Tuesday 22 January 2013

Links Missing in Central Admin SharePoint 2010

I am going through Microsoft Learning Kit for exam 60 - 667 and trying to practice SharePoint 2010 as recommended but when I installed User Profile Service using Farm wizard it installed and configured it properly however I am not able to start User Profile Synchronization service any more.

I have been given a free advise to log off and log again and I did it but when I tried to log in again and opened Internet explorer and tried to go to Central Administration using its URL I couldn't find few links, for example "Manage Services on Server" was missing.

I looked at Active directory and figured out account is in domain admins but figured out that if you don't open central administration as administrator, some links will be missing in SharePoint 2010 Configuration database version : 14.0.4762.1000.

I am still looking into why User Profile Synchronization service isn't starting at the moment and will make another post.

Source : http://www.askthesharepointexperts.com/question/details/16/missing-some-links-in-sharepoint-2010-central-administration-even-when-logged-in-as-farm-administra

Monday 21 January 2013

A control with ID 'topSiteMap' could not be found.

This morning I deployed a webpart to solution gallery using STSADM but it kept giving me error that a custom assembly isn't found even though it was in GAC.

I thought it might be a good idea to reference assembly and use WSP builder to deploy webpart again, so I retracted/removed using Central Admin and deployed it again using WSP builder as soon as I deployed it, I started getting this error,


Exception information:     Exception type: HttpException     Exception message: The DataSourceID of 'TopNavigationMenu' must be the ID of a control of type IHierarchicalDataSource.  A control with ID 'topSiteMap' could not be found. 
Request information:     Request URL: 

Any page I go to I get same ugly error, I looked at web application's web.config and figured out it has been recently modified, so I assumed its WSP builder that did some dirty work. I copied old back of web.config but nothing changed. I tried removing webpart completely and then add again using STSADM but still nothing changed it.

At end I started monitoring ULS logs and found multiple errors


Delegate Control: Exception thrown while building custom control 'Microsoft.SharePoint.SPControlElement': Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPartPageUserException: A critical error has occurred on this page. Contact your system administrator if this problem persists.  at Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationRuntime.SafeControls.RethrowExceptionIfNeeded ()  at Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationRuntime.SafeControls.IsSafeControl (Type type, String & unsafeErrorMessage)  at Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtility.CreateServerControlFromAssembly (sControlAssembly String, String sControlClass)  at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPControlElement.BuildCustomControl (Template Control tctlPage, sControlAssembly String, String sControlClass, sControlSrc String, XmlNode xnElementDefinition, SPFeatureDefinition featdefElement, String sElementId)  at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPControlElement.BuildCustomControl (Template Control tctlPage)  at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.DelegateControl.BuildCustomControlResilient (SPControlElement ctlelemDefinition)

I created another site collection for same web application and was getting errors for out of box webparts too.

While monitoring ULS randomly I found an error saying one of our custom utilities dll is missing, I checked gac and it wasn't there adding this custom dll in GAC and AJAXControlToolKit dll back in Web App's bin folder solved the problem.

Don't forget to do a IISReset after putting dll to gac otherwise it won't going to work.

Conclusion

Be careful while using WSP Builder for some reason when you try to "Uninstall" a solution it removes dlls from gac and web app bin's folder, not sure about web.config but you should always keep a backup copy of it.



Friday 18 January 2013

Certificate for SharePoint website with SSL

HTTPS SSL Certificate on SharePoint Web Application


If you need SSL(Https) on your sharepoint web application you will need to have a certificate installed on your site, now if your site is required to be used within Local Intranet then instead of purchasing a certificate you can just install certificate role on your server and issue your website a certificate which can be installed by each member on there PCs. Now there might be a better way of doing it but this is what I did to fix certificate problem on our development server. 

I followed this blog post for installation of Certificate but you can just go to control panel, then add remove programs and then add system compnent or something like that, select certificate role. Go through wizard give your certificate authority some kind of name like CADevelopmentServer. Now you can issue a certificate using Certificate authority and get one on your web application by going through IIS web application properties, I will let you find out rest of it with pictures in this blog post,



Installing Certificate and getting Https for a website sounds like a hard task but its seems easier then anything and few clicks get you there.

Thursday 17 January 2013

Updating Resources in 12 Hive

Updating Resources in 12 Hive

When we update resources in 12 hive Resources, we need to do a IIS reset to make changes get picked up by SharePoint. I was trying to create a new site using a custom Site Definition but because of wrong resource name of a list I was getting exception however when I changed resource and tried to create site again it didn't worked until I performed a IIS reset.