Two very good articles on best practices for MOSS 2007 / WSS 3.0 installation:
MOSS 2007 Installation
http://www.sharepointforum.se/en-US/Wiki/Installation%20MOSS%202007.aspx
WSS 3.0 Installation
http://www.sharepointforum.se/en-US/Wiki/Installation%20WSS%203.0.aspx
A known issue exists with SharePoint / MOSS 2007 that produces the following error when attempting to delete a master page form the master page gallery:
This item cannot be deleted because it is still referenced by other pages.
This error might be expected if the master page was still in use, but the error is shown regardless if other pages still reference the master page or not.
A Microsoft Knowledge Base article exists (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=926812) which suggests setting the master page to a hidden state, but sometimes that isn’t enough. There are times when it is more than just a clean up issue, often it really is necessary to completely remove the file.
To completely delete the master page, perform the following steps:
Attempting to open a SharePoint document library in Windows Explorer view by choosing ‘Actions’ | ‘Open with Windows Explorer’ on a Windows Server 2008 machine generates the following error:
Your client does not support opening this list with Windows Explorer.
This is because the ‘Web Client’ service is required, but not installed on Windows Server 2008 by default. The service can be installed as a part of the ‘Desktop Experience’ Windows feature. To install the ‘Desktop Experience’ Windows feature perform the following steps:
Thank you to Tihomir Ignatov for his post on this error.
Requirement: Develop a Regular Expression to parse a single line of text considering any of the following combinations of City, State, and Zip Code valid:
Regular Expressions can be very powerful, but also can be a bit hard to develop and read. I would recommend using a good RegEx editor to help you build and test your expressions. Also, make sure to comment your expressions to assist in future maintenance and debugging.
After trying out a few RegEx tools, I recommend using Expresso which is available on the Ultrapico web site. The tool includes a 60 day trial period, and at the time of writing this article, the actual registration for the tool is also free.
To accomplish the above requirement, I found that using named groups and multiple or conditions (‘|’) was the best way to handle all the different combinations of City, State, and Zip Code I needed to support. This made it easy to allow for commas or the lack of commas and different spacing in the input text as well.
Using Expresso, I came up with the following Regular Expression:
(updated 2/4/2010 to allow for ‘.’ (period) and ‘-’ (dash) in City names)
#Parse address line into named groups (City, State, Zip)
^ #Beginning of string
( #Start OR condition
( #Begin first condition (City, State, Zip)
(?<City>[A-Za-z\.\-\s]+) #City
( (?:,\s?) | (?:\s?) )\b #Comma, comma space, or space
(?<State>[A-Za-z]{2}) #State
(?:\s?) #Space
(?<Zip>\d{5}(-\d{4})?) #Zip
) | #End first condition
( #Begin second condition (City, State)
(?<City>[A-Za-z\s]+) #City
( (?:,\s?) | (?:\s?) )\b #Comma, comma space, or space
(?<State>[A-Za-z]{2}) #State
(?:\s?) #Space
) | #End second condition
( #Begin third condition (Zip)
(?<Zip>\d{5}(-\d{4})?) #Zip
) #End third condition
) #End OR condition
$ #End of string
I then incorporated the new Regular Expression into a simple .NET console application to test. The application prompts for an input and then outputs any valid combinations that are matched. The complete listing for the console application is below.
