Once you get started with Search on SharePoint 2010 you realize that much hasn’t changed in our ways of doing things in the MOSS 2007 times (some of us still doing it, not all our clients have made the leap, despite all the bells and whistles).

Problem statement

Let’s assume that you install SharePoint 2010 (btw: here I’m talking about the Server, not the Foundation) and you might have realized that 1st time, after the configuration wizard, you end up with having a new Web Application created for you and being asked already to choose a site collection template for it. That web application usually uses the machine name so there’ll be something like http://mymachinename.

I usually skip that step and already delete that web application. The main reason is that I like to have control over what’s going on. I personally do not like using the hostnames for SharePoint applications, so I define them either in DNS (if running on Windows Server) or the HOSTS file (if I’m on a workstation such as Windows 7), so my URLs will look like http://sharepoint.local or http://mysite.sharepoint.local

So assuming you re-created a new Web Application (and give it a DNS name instead of a HOST name) and also created your new site collection and even added a Enterprise Search Center to it (only this one has the People tab, and for it you need to have the Publishing Infrastructure features activated at Site Collection level and also Top-Level Site), run a Full Crawl and suddenly you notice that even though you have lots of pages in the regular site search (or the “All Sites” tab), you have no results in the People tab.

So start investigating what is going on, by looking at crawl logs to see if any People have been crawled. To do that you go in Central administration, then Application Management and Manage Service applications

The next step is to click on the Search Service application (if you used the Configuration Wizard the name will be just like bellow, however if you created a new Search Service application and given a different name, make sure you locate that one, what is important though – to be Configured and Started).

Once clicked on it (or choose the Manage button in the Ribbon) you will notice the very familiar interface as with MOSS 2007 (we will focus on Content Sources and Scopes).

Click on “Crawl Log” in the left side and notice whether there have been any Errors or Warning messages.

It is obvious that something went wrong and clicking on the Top-level Errors or Errors, gets you to next screen where you can realize that the URL is wrong. This is your clue that in the Content Source identified by “Local SharePoint Sites” you must update the URLs.

The thing is that during creation of the web application, right after the Configuration wizard, SharePoint 2010 also added the URL for crawling in the “Local SharePoint Sites” shared Search Scope (highlighted in next screen).

How to fix it

If it happens that you do not re-create the Web application to match the URL you won’t be able to Crawl the People search, as that must be added manually (my last entry in the same screen above, shows the modified URl specific to People search sps3://SharePoint.sh, where sharepoint.sh is my new path and SPS3 it what identifies the People search and not regular pages/sites search).

Now you must run the Full Crawl on the Content Source just updated (or wait for the next automatic updated, if you did established the Schedule, or did you not??)

Hope it helps others on the investigation path,
C. Marius

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If you have created a Search Center with Tabs (you  know, that one with 2 tabs that allow you to also perform People Search?) in SharePoint 2007 under a Team Site top-level site, most likely you’ve been able to experience the dreaded exception, followed by and even worse situation where the site has been created, but is inaccessible, whatsoever.

So in conclusion operation failed, and you are left with only one option: To delete that freshly created site before being able to reuse that same URL path again.

Explanation is simple (and not very well documented also): In order to use the Search Center with Tabs you need to activate the “Publishing infrastructure”.  Remember, the 2 different “types” of sites, also known as “Collaboration sites” vs. “Publishing sites”. In other words you need to activate 2 features (please note that pictures below are those available in SharePoint 2010), one at Site Collection level and the other one at Site level, as follows:

1. Open to Top-Level site, go into Site Settings and (attention) under “Site Collection Administration” choose Site Collection features. On the list find the “SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure”. Be aware that activating it can sometime lead to unpredictable results, particularly on the sites with highly customized default master page. Now assuming this is successful move to step 2.

2. On the same Site Settings page at the level of the top-level site, this time use the “Site Features” (only for the current site, not all the site collection) and activate the feature “….”. Once this is done, you can go create your “Search Center with Tabs”.

