
{
    return this.ToUrl(skipInternalParameters, null);
}
 
public string ToUrl(bool skipInternalParameters, Func<object, string> cs)
{
    StringBuilder url = new StringBuilder();
    foreach (ParameterInfo info in this)
    {
        if (skipInternalParameters && !info.PromptUser)
        {
            continue;
        }
        if (info.Values != null)
        {
            foreach (object obj2 in info.Values)
            {
                UrlEncodeSingleParam(url, info.Name, obj2, cs);
            }
            continue;
        }
        UrlEncodeSingleParam(url, info.Name, null, cs);
    }
    return url.ToString();
}

 
private static void UrlEncodeSingleParam(StringBuilder url, string name, object val, Func<object, string> cs)
{
    if (url.Length > 0)
    {
        url.Append('&');
    }
    url.Append(UrlEncodeString(name));
    if (val == null)
    {
        url.Append(":isnull=true");
    }
    else
    {
        url.Append('=');
        url.Append(UrlEncodeString((cs == null) ? val.ToString() : cs(val)));
    }
}

private static string UrlEncodeString(string param)
{
    return UrlUtil.UrlEncode(param).Replace("'", "%27");
}

 
public static string UrlEncode(string input)
{
    if (input == null)
    {
        return null;
    }
    return Uri.EscapeDataString(input);
}

public static string EscapeDataString(string stringToEscape)
{
    if (stringToEscape == null)
    {
        throw new ArgumentNullException("stringToUnescape");
    }
    if (stringToEscape.Length == 0)
    {
        return string.Empty;
    }
    int destPos = 0;
    char[] chArray = EscapeString(stringToEscape, 0, stringToEscape.Length, null, ref destPos, false, 0xffff, 0xffff, 0xffff);
    if (chArray == null)
    {
        return stringToEscape;
    }
    return new string(chArray, 0, destPos);
}


private static unsafe char[] EscapeString(string input, int start, int end, char[] dest, ref int destPos, bool isUriString, char force1, char force2, char rsvd)
{
    if ((end - start) >= 0xfff0)
    {
        throw GetException(ParsingError.SizeLimit);
    }
........

As you can see above, SQL Server 2008 R2 while using the String Builder type is not performing any checks on the size limit. But SQL Server 2012 is throwing an exception when the site is greater than 65520 characters. This was the problem and we ended up modifying our code to fix this issue.

Remote Desktop – Multiple monitors

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Thu, 10 May 2012 02:23:00 +0000

This post is useful for those who:

Use Remote Desktop
Use Multiple monitors

If you are like me who remote’s into virtual machines or physical machines frequently, then here is a tip. When remotely logging into machines, do you use multiple monitors ? Does the remote machine view scale across multiple monitors ? By default it does not. When you click Remote Desktop or MSTSC.exe, the below screen comes up without the option for multiple monitors.

But, once you click options and then click on Display tab, there is an option to enable multiple monitors for your remote session.

Click the checkbox “Use all my monitors for the remote session” and you can use multiple monitors for current remote session. Hope this helps !

Windows Server 8 Part 2–VMware Tools

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Tue, 08 May 2012 23:56:00 +0000

After installing Windows Server 8, I did not install the VMware tools immediately. When I eventually did, I was no longer able to get into the Server.
It would boot fine, but come up with the a blank Windows 8 Server screen. So looks like Windows Server 8 does not like VMware tools yet. Or, there is an update for WorkStation 8 which supports Windows Server 8. My co-worker suggested that he might have had the same problem and mentioned about an update. So, I upgraded Workstation to 8.0.3 build-703057. Did that solve the problem ? Nope…It did not. Since, the VM boots properly and has issues displaying, I enabled the “Accelerate 3D graphics” option in the Hardware Settings of the VM. That’s it….It did the trick and now, I can get to my VM. More later…

Windows Server 8 Part 1 – Basic Install

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 22:31:00 +0000

Recently, I started testing Windows Server 8 (or Windows Server 2012 as officially called now) and wanted to blog about this for sometime now. This is going to be the beginning of a series of posts related to Windows Server 8/2012.

The first post will cover the basic install steps of building a Windows Server 8 virtual machine using VMWare Workstation. So let’s get started.
First, let’s fire up VMWare Workstation and start creating a new virtual machine. Let’s pick the “Typical” configuration.

In the next step, we will use the Windows Server 8 Beta ISO as the install software.

Now, let’s pick Windows Server 2008 R2 as the template. I did try it using the “other” option, but the install crashed and kept on rebooting.

