Moving files in Visual Studio and the SharePointProjectItem.spdata file

While mucking around the CKS:Development Tools Edition Visual Studio 2010 extension for SharePoint, I inadvertently created a new master page from the Starter Master Page (CKSDev) template in an existing VS module:

Neither VS nor SharePoint seemed to object to this arrangement—likely because the module in question was otherwise empty—but, as an experiment, I decided to move the CKS:Dev master page SPI into the project (and the top-level MasterPages module) nonetheless, making the nested CKS:Dev container obsolete.

This wasn't a good idea because subsequent attempts to build the package failed with the error "Could not find the file 'c:\…PageLayouts\StarterMasterPage1.master". Omg, what to do and why is trying to find these files in the project root?! I briefly pined for the good ol' .ddf file from 2007 days and then slapped some sense back into myself.

To begin fixing the problem, I first had to click the Show All Files button in the Solution Explorer window to reveal the SharePointProjectItem.spdata file in the root-level module (note the CKS:Dev inner master page module has its own .spdata file, which is empty after the move):

This is an XML file and its structure is quite basic; I'd describe it as a mini project file for the module in question as it lists the source files in the module along with their targets, and types.

Interestingly, the Source values specified all started with "..\" but inspecting a similar file from an un-modified module simply listed each file names; I assume Visual Studio helped out during the move to add this additional path information.

Removing the "..\" prefix fixed the problem and suggested to me the SharePoingProjectItem.spdata file may prove fragile during project refactoring. Sure enough, moving the files back to their original home added a spurious MasterPages\ prefix to each file and wreaked havoc all over again.

Moral of the story: manually edit the SharePointProjectItem.data file as required but beware Visual Studio may "fix" any of your changes.

One other thing to note: when I moved my files around, Visual Studio reset the properties on some of them. Most notably, Elements.xml file reverted to a Deployment Type of ElementFile instead of ElementManifest and the Build Action was set to Content. Modifying these properties also added the parent directory prefixes back to my .spdata file. Perhaps removing files from one location and adding them them back through the Add –> Existing Item… dialog is a safer way to approach this long-term if VS is going to continue meddling with things.

And just to add to the joy, one final bit of fun: a page layout added to the module in question was deploying fine; for the sake of producing the screenshot above, I excluded it from the solution, which also removed it from the files listed below the MasterPages module in the visual feature designer. While I assumed the feature designer would automatically update itself when I added the layout back to the module, I was wrong: the designer refused to update to reflect the inclusion of the page layout until I restarted Visual Studio! If this is a VS 2010 bug, it'll be one of several I've already filed with MS! Viva SP1!!!

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Setting the Visible property on a webpart throws

Using myWebPart.Visible = false and getting this?

The Visible property cannot be set on Web Part 'your_web_part'. It can only be set on a standalone Web Part.

Use myWebPart.Hidden = true instead.

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Must Have Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Hotfixes

Now there's a damning blog post title!

In brief, I've had a few issues since installing Windows Server 2008 R2 and adding the Hyper-V Role on my Dell Precision M6500 Core i7 laptop (if you've landed on this post and you don't care about laptops--i.e. you're an admin--don't stop reading now as this post will likely apply to you too). This post is meant to be a running log of problems and their resolutions while we await the next service pack, I suppose.

Problem #1: Blue Screen of Death/random reboots

Resolution:

• Install the http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975530 hotfix on your Hyper-V hosts or use the work around detailed in the KB article.

KB975530: Stop error message on a Windows Server 2008 R2-based computer that has the Hyper-V role installed and that uses one or more Intel CPUs that are code-named Nehalem: "0x00000101 - CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT"

Symptoms, event log entries, and whatnot: Unexpected freezes, BSODs and reboots during periods of high network activity.

• Event ID 219, The driver \Driver\WUDFRd failed to load for the device USB\VID_0A5C&PID_5800&MI_01\7&66de6c9&0&0001.
• Event ID 41, The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly.
• Event ID 4, Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller: The network link is down.  Check to make sure the network cable is properly connected.
• Event ID 1001, The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck.  The bugcheck was: 0x00000101 (0x0000000000000019, 0x0000000000000000, 0xfffff880020ce180, 0x0000000000000003). A dump was saved in: C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP. Report Id: 043010-31168-01.
  

Apparently this issue is caused by an Intel erratum affecting Nehalem-based processors (i.e. Xeon 5500, Core i7-800, and Core i5-700 series).

Problem #2: Guest VMs freeze, lost connection

Resolution:

• Install the http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974909 hotfix
• Install the http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981836 hotfix (this KB is specific about Windows Server 2003 but a Microsoft representative suggested it's applicable to all VMs as the hotfix updates the integration services components generally)
• Update integration services on all guest VMs

None of this worked for me but changing my host power settings from Balanced to High performance did. In theory you should be able to revert to Balanced after installing and the above.

You may also want to investigate turning off TCP offloading.

Symptoms, event log entries, and whatnot: Hyper-V console freezes in some virtual machines but not others (the only one affected in my case was an XP VM upgraded from Virtual PC 2007 SP1), Hyper-V manager reports the Heartbeat as "Lost connection".

• Event ID 5: The miniport 'Microsoft Virtual Machine Bus Network Adapter #3' hung.

...followed by...

• Event ID 4: The miniport 'Microsoft Virtual Machine Bus Network Adapter #3' reset.

For additional information about this problem, definitely check out http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsserver2008r2virtualization/thread/0408a28d-6ab8-4c85-8773-4bc42c2df40b

More to come? Hopefully not! ;-)

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Configuring the People Picker and No exact match was found

SharePoint's people picker is generally one of those things that just kind of works—and fairly well no less. There's a gotcha to that statement however: the people picker works well when the the SharePoint farm exists in the same domain as the users you want to match against, or exists in a second domain where a two-way trust has been established with the first domain.

If your SharePoint web frontends exist in another domain with a one-way trust, you've got some extra work to do. This is the case with our dev setup and DMZ setup: our dev VMs are joined to the dev domain which trusts the corporate domain and our production servers are similarly joined to a web domain that also trusts the corporate domain. Both trusts are one-way.

I'll simplify what needs to be done by stating you simply need to tell SharePoint which forests or domains house the users you're after and provide an account from that domain.

Firstly you'll need to provide a key that will be used to encrypt any passwords you plug in during the next step. Run this on every WFE where "key" is a string of your choosing:

STSADM.exe -o setapppassword -password key

Next, set the peoplepicker-searchadforests property:

STSADM.exe -o setproperty-propertyname peoplepicker-searchadforests -propertyvalue <Valid list of forests or domains> -url <URL of the Web application>

where <Valid list of forests or domains> might look like this:

"domain:mydomain.com,mydomain\myuser,mypassword"

Supply the URL of the web application you want to configure (and note you don't need to set this for Central Admin, set it for a specific web application). Multiple domains and forests can be listed if necessary.

For more information, check out these resources:

• All you want to know about People Picker in SharePoint ( Functionality | Configuration | Troubleshooting ) Part-2
• Peoplepicker-searchadforests: Stsadm property

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Data Compare crashes Visual Studio 2010

Although I'd previously noticed the Data Compare and Schema Compare options on the Data menu in Visual Studio, until today I didn't have a good reason to see what they can do.

Note I'm running VS Ultimate; if you can't see it, I'm not certain in which editions of the product this menu makes an appearance. SQL Server Management Studio 2008 doesn't seem to have a comparable tool that I'm aware of—which seems odd—but please comment if you know something I don't.

So here's the situation: two copies of the same database, one that's been moved to a different server and both of which have data changes. Your mission: find and fix the differences.

Open VS, Data –> Data Compare –> New Data Comparison…

CRASH!

Luckily I was able to work around this problem (feature?) by re-opening VS, Data –> Transact-SQL Editor –> New Query Connection, connecting to any ol' database (or optionally just cancelling out of the connection window) and then launching the compare wizard again.

I'm not sure what this does since you specify a database connection in the compare wizard anyway and cancelling the connection window or closing the new query window after opening the Transact-SQL Editor connection makes the problem go away. I've logged a bug with Microsoft connect.

Update 6 Sept 2010: MSFTConnect just got in touch to tell me this is likely related to the Solution Navigator extension in the Productivity Power Tools. Disabling apparently fixes the problem and the problem should be fixed this month.

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Enable Fusion Assembly Binding Logging

The WRN: Assembly binding logging is turned off message is annoying but assembly binding logging can be extremely helpful when you need to know how .NET is (or isn't) locating the assemblies you've referenced. The message is annoying because, if you're like me, you never have logging enabled and the registry key cited is a bit unusual:

To enable assembly bind failure logging, set the registry value [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion!EnableLog] (DWORD) to 1.

What does the exclamation mark mean? Presumably EnableLog is a DWORD in the Fusion key but it's all a bit unclear for my liking. Once you've set this DWORD, you need to figure out what to do next and for many people that will likely involve firing up the Fusion Log Viewer fuslogvw.exe or the Windows/.NET SDK. But then what?

Gary Kindel was kind enough to post the following details in response to a related Stack Overflow question:

Add the following values to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion

DWORD ForceLog set value to 1
DWORD LogFailures set value to 1
DWORD LogResourceBinds set value to 1
String LogPath set value to folder for logs ie) C:\FusionLog\

Make sure you include the backslash after the folder name. I also found an IISRESET was necessary in a web context.

Since I wanted to enable this logging in an environment without Visual Studio or the Windows SDK installed, the above option was clean and lightweight. Log files were dumped to the expected location in .html format and it was then a case of locating the assembly I was interested in… and, oh yeah, fixing the problem ;-) The issue was also detailed in the ASP.NET error message returned by IIS.

Advanced geeks: because Fusion logging supposedly affects performance, you might want to create a reg file/batch script to toggle logging on and off. Here's a starting point—put this into a file called EnableFusionLogging.reg and double-click to run it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion]
"ForceLog"=dword:00000001
"LogFailures"=dword:00000001
"LogResourceBinds"=dword:00000001
"LogPath"="C:\\Temp\\FusionLog\\"

I actually call this from a batch script which also resets IIS and I have a mirror reg file that disables logging.

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Windows Licensing Details

Windows will report licensing details if you run the following from an elevated console window:

slmgr.vbs /dlv

The Windows Script Host popup will shortly tell you which edition of Windows you're running, which licensing channel you fall under (retail, OEM, volume), your activation ID, license status, rearm counts, and KMS details.