Now, for some questions we feel would seem reasonable:

1. Why isn’t the “Search Center with Tabs” site template hidden by default as part of the Site definition?  (In a site definition it is possible very easy to have a “VisibilityFeatureDependency” that would hide a particular site template unless that feature, whose Id is specified is not activated before)!

2. Why isn’t a specific error part of the system that should state “Hey dude, cannot do that because…bla,bla”?

If you would have thought that this issue has been tackled in SharePoint 2010, you are in for a big surprise, because it isn’t. Actually the exception message is really simple “No can do” – or in translation “An exception has occurred, Correlation Id {bla,bla,bla}”. Indeed there is a new “Enterprise Search Center” (no longer called “Search Center with Tabs”), but is does 100% the same.

In conclusion, if you ever need to use the “Enterprise Search Center” while running a “Non-publishing site”, do make sure you activate the features mentioned above!

So, even if it is obvious for some of us, that have encountered the issue in the “old” times of MOSS 2007, it might be not that obvious for some others.  I hope it does spare some valuable time, while trying to get to the bottom of it.

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It looks like for the 1st time in Microsoft’s application release cycles a Release Candidate of a platform such as SharePoint 2010 RTM is easily configurable with the RTM versions of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, and….wait, it gets better Team Foundation Server 2010 (and not in Basic Mode).

There is not much to say here, as it all went very smoothly.

I started off by installing Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate via the Web installer (i couldn’t make it via the downloaded .ISO image for whatever reason, mentioned even on Microsoft Connect site). Then i installed (but NOT configured) the Team Foundation Server 2010 x64 edition).

Once all done, I've started off the SharePoint 2010 RC (not the Foundation, but the full version of the SharePoint platform) and wait for it to finish.

Note that you do NOT need to install the Geneva Framework anymore neither the Sync Framework, nor the Silverlight 4 tools. I’ve just installed the MS Chart Framework for .NET 3.5. SP1.

Those being said, i now have a fully integrated environment for building my Silverlight 4 for SharePoint 2010, in one environment. So i shall better get down to it…

Until next time, happy SharePointin’,
C. Marius

If you went through the trouble of setting up a development environment with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 you should probably know that the installation of will not copy correctly one of the most important assemblies for Linq to XML, the System.Xml.Linq.

Also, trying to add it via project References will do no good either as it is not present there either. But you do find that assembly in <System Drive>:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v4.0\Libraries\Client. (For X86 installations do change to the Program Files.

One more thing, if you are eager to try Visual Studio 2010 RC1 that Microsoft has been publishing not so long ago, you should know that Silverlight 4 is not supported in this release. At the same time it looks like is more and more difficult to get your hands on the Beta 2 version of Visual Studio 2010, so if you have one around, make sure you don’t delete it.

Hope it helps,
C. Marius

Not later than 2 weeks back I've been invited to perform some reviewing on an upcoming book for Packt publishing related to integrating Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010. Some months back using tips on the web i prepared my W7 x64 as development machine benefiting from VHD boot under Windows 7 to avoid messing up my physical installation with all the betas and RCs circulating around.

I do have that already couple of differential VHDs on my development machine, containing various configurations. Nowadays, after releasing Visual Studio 2010 RC1 it is hard to find any version of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, but i did kept close a copy of a DVD i received back at the Tech Days in Paris. The reason I need to use Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 instead of RC1 is because support for Silverlight 4 is not included! Very important for my current situation!

Now, capitalizing on that experience, along with the fact that i also received a RC1 version of the SharePoint 2010 i set for creating a new differential VHD from my baseline create previously.

Microsoft has made a good job describing finally on TechNet the requirements, you only have to go and grab them on TechNet site. Obviously launching install still throws the same exception about failing package. Now the trick is that in Program Files (x86) one folder will be created where the installation files are extracted

So, before installing, make sure you:

1. Go under Files/Setup/ and add this line in config.xml <Setting Id="AllowWindowsClientInstall" Value="True"/>. When saving, Windows 7 will most probably request that you save it somewhere else, e.g under My Documents folder, unless you are Administrator. Just make sure overwrite the original file with the version containing your changes. Here is how my configuration file looks like.

