Quick Guide for setting up SharePoint environment for Apps

Following several guides and going through many articles at last I am able to install SharePoint Apps on my environment, you will find several incomplete and confusing articles on internet.

I followed Vlad Catrinescu article which is to the point and actually works, it took me just 5 minutes to configure my test environment for installing apps from SharePoint online Store.

Here's link to Vlad's article,

http://www.scribd.com/doc/124831209/Configure-an-Environment-for-Apps-for-SharePoint-2013-Step-by-Step-Guide

Since the above article gets into much details along with screenshots, I will just mention important points you need to go through to get it working,

- Create a forward look-up zone with zone name e.g. "exampleapps.com"

- Create a New Alias (CNAME) with name as "*" and FQDN for target host as full name of your     SharePoint Server, e.g. www.exampleServer.com or whatever's your server's name is

- Now on your try to ping Apps-23423423423.exampleapps.com and get the response, if it doesn't work then either you entered FQDN of target host wrong or your DNS server isn't locating your SharePoint web server. Put a comment if you get stuck here and I will try to help.

- Create, configure and start SharePoint App management and Subscription server on your SharePoint server

-  Now Configure App URLs in Central Admin, App domain going to be exampleapps.com in this case and App prefix will be "Apps"

- You will need to configure internet facing endpoints for apps, so I just enabled web application scoped feature named as "Apps that require accessible internet facing endpoints" on my port 80 web application.

- Create a new web application on port 80, but keep the Host Header option empty and rest options as usual, now note, if you used SharePoint configuration wizard then you don't need to create a new web application because SharePoint configuration wizard by default creates a web application without host headers, so all you need to do is to create a root site collection.

- Last but important step, delete Default Website in IIS Server, otherwise you will receive 404 errors for sharepoint apps.

Note: I followed these steps on a development server, so try them on production on your own risk :-).

MSDN article if you want to follow for setting up App domain.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161236.aspx

Error occurred in deployment step 'Uninstall app for SharePoint': The local SharePoint server is not available.

Hmmm, was excited enough to deploy my first SharePoint hosted app but this error ruined the joys,

Error occurred in deployment step 'Uninstall app for SharePoint': The local SharePoint server is not available. Check that the server is running and connected to the SharePoint farm.

Now what ? error doesn't help much at all, so lets look at logs, the way I debug any issue regarding SharePoint is,

 - Check event logs in Event Viewer.

 - If don't find anything in Event Viewer then ULS Viewer, check this post if you don't know how to debug       using ULS Viewer.


Other than that you can also use SVC_Trace exe or fiddler for debugging web services or client side code, anyway coming back to topic, in this case I find the real error in event viewer,

SQL database login for 'TestServer01_Config' on instance 'SQLTEST01' failed. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below.
Login failed for user 'DEV\mr'.

So when we deploy a solution to SharePoint site using Visual Studio, it uses the account we are running Visual Studio as to deploy the solution, which in return makes changes to SharePoint config database, so if account doesn't have access to SP config, it will fail to deploy solution. As you would had figured out the solution, just give development account permission to SharePoint config database.

Edit

I have given my development account SP_DATA_ACCESS permissions on all relevant databases as shown in picture below,

Edit-2

Unfortunately above steps didn't solved the problem and lead to another error,

SQL Database 'WSS_Content_Dev' on SQL Server instance 'TESTSERVER01' not found. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below.

Cannot open database "WSS_Content_Dev" requested by the login. The login failed.

Login failed for user 'DEV\mr'.

Giving development user "dev\mr" in this case "SP_Data_Access" permissions on WSS_Content_Dev solved the problem :-).

This solved the problem of deploying my first app to SharePoint server.



Note:
I am giving development account permissions to SharePoint configuration database because it's a test environment, however if on production environment, your SharePoint administrator account should be deploying the solution and should have right permissions already.

Debugging WCF service using SvcTraceView on application server

Debugging web services can be pain, specially when they are hosted on a application server within a SharePoint farm. There are several ways one can debug web services though, e.g. using a visual studio remote debugger but what if it doesn't hit your web services breakpoints or your network administrator do?

Easiest way to figure out what's wrong with web services is to use SvcTraceViewer.exe e.g. why my code not able to find the hosted service or if the problem is with service account authentication.

Not so difficult to set it up, all you need to do is to add a some tag in your hosted WCF services and then open the SvcTraceViewer to view the created file.

Step-1:
Find hosted WCF service's web.config and add following tag to it within configuration tag. It will recycle the application pool of hosted service itself when you will save changes to web.config file.

<configuration>
<system.diagnostics>
    <trace autoflush="true" />
    <sources>
            <source name="System.ServiceModel" 
                    switchValue="Information, ActivityTracing"
                    propagateActivity="true">
            <listeners>
               <add name="sdt" 
                   type="System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener" 
                   initializeData= "WcfConfigExample.e2e" />
            </listeners>
         </source>
    </sources>
</system.diagnostics>
</configuration>

Step-2:
Find SvcTraceViewer.exe within installed Visual studio files, location might change depending on version of VS, however since I am using VS 2010 ultimate so I find EXE file at,

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bin\NETFX 4.0 Tools

In some cases you will need to open the EXE file as administrator.