The next screen is used for easy install. You can leave the default settings. There is no need to enter a product key here. Actually, easy install will not work here. In a later step, we will see how to remove the install configuration file and get through the error message.

You can change the name of the virtual machine in the next screen and the path to the virtual machine folder.

Next, we will specify the disk size. You can leave the default settings or use a custom size.

Next, will be the summary screen.

Click on the customize hardware to change the hardware settings. After finishing the hardware settings, click “Finish” to create the virtual machine.

The virtual machine should start the process of creating a new Virtual Machine.

Since, VMWare WorkStation uses easy install the process and will fail when looking for a product key. You will need to remove the install configuration file in the settings window to continue the install process.

Make sure the floppy drive is not connected and uses the “use physical drive” option instead of floppy image file. The floppy image file is pointing to a configuration file which will look for product key screen. After you change the settings, click close and restart the virtual machine.
The next steps are self explanatory. The first step involves setting few basic options.

Next, you can pick Core/GUI option for configuring Windows Server 8. This is not new in Server 8. It was available in Windows 2008 R2.
Also, you can pick custom install as the option when prompted.

Pick the drive where the OS needs to be installed and the install will continue to copy, install features and reboot.

When prompted, enter and confirm the admin password.

Voila ! You are done and ready with Windows Server 8.

SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Upgrade Error

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:55:00 +0000

During the In-Place upgrade from SQL Server 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2012, sometimes the Reporting Services component upgrade would error out with different types of error messages:

Specifically, the errors would be something like:

A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate is not configured on the Web site
An SSL binding already exists for the specified IP address and port combination. The existing binding uses a different certificate from the current requests. Only one certificate can be used for each IP address and port combination. To correct the problem, either use the same certificate as the existing binding, or remove the existing SSL binding and create a new binding using the certificate of the current request.

To resolve this issue, it is important to understand the workflow of the Reporting Services upgrade path. Your best friend in this case is MSDN. I could not find anyone else having the same problem.

Going to MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143747.aspx (Upgrade and Migrate Reporting Services), the first thing you will notice here is :

Run the upgrade advisor before you do the upgrade
Remove invalid SSL certificates. This includes certificates that are expired and you do not plan to update prior to upgrading Reporting Services. Invalid certificates will cause upgrade to fail and an error message similar to the following will be written to the Reporting Services Log file: Microsoft.ReportingServices.WmiProvider.WMIProviderException: A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate is not configured on the Web site.

I ran the upgrade advisor and not find any issues. The SSL Certificates on the server were still valid and not expired.

So, I took a snapshot of the VM and ran the upgrade. It failed giving me the second reporting services error. I reverted back the snapshot and then opened up reporting services configuration manager. In here, I made the below two changes before the upgrade was restarted:

Under Web Service URL

IP Address –> Changed it to “All Unassigned”
Under Advanced –> Removed the SSL Certificates

Under Report Manager URL

Click Advanced –> change the IP Address to Unassigned and Remove the SSL bindings.

Both the above steps are necessary. Even if you don’t do one piece, the Upgrade fails.

Once the above steps were done, the upgrade was very smooth and successful.

Infopath Forms Exception after Windows Updates

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 08:23:00 +0000

Our production servers receive Windows update immediately and during one of the maintenance periods, the InfoPath forms on a SharePoint Site stopped working.
Looking at the ULS logs, I saw the below error:
System.IO.FileLoadException: Loading this assembly would produce a different grant set from other instances. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131401) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Diagnostics.FirstChanceHandler.ExceptionFilter(Boolean fRethrowException, TryBlock tryBlock, FilterBlock filter, CatchBlock catchBlock, FinallyBlock finallyBlock) at Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server.DocumentLifetime.ErrorPageRenderer.RunAndGetErrorRendererOnException(HttpContext context, EventLogStart eventLogStart, TryBlock tryblock, CatchBlock catchblock) at Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server.Controls.XmlFormView.LoadDocumentAndPlayEventLog() at Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server.Controls.XmlFormView.OnDataBindHelper() at Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server.Controls.XmlFormView.OnDataBinding(EventArgs e)
Anytime the error “Loading this assembly would produce a different grant set from other instances” shows up, it means that the application pool needs to be recycled. It is almost like the app pool got loaded into memory during the updates.
So, I quickly recycled the application pool and it fixed the error.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview (CP)–After a month

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:10:00 +0000

I have been using Windows 8 since the developer preview and currently using the CP since its release. Windows 8 CP is currently my main workstation with all the developer tools installed. When using the developer preview, I was running into frequent crashes but CP has been really great. The frequent crashes are not happening anymore. Windows 8 is a huge shift for Microsoft Users as the user interface has been completely redesigned and is based on Microsoft’s Metro User Interface. Microsoft is aiming towards a single operating system for both desktop, tablet and phone users. The trick will be to satisfy all the different types of users and this will be a difficult task to accomplish. If Microsoft can pull this off, it will be a huge accomplishment on their part. Historically, it has been proven to be difficult to satisfy all types of consumers. Each area like tablet, desktop and phone has a niche of users with their own requirements.