using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
string addressToParse = String.Empty;
Console.WriteLine("Sample RegEx application to parse combinations of City, State, and Zip Code.");
Console.WriteLine();
Console.Write("Enter address or <Enter> to Quit: ");
while (true)
{
addressToParse = Console.ReadLine();
if (addressToParse.Length > 0)
{
ParseAddressSegments(addressToParse);
Console.WriteLine();
Console.Write("Enter address or <Enter> to Quit: ");
}
else
{
break;
}
}
}
private static void ParseAddressSegments(string addressToParse)
{
StringBuilder pattern = new StringBuilder();
pattern.Append(@"#Parse address line into named groups (City, State, Zip)" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"^ #Begining of string" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"( #Start OR condition" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"( #Begin first condition (City, State, Zip)" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"(?<City>[A-Za-z\.\-\s]+) #City" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"( (?:,\s?) | (?:\s?) )\b #Comma, comma space, or space" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"(?<State>[A-Za-z]{2}) #State" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"(?:\s?) #Space" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"(?<Zip>\d{5}(-\d{4})?) #Zip" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@") | #End first condition" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"( #Begin second condition (City, State)" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"(?<City>[A-Za-z\s]+) #City" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"( (?:,\s?) | (?:\s?) )\b #Comma, comma space, or space" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"(?<State>[A-Za-z]{2}) #State" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"(?:\s?) #Space" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@") | #End second condition" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"( #Begin third condition (Zip)" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"(?<Zip>\d{5}(-\d{4})?) #Zip" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@") #End third condition" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@") #End OR condition" + Environment.NewLine);
pattern.Append(@"$ #End of string" + Environment.NewLine);
Regex rgx = new Regex(pattern.ToString(), RegexOptions.IgnoreCase
| RegexOptions.CultureInvariant
| RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace
| RegexOptions.Compiled);
Match match = rgx.Match(addressToParse);
if (match.Success)
{
foreach (string name in rgx.GetGroupNames())
{
if ( (match.Groups[name].Value != String.Empty) && (name == "City" || name == "State" || name == "Zip"))
{
Console.WriteLine(@"{0} = ""{1}""", name, match.Groups[name].Value.Trim());
}
}
}
}
}
}
Download the sample Visual Studio 2008 solution.
Happy RegEx coding!
Using the syntax ‘DropDownList1.SelectedIndex = 10;’ does not create an exception, but using the syntax ‘DropDownList.Items.FindByValue(“10”).Selected = true;’ can create the following exception:
Cannot have multiple items selected in a DropDownList. at System.Web.UI.WebControls.DropDownList.VerifyMultiSelect()
Calling ClearSelection() on the DropDownList first will avoid this exception. It is also a good idea to first check and make sure that the value actually exists as an item within the DropDownList as in the following example:
private void SetDropDownListSelectedItem(string selectedValue)
{
ListItem li = DropDownList1.Items.FindByValue(selectedValue);
if (li != null)
{
DropDownList1.ClearSelection();
li.Selected = true;
}
}
A simple method to highlight the text within a textbox control when the control gets the focus:
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//Add client javascript to highlight the value when the control receives the focus
txtMyTextBox.Attributes.Add("onfocus", "this.select();");
}
This is a nice and easy way to highlight a default value in a form or a search box.
IIS 7 did not carry over many of the VBS scripts that IIS 6 came with. In particular, IISAPP.vbs which was a tool used to list the running worker processes, is no longer available on IIS 7 / Windows Server 2008. IISAPP.vbs was often used to determine which IIS process to attach your Visual Studio debugger to.
Fortunately, AppCmd.exe, which is a more powerful tool, can be used to accomplish the same task. For instance, to list the running worker processes, issue the following command: C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe list wp
A good write up on AppCmd.exe can be found at: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/114/getting-started-with-appcmdexe
While working with Visual Studio 2008 / VseWSS projects I occasionally see the following COM exception preventing the VS project from packaging or deploying to SharePoint:
Error: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0×80004005): Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component.
It turns out, at least in my experience, that this is caused by an error within the manifest.xml file which typically is due to a renamed file or a change in the project’s directory structure.
To resolve:
The VseWSS project should now package/ deploy without error.
On a fresh install of Windows Server 2008, MOSS 2007, Visual Studio 2008, and the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services I received the following error when trying to deploy or package a solution with VseWSS:
The content type text/html; charset=utf-8 of the response message does not match the content type of the binding (text/xml; charset=utf-8). If using a custom encoder, be sure that the IsContentTypeSupported method is implemented properly. The first 1024 bytes of the response were: ‘<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
Apparently the VseWSS CTP 1.3 uses the WCF in the deployment process and requires the Windows Server 2008 WCF HTTP Activation feature to be activated. To activate the WCF feature in Windows Server 2008 use the following steps:
I have noticed the following error a few times when activating the MOSS Publishing Infrastructure feature on a newly created site collection:
Failed to activate feature ‘PublishingPrerequisites’ (ID: a392da98-270b-4e85-9769-04c0fde267aa) at scope ‘http://[url]‘.
Typically opening a command prompt (as administrator) and running an ‘iisreset /noforce’ will resolve this error.
