Enjoy reading!

The bug is described in the update package as follows:

In SharePoint Server 2010, when you use representational state transfer (REST) to query a list that contains a count-related lookup column, such as the Posts list, you receive the following error message:

500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR.

I didn’t test it yet, but I assume the bug wasn’t that hard to fix so it’ll probably be gone.

You can download the updates here:

SharePoint Foundation 2010: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=2459125&kbln=en-us
SharePoint Server 2010: http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=2459257&kbln=en-us

Disclaimer: I got the downloadlinks from MS support directly. There seem to be no official posts yet on the release of this update, so please handle it with care and provide a good back-up of your environment before installing anything. Also I don’t have an update package for Project Server 2010 installations yet, once I find it (if it’s there), I’ll update this post.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 33,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 30 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 75 posts. There were 5 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 84kb.

The busiest day of the year was December 3rd with 213 views. The most popular post that day was SP2010: Creating a mixed mode login page for claims based authentication.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were social.technet.microsoft.com, google.com, google.co.in, social.msdn.microsoft.com, and facetedsearch.codeplex.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for task configdb has failed with an unknown exception, mixing forms and windows security in asp.net, spclaimsutility.authenticateformsuser, sharepoint news template, and sharepoint news site.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

SP2010: Creating a mixed mode login page for claims based authentication May 2010
49 comments

Adding a column to SharePoint news articles (design/edit view) March 2008
14 comments

Mixing Forms Based and Windows Authentication In ASP.NET August 2007
15 comments

Crystal Reports Web Part for MOSS 2007 August 2007
10 comments

SP2010: Cannot get membership provider with name… April 2010
3 comments

I did install the october 2010 cumulative update, which was a faulty one when it was first released. I don’t know if this had anything to with it, but changed were made to the user profile config file. To correct these, follow these steps:

1. Open up Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Service.exe.config and go to the end of that file.
2. In my case, there were some illegal assembly binding redirects in the config file, which forced the executable to search for version 4.0.3531.2 of the assemblies. Comment out those lines.
3. Now restart the User Profile service and Sync service. This should work now.
4. After restarting the services; don’t forget to run an iisreset on your box when it also hosts Central Administration.

After these steps, all was working fine again. I have not a valid clue on what caused this, but at least it’s solved now :)

    /// <summary>
    /// Set all secondary BCS fields for a given entity
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="listItem">The item to set the fields for</param>
    /// <param name="dataField">The BCS field itself</param>
    /// <param name="entityInstance">The entity to get the values from</param>
    private static void SetSecondaryFields(SPListItem listItem, SPBusinessDataField dataField, IEntityInstance entityInstance)
    {
      // Convert the entity to a formatted datatable
      DataTable dtBDCData = entityInstance.EntityAsFormattedDataTable;

      // Set the BCS field itself (Display Value)
      listItem[dataField.Id] = dtBDCData.Rows[0][dataField.BdcFieldName].ToString();

      // Get the specific finder method to get the columns that returns
      IMethodInstance method = entityInstance.Entity.GetMethodInstances(MethodInstanceType.SpecificFinder)[0].Value;
      ITypeDescriptorCollection oDescriptors = method.GetReturnTypeDescriptor().GetChildTypeDescriptors()[0].GetChildTypeDescriptors();

      // Set the column names to the correct values
      foreach (ITypeDescriptor oType in oDescriptors)
      {
        if (oType.ContainsLocalizedDisplayName())
        {
          if (dtBDCData.Columns.Contains(oType.Name))
          {
            dtBDCData.Columns[oType.Name].ColumnName = oType.GetLocalizedDisplayName();
          }
        }
      }

      // get the secondary field display names; these should be set
      string[] sSecondaryFieldsDisplayNames = dataField.GetSecondaryFieldsNames();

      // loop through the fields and set each column to its value
      foreach (string columnNameint in sSecondaryFieldsDisplayNames)
      {
        Guid gFieldID = listItem.Fields[String.Format("{0}: {1}", dataField.Title, columnNameint)].Id;
        listItem[gFieldID] = dtBDCData.Rows[0][columnNameint].ToString();
      }
    }

