Short Tom Blog

Visual Studio 2008 WSS extension 1.3 on Windows Server 2008

I installed Visual Studio 2008 Extensions Version 1.3 CTP (VSeWSSv13_AMD64_Build-433.exe available from here) on my Windows Server 2008 with MOSS 2007 and IIS 7. The Visual Studio extensions gives you the solution generator used to create list and site definitions.

When I tried to open the Solution Generator, I got the following Error:

Error 2 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">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>

<title>IIS 7.0 Detailed Error - 500.0 - Internal Server Error</title>

<style type="text/css">

<!--

body{margin:0;font-size:.7em;font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;background:#CBE1EF;}

code{margin:0;color:#006600;font-size:1.1em;font-weight:bold;}

.config_source code{font-size:.8em;color:#000000;}

pre{margin:0;font-size:1.4em;word-wrap:break-word;}

ul,ol{margin:10px 0 10px 40px;}

ul.first,ol.first{margin-top:5px;}

fieldset{padding:0 15px 10px 15px;}

.summary-container fieldset{padding-bottom:5px;margin-top:4px;}

legend.no-expand-all{padding:2px 15px 4px 10px;margin:0 0 0 -12px;}

legend{color:#333333;padding:4px 15px 4px 10px;margin:4px 0 8px -12px;_margin-top:0px;

border-top:1px solid #EDEDED;border-left:1px solid #EDEDED;border-right:1px solid #969696;

border-bottom:1px solid #969696;background:#E7ECF0;font-weight:bold;f'. 0 0

Following some Googling (or should that be Binging) The reason was because Visual Studio 2008 Extensions Version 1.3 CTP uses WCF in the deployment process and you cannot run WCF in IIS 7 unless you do the WCF HTTP Activation, and the default configuration of Windows server 2008 doesn't provide this, so you can do WCF HTTP Activation by following these steps:

Go to the start menu Text box and type: Programs and Features.
Click on Turn Windows features on or off on the left panel

Click On Features --> Add Features:
Check HTTP Activation Check box under WCF Activation:
Install the Feature

Now the solution generator should open with no problems

Connecting SharePoint to a SQL Instance on static port

If you are using a SQL server instance on static port (best practice for to secure SQL) there are a couple of things you need to do.

On the SQL server, in the firewall configuration, allow inbound connections to your static port.
In the SharePoint Configuration Wizard, you need to put "dbserver\instance,PortNumber" for the Database server name.

Redirect Page Content type Error – It don't like spaces

Recently I had an interesting error issue with my company’s MOSS 2007 intranet.

My marketing department were trying to create a page to redirect to a PDF newsletter. The answer was the OOTB Redirect Page. Now this worked fine for all users with edit permissions, the redirect page came up for 5 seconds and then loaded the PDF file in the browser (as configure in Adobe Reader) as expected. Now all the other users who had read permissions tried to open the redirect page straight away they were displayed with a nice "page cannot be found" error message.

The redirect URL was set the http://intranet/marketingsite/Documents/Internal%20newsletters/Newsletter%20April%202009.pdf

After some investigation I worked out that the Redirect page content type does not like spaces(%20 in HTML encoding) in the file name or url.

Therefore I changed the PDF filename and Folder name to replacing the spaces with underscores ( _ ). Therefore the new url was

http://intranet/marketing/Internal_newsletters/Newsletter_April_2009.pdf

Problem solved

Remember, always test with the redirect page with a user account with read only permissions.

Internet Explorer 7 & 8 (64-bit) are only Level 2 Supported SharePoint browser with MOSS SP2

Whilst investigating a Browser support issue for SharePoint I found out that the 64 bit versions of IE7 & IE8 are only Level 2 Supported Browsers. This means that all the functions performed via the browser with SharePoint will not work as designed in these browsers.

SharePoint items like the Date picker control, Rich Text Editor field and Datasheet view will not work as designed with the 64 bit versions of IE7 & IE8.

See the TechNet article for more details http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx