Squares in SharePoint

This year my company rolled out SharePoint 2010. A problem that has come up however is that for users with IE7 installed, sqaures appear in some text boxes on site new and edit forms. Don't beleive me? Check it out:

Normally this would happen if there is some text which the Operating System does not support, such as XP not being able to display chinese characters. These forms however are empty, after checking the HTML, there is no value set for any of these fields!

Running SP 2010 Post Setup Configuration Wizard

Are you running Windows 7 64bit and trying to install SP 2010 with Office Web Apps (OWA)?

Install SharePoint using the MSDN article on installing SP 2010 on Win 7. To install OWA, you need to do the same trick as SP 2010:

<Setting Id="AllowWindowsClientInstall" Value="True"/>

You also need to copy a file to your system32 dir to pass the prereq checks. After the OWA install, the post-setup configuration wizard (PSConfigUI.exe) will not run. PSConfig.exe also returns an error message:

"Only one copy of the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard can be run at a time."

After some debugging and reflecting... It turns out to be a problem with how the Mutex class is used to determine if the wizard is already open or not.

The trick now is how to skip this validation check so we can run the wizard. You can do this via Visual Studio. Create a new project (anything) and go to project properties -> Debug. Under Start Action, change to Start external program, setting:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN\psconfigui.exe


You then need to run (F5) and then pause execution immediately (ASAP!):

Wherever you land, navigate the call stack back up to the first entry point (PsconfigInterfaceMain.Main()). Click on Show Dissasembly. You then just need to find the next "jmp" command and set a breakpoint there:

Then all you have to do is grab the yellow arrow and drag it over that line so it doesn't execute. Hit F5 to continue, and you should see the wizard appear. Follow the prompts...

Once the wizard completes, run up your central administration and check the OWA services are now available (Powerpoint and Word Viewing services):

STSADM import hangs on Importing User when using -includeusersecurity

Part of what I'm working on right now is getting a test SharePoint 2010 environment up and running for some of our old WSS 3.0 sites. This involves taking a backup of the site, importing it into a clean WSS 3.0 install, and then upgrading the WSS_Content DB.

After running the following command:

stsadm -o export -url http://localhost/aus/sims -filename C:\SIMSBackup\SIMS.cmp -includeusersecurity

copying over the backup file to the test server, and then running:

stsadm -o import -url http://localhost/aus/sims -filename C:\SIMS\SIMS.cmp -includeusersecurity

The import would start to hang after importing a few hundred users (our company has 5000+ users). A little trick I found was that if I disconnected the machine from the network, the import would work fine, and fast!

The reason why? Each time you import a new user into WSS, it will query your Domain Controller (Active Directory) to update information about that user such as email address, name, etc. But if you keep querying AD this way, it will eventually block you out and not respond to your requests.

If you disconnect the machine from the network and then run the import with -includeusersecurity, it will work without any problem.