Step-3:
Do something to trigger WCF services and check folder where web.config file exists as that's where it will create "SdrConfigExample.e2e" log file, once you find it. just open the SvcTraceViewer.exe file.

Step-4:
Press Ctrl + O keys; Navigate to SdrConfigExample.e2e file to load log trace file in viewer.

Step-5:
Search for specific terms using Ctrl + F or just go through logs. You can also add custom logs to your WCF service and find them in here to figure out where exactly your code is getting exception at, You can find more about Trace Viewer at, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa751795(v=vs.110).aspx

C# The Handle is Invalid

I have been given a task to debug a SharePoint event receiver as it wasn't doing what was meant to do, so I started by looking at event viewer logs. 

Event viewer error didn't helped much other then saying;

Error loading and running event receiver **Assembly Details**. Additional information is below.

: The handle is invalid

Searched google lot but couldn't find anything relevant in SharePoint context, but somehow figured out, this error "The handle is invalid" comes up when user doesn't have enough permissions to perform a task and in my case it was when event receiver tried to create a new event log or even when try to write a log to already created event log.

Fixed the issue by putting code within   SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate(){  }); block, however couldn't figure out which exact permission was required to let user to write event logs but adding above fixed the issue for me, so all good.

Mass unfollow on twitter using chrome

Simply go to https://twitter.com/following and then inspect any element, find console tab and type this script line 

$('.unfollow-text').click() 

It will press all the unfollow buttons for you, if you want to unfollow all then use page down key so all people you are following will become visible on page then run above script in console.

Directory Services Restore Mode NightMare

In short, I got a development virtual machine I run on my PC using virtual box, it's a stand alone SharePoint 2007 box along with SQL Server 2005 and K2 server 2003.

I was testing something which actually hanged my VPC machine and as a result I had to power off it which is veryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy veryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy bad practice, but since I am using it for development and got out dated backup copies so wasn't a big issue for me. Anyway when i restarted it gave me this error,

I almost tried 100's of articles on Internet and couple of hours to fix the issue but couldn't but at-last I fixed it by following this MSDN article,

How To Use Ntdsutil to Manage Active Directory Files from the Command Line in Windows Server 2003

You also might find it useful to read this information about active directory files which helped me fix the issue and understand what happened but I won't going to explain it in here,

Active Directory files and their functions

and this link also helped even though it's for Exchange edb but applies to active directory edb recovery as well,

How to Solve Exchange Dirty Shutdown Error



To be continued if I get time I will explain a bit more or just add comment if you need help...

Getting SPUser using Login Name

Today I came across a situation where I had to let user input user name(s) and add them to people picker field within a list, unfortunately it has to be done using web services as user is interacting with SharePoint throw iPad.

Problem ?

User can input anything (any string) so I need to validate if user name(s) exists or not,  if user with login name provided has access to site collection page and at end if all previous are true then get SPUser object and add it to people picker field of custom list.

Solution

Assuming you already got or know how to get reference to SPSite, SPWeb, SPList and SPListItem objects

SPUser user = null;

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(userLogin))
{
       try
      {
           // statement below will throw exception if user doesn't exists
           if (site.RootWeb.DoesUserHavePermissions(userLogin, SPBasePermissions.Open))
          {
                try
               {
                    user = site.RootWeb.SiteUsers[userLogin];
                }
               catch (Exception ex)
              {
                   string other = string.Format("EXCEPTION! UserName '{0}' provided doesn't has permissions to root web", userLogin);
                   throw new SoapException(other, SoapException.ServerFaultCode, ex);
              }
           }
       }
       catch (Exception ex)
       {
            string other = string.Format("EXCEPTION! UserName '{0}' provided doesn't exists", userLogin);
            throw new SoapException(other, SoapException.ServerFaultCode, ex);
       }

       SPFieldUserValueCollection uvCollection = new SPFieldUserValueCollection();
       SPFieldUserValue uValue = new SPFieldUserValue(web, user.ID, user.LoginName);
       uvCollection.Add(uValue);

//Now update item just by item["People PIcker Field Name"] = uvCollection;
}

That's it, above code worked for me so it should work for you.

Lesson learned

I tried to use RootWeb.Users[userLogin] but it didn't worked for me as it does not return users who have access through a group whereas I had some user's given access to root web through groups only.

RootWeb.AllUsers[userLogin] is a dangerous function as  it returns list of all users who ever had access to web (even ones who don't have access to web anymore now).

web.EnsureUser() method creates a user if not exists already which I couldn't use in this scenario as client input is being used to validate SPUser object.