Recently, I have just setup my new company laptop to run Windows 2008 as a desktop and reinstalling SharePoint in Hyper-V.  Upon completion of the installation and while accessing the Shared Services Provider, I was prompted continuously with authentication prompt, even I have entered the correct user and password.  Subsequently, I am just presented with a blank page.

There is a KB article at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 that describes the same scenario.

This is more of a note to myself to remember to set the DisableLoopbackCheck in the registry:

Steps:

1. Open your registry editor by going to Start –> Run and enter regedit and click OK.
2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa in the registry editor.
3. Right-click Lsa, click on New and select DWORD value.
4. Enter DisableLoopbackCheck and press Enter.
5. Right-click DisableloopbackCheck and select Modify.
6. In the Value data box, enter 1 and click OK.
7. Restart your server.

I would recommend that you do this on at least the Central Administration server, if not all WFE servers.

When you install the Visual Studio Extensions for WSS, you are prompted to select a web site or create a new web site, and select an application pool to be used for the new site.  This site will be used for deploying your SharePoint artifacts into SharePoint.

However, if you are doing this on a Windows 2008 server, which is running IIS 7, there is an additional features that will need to be activated.  Otherwise, you will an encounter the following error:

Go to your Features in the Server Manager, click on “Add Features”

Expand the .NET 3.0 Framework  Features and under the “WCF Activation”, select the “HTTP Activation” and click “Next” to install the feature.

So if you are trying to install the 10 SharePoint free themes, you will need to enable the WCF Activation in order to deploy them.

Cheers

Quite often we will be writing custom XSL to customize the display of a Content Query Web Part (CQWP) and at times we would want to get the current page URL where the CQWP web part lives.  For example, providing a link to a custom page to display your item as shown below, where the “Details” link is pointing to a custom page.

However, you would like to be able to get back to the origin page where the link is clicked.  You could achieve this by doing the following in your custom XSL:

Step 1:  Add the following namespace to your custom XSL:

xmlns:ddwrt=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime

Step 2:  Add a parameter name “PageUrl” right after XSL Stylesheet declaration:

<xsl:param name=”PageUrl” />

Step 3:  Add a query string to the link:

Step 4:  Add a link or button on your custom page and the following OnClick event:

As you probably have read regarding the SharePoint SP2 bug which reverts your license to the trial license which would expire after 180 days, and causes your existing license to expire in 180 days after the upgrade.  You could have fixes the problem by re-entering your license key into the system.

Microsoft has released a fix for this, this could be applied before or after the SP2 upgrade.

The 32-bit version can be downloaded here.

The 64-bit version is here.

For more information, you can read the kb article here:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971620

Chris O'Brien has compiled a detailed checklist on optimizing SharePoint sites, it is a great reference if you are tweaking performance on site.

Click here to read his article.

If you have downloaded and installed the Service Pack, please take note that Service Pack 2 will reset your product license key and product expiration date as though you are running on a trial license, which will expire in 180 days.  Though the expiration date will not affect the functionality of SharePoint until the expiration date.

For more information on this, check out the post by the SharePoint Team at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx

Service Pack 2 for Office System 2007 and Office Server 2007 has been released on April 28th.

For more details on what is in the Service Pack 2 could be found here:

• Description of WSS 3.0 SP2
• Description of MOSS 2007 SP2
• Description of SharePoint Designer 2007 SP2

More information could also be found at Updates Resource Center for SharePoint Products & Technologies

There is no media for the SP2, below are the links to download the binaries:

• WSS 3.0 SP2
• MOSS 2007 SP2
• SharePoint Designer 2007 SP2

There is a new release of the SharePoint SDK, version 1.5 which contains the following updates:

• A new of version of the Business Data Catalog Definition Editor
• A few new search samples with regards to Federated Search:
  • Custom federated search web part with a credentials UI
  • Federated search SQL Server Connector
  • Federated search HTML to RSS Connector
  • Federated search Virtual Earth Map connector

The new SDK can be downloaded at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6d94e307-67d9-41ac-b2d6-0074d6286fa9&displaylang=en

These are very good introductory online course if you are a .NET developer and interested to learn more about SharePoint. 

A total of 12 modules are available:

Module 1: Developing Solutions on SharePoint Platform

Module 2: Web Parts

Module 3: Page Navigation

Module 4: Page Branding

Module 5: Data Lists

Module 6: Web Services

Module 7: Event Handlers

Module 8: Content Types and Site Columns

Module 9: Workflow

Module 10: User Management

Module 11: Silverlight

Module 12: Deployment

This is mainly a note to myself since I keep forgetting this.  If you have deployed SharePoint using least privileges service accounts for your SharePoint, you would be encountering “Access denied” error message when activating the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure.

You can manually activate Publishing Resources via stsadm