2. Install pre-requisites, one by one:

• Microsoft "Geneva" Framework (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=165752)
• Microsoft Sync Framework v1.0 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=141237&clcid=0x409)
• Microsoft Filter Pack 2.0 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=166504 or C:\Program Files (x86)\MSECache\oserver2010\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles\FilterPack)
• Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=141512)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (i use Express Edition always on my development machine). In this particular case, where i needed to deal with .NET 4.0, i choose to install already the version that has support for .NET 4.0 Beta 2 (use SHAREPOINT as the name of the instance, because otherwise SharePoint 2010 will ignore it and create a new instance during setup). You can find it here SQLEXPR x64 Executable with .Net 4 Support. This will get you 2 benefits: speed up installation of SP2010 (especially that when choosing “Standalone” install it will require and install SQL 2008 Express – you will see later why i choose standalone) and avoid you to install many cumulative package updates which are really a pain. Also very important is that under Windows 7 do add the “Administrators group” already during installing to the SQL Administrators group. Also make sure that the account used for Installing and Configuring is already in the Administrators group of the local machine.
• Obviously you don’t need PowerShell 2.0 CTP3 as Windows 7 already comes with it. Don't try to download and install the latest release of Windows Management Framework (that contains both PowerShell 2.0, BITS and WINRM), neither of the available packages are good for Windows 7 and will NOT work and believe me SHarePoint 2010 RC1 will function just perfect without it.

You’re done, now you can start installation of SharePoint 2010 RC1 X64 (or build 14.0.4730.1010). Navigate under the same folder under Program Files (x86)/MSECache/oserver2010 and run setup.exe. Next screen shall ask for you key (i assume you have that somewhere handy).

Go on, type it in or copy it, and after validation you shall be presented with the regular screen, you must be probably familiar with from SharePoint 2007. Now this a non-turning point because depending on what you’ve selected you’ll end-up with one useless installation or….not.

The trick here is that if you choose “”Server Farm” instead of “Standalone”, you will get a warning (see bellow) and then, after all setup is finalized and Configuration Wizard starts, UNLESS you are connected to a Active Directory Domain and use a domain account (but rather a Local account – i always create various local accounts, to use best-practices, such as SPService, SPSearch, SPCrawl, etc.), you will end-up with the next error, forbidding you to continue. That’s really ugly, as you either uninstall, and choose the “Standalone” option next time, which of course, only works with MS SQL Express that gets installed behind the scenes for you during setup (and now you see why is good to install it by yourself any way you want it) or add your machine to a Windows Domain so you could use a Domain account.

Now, once this is passed, the rest should be fine. One more tip, try running setup using the Administrator account (or at least during Configuration wizard)! I had a couple of times unexpected failures of the wizard which I could only overcome by running as Administrator.

Provided that everything went fine with the installation, you shall see the Configuration Wizard screen after installation!

However, as soon as it start (while executing initializing Task 2 charged with Creating configuration database, among others) you’ll receive un ugly exception!

Looking in the log file somewhere an exception is logged about an assembly that an assembly is missing called “Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35”.

After some research on this assembly, I was already suspecting that the Geneva framework has something to do with it., i found that this assembly is has something to do with Claims in the Windows Identity Foundation. This got me thinking that Microsoft released not long ago the Microsoft Windows Identity Foundation, already part of the Windows 2008 R2! So, I proceed in downloading and installing this package from Microsoft’s Download Center. Make sure you choose Windows6.1-KB974405-x64.msu. Installation is quick and smooth, and after a new attempt, what do you know, it works like a charm (even if it takes its time).

So here it is, now you have a brand new fresh installation of SharePoint 2010 RC1 on your Windows 7, just like mine. Next time i shall write about integrating Silverlight 4 RIA Services with SharePoint 2010 to “light-up your SharePoint” as some articles keep claiming.

Until next time, happy SharePointing’,

C. Marius