Coming to Windows 8, here is my analysis:

Will work great on Tablets. Have been using Samsung 7 Slate and is awesome !
Enterprises will embrace it quickly because of some of the nice features
What are the nice features ?

Single interface for tablets and PC’s
Metro Applications
Reset and Refresh – easily restore your PC
Sky Drive integration
File History
Charms
Snap Multi-Tasking
Windows 2 Go
Better Support for multiple monitors
Excellent Search – search for anything and everything
More (another blog post)

Now to the sore points

No Start button –> This will take time to sink in
Power and Restart buttons –> not easy to find
Turn off Metro interface if needed –> cannot do it in DP or CP (may be in Release Preview)
Close background applications –> no easy way to do this (right click on the top left of the screen actually shows the applications which can be closed OR task manager)

Windows 8–Day 2

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 02:11:00 +0000

The Windows task Manager in Windows 8 is completely revamped. I like the new look of the task manager. It is very intuitive and a single place to go to to debug all the issues. The task manager itself consists of 7 main areas:

Processes
Performance
App History
Startup
Users
Details
Services

The Processes tab nicely explains what applications and background processes are running. It also gives a graphical view of the current CPU, Memory, Disk & Network usage of each of the process. Right clicking each process gives you the ability to end the process, create dump file and look at the properties:

The Performance tab gives you more details on the CPU, Memory, Disk and Networking usage. You can also launch resource monitor from the link at the bottom of this screen.

The App History tab is completely new and is for tracking the performance of the Metro Styled applications.

The startup tab give the information about the applications which are started during system startup. You can disable the unneeded ones by right clicking the application.

The Users tab gives you an idea about the users logged into the system and also the resources used by each of the users.

The details table gives you information about the applications which are running.

The Services tab gives you an idea about the currently installed services on the system.

Windows 8–Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 01:30:00 +0000

I recently installed Windows 8 DEV preview and so far it’s been a nice operating system to play around with. I will try to document my findings as I use this new Operating System more frequently. After installing the Windows 8 OS with Developer tools, 64 bit version, I was trying to install Office 2010. The moment I ran the installer, it complained about 32 bit office components. Something like: “You cannot install the 64-bit version of Office 2010 because you have 32-bit Office products installed”. This was because of Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer which is 32 bit. I had to uninstall Power Point viewer to get Office 2010 installed. Power Point Viewer was installed by default. After installing Office 2010, the tools should be available to you:

Next, the one thing I don’t like at all is the restart option. In Windows 7, you could click Start –> Shutdown. But with Windows 8 , you will need to hover over the start button –> settings which would bring up the popup kinda thing on the right where you can restart the machine.

More later…..

Secure Token Service related error 800703fa

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 15:22:00 +0000

While configuring SharePoint 2010 Farms, sometimes while using Claims Authentication the below error used to popup every morning on the front end servers. The strange thing is that it would disappear after an application pool recycle.

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {080D0D78-F421-11D0-A36E-00C04FB950DC} failed due to the following error: 800703fa.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[[System.ServiceModel.ExceptionDetail, System.ServiceModel, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089]]: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {080D0D78-F421-11D0-A36E-00C04FB950DC} failed due to the following error: 800703fa.

If you look at the Stack trace, it becomes clear that the error is related to the WCF Service and in this case, it was related to the Secure Token Service (STS) application. To fix this error, open up IIS and navigate to the application pools section. In that are open the SecureTokenServiceApplication pool account and modify the “Load User Profile” property in advanced settings.

By default this property is set to False, change it to True and this should fix the error.

SharePoint 2010 Disable Mobile Page Redirect

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 15:00:00 +0000

When deploying SharePoint Farms, it is very important to consider the mobile aspects of using SharePoint also. Sometimes, it is very easy to miss this aspect. Out of the box, SharePoint 2010 provides few basic mobile pages. When you browse from a mobile, then you will be redirected to a different page rather than the regular publishing/wiki page you would see. You will be redirected to a page in layouts folder: /_layouts/mobile/mblwp.aspx.