To use this to update a list item, call it like this:

SPBusinessDataField dataField = listItem.Fields["BCSField"] as SPBusinessDataField;
listItem[dataField.RelatedField] = customerId;
SetSecondaryFields(listItem, dataField, entityinst);
listItem.UpdateOverwriteVersion();

Special thanks to Wade A Hunter for providing the guidelines on how to do this in 2007, this code is based on that. See: http://wadehuntersblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/working-with-sharepoint-2007-business.html

In web.config, make sure the following section exists:

<system.web.extensions>
  <scripting>
    <scriptResourceHandler enableCompression=”false” enableCaching=”true” />
  </scripting>
</system.web.extensions>

First, make sure it’s not there already since that will generate errors. This fixed the problem for me.

Second, several others have reported that this might do the trick:

Lookup /_vti_bin/sts in IIS (for your SharePoint site of course). The application pool for that site will be set to ‘SecurityTokenApplicationPool’. Change that setting to match the application pool used for your site.

I wish I could explain more about the problem, but I really cannot. But hey, if these fixes work… :)

Second, I want to show the following video on the Social Revolution. Has quite a few cool facts about social media and why you shouldn’t ignore it. Good thing SharePoint 2010 offers quite some social media aspects right out of the box. So why not make good use of those?? Check it out!

Here’s some steps you can take if you want to provide three different InfoPath forms for adding / editing and displaying your list item:

1. First, you open up your list in a browser window
2. Choose the List ribbon item to view the List ribbon buttons.
3. Select the InfoPath button, now InfoPath (which you would have to have installed of course) will open up with a default representation of the form.
4. Edit the form the way you want it to.
5. Press the little “quick publish” button in the quick ribbon, this will publish your form.

Now you’ll notice that your form becomes the default form for all actions. If you want to provide different forms for the actions, you’ll need SharePoint Designer:

1. Provide three different views in InfoPath, you can do this by selecting the Page Design ribbon tab and creating two extra forms. Make sure you don’t select the option to show the form in the dropdown menu, otherwise people can choose this form on their own (which is probably not what you want)
2. Publish your InfoPath form again to get the forms into SharePoint
3. Now open up your list in SharePoint designer. You’ll notice there’s an extra folder called ‘Item’ (or your content type name). This folder contains three pages: displayifs.aspx, editifs.aspx and newifs.aspx.
4. Open up on of the pages and select the webpart (BrowserFormWebPart) on it.
5. In the Tag Properties window, scroll down to ‘Default View’.
6. Type the name of the view you want to use
7. Save the page

That’s it; now that particular page will use the InfoPath view you specified. This way you can easily provide forms which have different options for inserting / editing and perhaps a completely different lay-out for display purposes. Cool!

Special thanks to Clayton Cobb for providing this solution at MSDN.

An operation failed because the following certificate has validation errors:\n\nSubject Name: CN=*.company.com, OU=PositiveSSL Wildcard, OU=Domain Control Validated\nIssuer Name: CN=PositiveSSL CA, O=Comodo CA Limited, L=Salford, S=Greater Manchester, C=GB\nThumbprint: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX\n\nErrors:\n\n The root of the certificate chain is not a trusted root authority..

Hmmm okay. At first I tried adding the certificate on the server itself, didn’t make any difference. Then I noticed an option in Central Administration called ‘Manage trust’ which is located under Security / General Security. There you can add the root certificate of your SSL certificate to SharePoint. To do this; click New in the ribbon and provide a name for your new trust. For Root certificate; select the root certificate of your choice. For Token Issuer certificate, I selected my own certificate, although I’m not sure is that’s necessary. After adding this: errors will disappear!

This probably only happens with real certificates, since a self signed one will have an automatically trusted root certificate I guess.

To do this, edit the default SilverlightPluginGenerator.cs file and add the following line after line number 113:

objectXElement.Add(this.CreateParameter(“windowless”, “true”));

This will add a parameter in HTML code like this:

This will fix it and send the Silverlight webpart to the back and get it grayed out when you want it to.