Solution

Most SharePoint Farms will have a solution for the long loading time after an Application Pool recycle or iisreset running. There are many different ways to preload websites, so your users have faster load times. So why another solution? There are some questions, that I think have not been dealt with before: Most solutions require some sort of Timer to be started (e.g. a Scheduled Task) When should the warmup occur?

Have you ever thought about the Features folder and when a folder will be created for one of you features? Well, I did 🙂 Why is this relevant, anyway? To be able to activate a feature on a given scope, it has to be installed first. That’s why. Action <td valign="top"> <strong>Result</strong> </td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top"> stsadm -o addsolution </td> <td valign="top"> The solution is added to the farm.

Visual Studio allow a F5 Deployment. I guess you all know that. The part where you have to think carefully is, when you add Features to your project. Should you activate “Activate On Default”? Well, it depends (as always). Usually I don’t enable that setting, because features tend to be activated on scopes you won’t expect. The problem Take a WebApplication scoped feature for example. It might create SafeControl entries for your controls.

A while ago Microsoft released an update, which prevents that you can log on locally to a website which has a FQDN. To resolve issues with e.g. the crawling a KB article has been published. You receive error 401.1 when you browse a Web site that uses Integrated Authentication and is hosted on IIS 5.1 or a later version You can disable the loopback check completely, or just for the used FQDNs.

The out-of-the-box WSS navigation offers one level of navigation. The navigation elements can be configured in the site settings. There is a way to make it have multi level navigation, as MOSS does, by changing the DataSource. But this “hack” is not flexible, as you can not reorder the item within the navigation menu. While I was reading the post How to create your own Cascading Navigation using the ASPMenu control, the decision was made to build a custom navigation which supports multiple navigation levels.

Using AJAX or Silverlight from within SharePoint in Webparts requires you to modify the web.config to support the technology. I don’t mention that you have to install the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Silverlight to be able to use it… Instead of changing the web.config manually (.NET Framework 3.5 AJAX und Silverlight in SharePoint registrieren von Fabian Moritz), you can use my features. They do all the necessary changes for you.

Deploying a SharePoint solution (.wsp file) to a SharePoint farm should be easy. Even if the farm contains 4 SharePoint Servers. Just stsadm –o addsolution –filename solution.wsp. Some waiting so the deployment is done on every server, and we should be happy. Well, the result was an Error in the solution status. Additionally the ULS log showed Updating SPPersistedObject SolutionOperationStatus Name=SolutionOperationStatus Parent=SPSolutionLanguagePack Name=0. Version: -1 Ensure: 0, HashCode: 38896601, Id: 87c32e71-13f0-4d85-a215-29f1d180d239, Stack: at Microsoft.

Creating a SharePoint solution file (which is a cab file renamed to wsp), can cause problems if the size of the file would exceed the space on an 1.44MB disk. 1.44MB? What the…? The default values for makecab, which is used for generating the cab file, will prevent the creation of a valid cab file 🙁 Thanks to Eugene Rosenfeld for finding this one.

In a SharePoint farm with multiple servers, features have to be deployed to every server. No problem you would think. That is why we got solutions and deploy them with stsadm. SharePoint will do the rest. But what do you do if you got an error during the deployment process? In my case the error was: A deployment or retraction is already under way for the solution xyz, and only one deployment or retraction at a time is supported.

If you have ever created a SPFeatureReceiver class, you might have noticed, that there is no “FeatureActivating”. So what do you do to cancel an activation of your feature? Just throw an exception within FeatureActivated. This will cancel the activation process, and not activate the feature.throw new SPException(“The feature could not be activated."); Technorati Tags: SharePoint,SPFeature

I get plenty of questions on how to add, deploy or activate a SharePoint Solution. Solution A SharePoint solution is a *.wsp file (which is a cab file) which contains at least one feature. Feature A feature adds new functionality to your SharePoint farm. It can be wrapped inside a solution file, or be deployed by adding files to your SharePoint servers. Installing a Solution To install a solution to your SharePoint farm, copy the wsp file to one of your SharePoint servers, and run “stsadm -o addsolution -filename yoursolution.

CodePlex has a project for SharePoint 2007 Features. Within this workplace there are features like: Ajax Config Feature Content Type Hierarchy Feature Debug Config Feature Debugger Feature Features Source Code Log Viewer Feature Manage Configuration Modifications Manage Form Users Feature Manage Hierarchical Object Store Feature Manage Layouts Site Map Feature Minimal Master Minimal Publishing Site Placeholder Master Feature Presence Contact List Feature Print List Feature Task Alert Feature Task Mover Feature Theme Changer Feature Window Links Feature Especially the Ajax Config Feature is great.