If you are using a custom branded page for SharePoint 2010, then you may not want the users not to redirect to the out of the mobile page when browsing from their mobile. The easiest and supported way to do this is to add a web.config entry for the respective web application. The below entry needs to be added under the node <system.web>:

   1:  <browserCaps>

   2:   <result type="System.Web.Mobile.MobileCapabilities, System.Web.Mobile, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"/>

   3:   <filter>isMobileDevice=false</filter>

   4:  </browserCaps>

There are other ways to change this setting, specifically modifying the compat.browser file in the “App_Browsers” folder located in the application’s virtual directory. In here, you can disable the setting for a specific mobile. For example, to disable the redirect on IPhone, you would modify the isMobileDevice setting to false. By default it is set to true:

   1:  <!-- iPhone Safari Browser -->

   2:      <!-- sample UA "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0 like Mac OS X; ja-jp) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5A345 Safari/525.20" -->

   3:      <browser id="iPhoneSafari" parentID="AppleSafari">

   4:          <identification>

   5:              <userAgent match="iPhone" />

   6:              <userAgent match="Mobile" />

   7:          </identification>

   8:          <capabilities>

   9:              <capability name="isMobileDevice"                    value="true" />

  10:              <capability name="canInitiateVoiceCall"              value="true" />

  11:              <capability name="optimumPageWeight"                 value="1500" />

  12:              <capability name="requiresViewportMetaTag"           value="true" />

  13:              <capability name="supportsTouchScreen"               value="true" />

  14:              <capability name="telephoneNumberDetectionDisabled"  value="true" />

  15:          </capabilities>

  16:      </browser>

SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 Beta Upgrade

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:51:00 +0000

Finally, I was able to cleanly upgrade our SharePoint 2007 environment to SharePoint 2010 Beta (Database Upgrade). With 2010, it is very easy to track the upgrade process and know where the errors occur. Below is snapshot of the upgrade process…As you can see, I restarted the upgrade process multiple times and finally I was able to see the Succeeded message in the upgrade status page.

Here are few tips to get complete the upgrade successfully:

Always look for errors and warnings in the log files ( In the folder: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\LOGS\).
The log files are very detailed and give you information about the specific error which is occurring (Search for “error” or “warning” in the log files).
If there is a warning about a missing file, make sure the file exists, otherwise the warning will never go away. If you do not have the file then either clean up installation on your current farm or at least use a dummy file for the upgrade process (No warranties here)
Don’t worry about the error or warning count. Usually, the actual errors or warnings are approximately half of the shown count.
Make sure you have all the features deployed, otherwise you will get at least 2 errors for every missing feature.
During the upgrade process, you can always check for errors in the log file, stop the upgrade process, fix the errors and restart it over again. You do not need to wait for the upgrade process to succeed or fail before restarting the upgrade process.

Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.StateServiceLocalizedException: A Microsoft SharePoint Server State Service error occurred while processing your request.

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 03:06:00 +0000

After upgrading a SharePoint 200 7 application to SharePoint 2010, I was trying to access an InfoPath form which was hosted in a web part on a page. The following error showed up on the page instead of the InfoPath Form:

Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.StateServiceLocalizedException: A Microsoft SharePoint Server State Service error occurred while processing your request.

So, as the error was related to State Service, I wanted to make sure the state service was mapped to the web application.So, I went into the Central Administration site and followed the below steps:

Click on Manage web applications under Application Management tab

Select the web application in which the error is occurring

Click on Service Connections button on the Ribbon (the ribbon should be highlighted once you select the web application)

Now, on the popup, click on the checkbox next to the State Service - State Service Proxy option. Make sure the check box is selected.

Click Ok
Now, return to the web application where the occurred and refresh the page. The InfoPath form should now load without any errors.

SQL Server 2008 Configuration Manager WMI Error

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:44:00 +0000

Recently, I was trying out few configuration changes in the SQL Server Configuration Manager to find out the impact of each change. After sometime, I tried to open up the configuration manager but the following error showed up instead of the configuration manager mmc.

The error was “Cannot connect to WMI provider. You do not have permission or the server is unreachable. Note that you can only manager SQL Server 2005 or later servers with SQL Server Configuration Manager. Invalid class [0X80041010]”.

