Karthick's Blog!

If you have the above problem, check your Time Job Definitions and Delete the "Enable Features" job, that should stop this particular activity from running indefinitely.

Whenever you have issues connecting to SQL Server 2008 from your SharePoint installation wizard or when you are having trouble accessing your Windows 2008 machine from outside (your VMWare or VirtualPC) - trust me, the issue is with the Windows Firewall! Turn it off (it has Domain, Public and Private Profiles) and turn all of them off for you to seamlessly connect through!

You get this error when you have a custom ASPX page having a ReportViewer WebPart. I initially had my SSRS 2008 running in SharePoint Integrated Mode, later I changed the mode to Native and also uninstalled the SharePoint Reporting Services Add-in. Even after this, I still had this error coming up. This is what I did to fix it : added inside the tag of my SharePoint application as well as the virtual directories of ReportServer and ReportManager (these are inside C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS10.MSSQLSERVER\Reporting Services) Last but not the least, I also restarted the server for this to start working! :)

I usually want to keep my blog to only technical stuff, but am unable to resist writing about this new speakers that I have bought! - Logitech V10, I must confess I am a big fan of Logitech products, they are just superlative quality at the same time, value for money! - costing about US$35, it attracts right from its presence in the shelves - its just compact among every other speakers kept in the store... Once you bring it home and get it connected to your USB! - You will just be very surprised with the fidelity, volume, quality, build quality, nice little compartmented pouch (you can just easily keep it in any standard laptop bag) - trust me, this is the best if you are looking at something that just powers from your USB, is compact and does not hit on your wallet!

The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component When you are running your SharePoint 2010 beta 2 on a machine that has the domain controller, you might sometimes face this issue of SharePoint search sevice not working, inspite of a Search Service Application being associated. This is what I did to solve this: I had this problem as well on my SharePoint 2010 machine and I feel this specifically occurs when you have the Domain Controller running on the same machine. I sorted out with the following steps:    Deleted the 3 databases that gets created along with a Search Service Application from SQL Server directly Stopped the SharePoint Search Service using stsadm command Reset all the crawled index Started the Search Service again using stsadm Created a new Search Service Application (I also ensured - the same account - for example spsearch is used for the Crawl Service, Search Service and Query Service Application pools)...

Whenever you encounter this error "The given key was not present in the dictionary" when opening a SharePoint List or when creating a new item on a list, am sure you are led to search your own code to see if you have wrongly referenced any non present field... But, that is not the case unfortunately! This mostly comes in lists where you have Custom Fields (inherited from SPField) created. You will have to check if you have the corresponding fldtypes xml created and placed in the template/xml folder apart from placing the .ascx file in the ControlTemplates folder. So in your case, you will mostly not have placed the xml file and that is what will be causing this issue!

When you have a missing feature in your SharePoint that refuses to go away inspite of deactivating it as well as uninstalling it by force, a site template (.stp) that depends on - fails to work... so how do you make this work? Well, you have to manually delete the feature id reference from the manifest.xml that is present in the .stp file. As you know, .stp files are nothing but .cab (cabinet) files, so all you need to do is rename, change the extension, open in WinRar or any such cabinet handling program, extract the files out, modify the manifest.xml file  (just delete the xml tag that points to that missing feature) and then when you have to place it back - you have to be careful! You have to make sure there are no sub folders that get created! Check my another post on how you can use the makecab.exe utility to recreate the cabinet file. Once you create that, then you need to rename it back to .stp, upload it back to the Site Template Gallery - and start using it!!!