Upon searching, the below link explained a resolution for the same issue in SQL Server 2005.

http://blogs.msdn.com/echarran/archive/2006/01/03/509061.aspx

I followed the steps exactly as mentioned in the above blog post and it worked perfectly for SQL Server 2008 too. Here are the steps:

Open up command prompt using elevated privileges (Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008) or normally in Windows XP or Windows 2003.
Navigate to the folder c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Shared
Run the following command: mofcomp.exe "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Shared\sqlmgmproviderxpsp2up.mof" (or just “mofcomp.exe sqlmgmproviderxpsp2up.mof” )
You should see a similar output in your command prompt:

Parsing MOF file: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Shared\sqlmgmproviderxpsp2up.mof

MOF file has been successfully parsed

Storing data in the repository…

Done!

Below is a snip of the results….

SQL Server 2008 Editions

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:23:00 +0000

Quite often, I need to look the features available in a particular edition of SQL Server and I end up searching for it all over the place. So, I decided to write this blog post with an idea of finding all the differences (@ the administration level only….for other difference please click on the link @ the end of the blog post) at a single place.

Features/Editions	Enterprise	Standard	Workgroup	Web Developer	Express
Number of CPU’s	OS Maximum	4 CPU	2 CPU	4 CPU	1 CPU
Memory	OS Maximum	OS Maximum	4 GB	OS Maximum	1 GB
Database Size	524TB	524TB	524TB	524TB	4 GB
x32 Hardware Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
x64 Hardware Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Data Compression (Row and Page compression for both tables and indexes)	Yes
Resource Governor (for managing SQL Server workload and system resources)	Yes
I64 Hardware Support	Yes
Table and Index Partitioning	Yes
Parallel Index Operations	Yes
Parallel Consistency Checks	Yes
Scalable Shared Databases	Yes
Indexed views	Yes
Enhanced Read-ahead and scan	Yes
Mirroring	Yes	Yes (Single Threaded, Safety full only)	Witness Only	Witness Only	Witness Only
Online System Changes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Log Shipping	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Clustering	16 node	2 node
Automatic Corruption recovery from Mirror	Yes	Yes
Log Stream Compression	Yes	Yes
Online Indexing	Yes
Mirrored Backups	Yes
Backup Compression	Yes
Hot-add memory and CPU	Yes
Snapshots	Yes
Fast Recovery	Yes
Online Page and File Restore	Yes
SQL Server Change Tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Merge Replication	Yes	Yes	Subscriber only	Subscriber only	Subscriber only
Transactional Replication	Yes	Yes	Subscriber only	Subscriber only	Subscriber only
Snapshot Replication	Yes	Yes	subscriber only	Subscriber only	Subscriber only
Heterogeneous Subscribers	Yes	Yes
Oracle Publishing	Yes
C2 Complaint Tracing	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
SQL Audit	Yes
Transparent Database Encryptions	Yes
Extensible Key Management	Yes
Hypervisor Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Database Migration Tools	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Policy-Based Management	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
SSMS Tools	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Database Mail	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Performance Data Collection	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
SQL Server Agent	Yes	Yes	Yes
Database Tuning Advisor	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Plan Guide	Yes	Yes		Yes
SQL Profiler	Yes	Yes	Yes
Performance Reports	Yes	Yes
Distributed Partition views	Yes
Automatic Query to index view matching	Yes
Unlimited Virtualization	Yes
CDC (change data capture)	Yes

If you would like to find more differences, you can find them here.

Outlook 2010 – Recall a sent message

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:56:00 +0000

Outlook 2010 has a nice feature called “Recall a sent message” . Using this feature, you will be able to either delete or replace the message in the recipients mailbox after the message has been sent (useful in cases where you forgot attachments or want to make changes immediately after the email is sent). But it only works if the message is unread. If the message has already been read, then you cannot recall it and you will get an email indicating that the recall has failed.
So, how do you recall the message ?

After an email is sent, go to the “Sent Items” folder
Click on the message you want to recall to OPEN it
Click on the file tab on the top left side

Click on the “Resend or Recall” option in the center pane

Now you can either “Recall” or “Resend the message”

Select “Recall this Message” and the following prompt will show up

At this point, you can specify either to “delete the unread copies of the message” or “delete and do a replace with a new message”
By clicking the checkbox “Tell me if recall succeeds or fails for each recipient”, you will get an email back indicating the status of the recall
Below is an example of failed recall which indicates that the message has already been read.

Clicking on the actions button on top menu bar will also open up recall options

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - February Release

noreply@blogger.com (Prashanth Palakollu) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:26:00 +0000

It is a good time now, if you want to get started with VS 2010 as the release candidate has been made available. Also, the febraury release for the traning kit is available (this is huge - almost 600 MB). You can download the training kit using the below link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=752CB725-969B-4732-A383-ED5740F02E93&displaylang=en