You are only limited by your imagination

Site Collection Admin Cannot Access Site

April 5, 2012 by m0gb0y74 | 0 comments

When trying to access a SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010 site on the same machines that it is installed on you may be continuously prompted for your credentials – even if you are the Site Collection Administrator for the site collection that the site resides in. This is most likely caused by Loopback Checking which is enabled on Windows 2003 and Windows 2008. The purpose of  Loopback Checking and steps on how to disable it are detailed in the Technet article ‘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‘.

The following steps briefly illustrate how to disable Loopback Checking:

  1. Click Start->Run and then type regedit and click OK.
  2. Navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa.
  3. Right-click Lsa and select New->DWORD Value.
  4. Type DisableLoopbackCheck and hit Enter.
  5. Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck and the click Modify.
  6. Type 1 into the Value data box and click OK.
  7. Close regedit and reboot your computer.

It is important to note that this is not Microsoft’s preferred approach but it is the simplest and shouldn’t be too much of a worry on a development machine.

Installing SharePoint 2010 using local accounts

April 2, 2012 by m0gb0y74 | 0 comments

If you try to install SharePoint 2010 on a single server using local (non-domain) accounts you soon hit a brick wall as the configuration tool will not let you go any further without entering a domain account to run services under. The following steps guide you through how to actually install SharePoint 2010 on a single server using local account.

NOTE: This will not work on a multi-machine install. To use a multi-machine install you must supply a domain account.

  1. Install SharePoint using the advanced option and select complete as the server type.
  2. Instead of using PSCONFIG or PSCONFIGUI launch the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell. This can be found under the same menu option as the Central Admin link.
  3. Type New-SPConfigurationDatabase and hit enter.
  4. You will be prompted for the DatabaseName. Provide a name for the configuration database (I normally use SP2010_ConfigDB).
  5. Next provide the DatabaseServer. This will be the name of the SQL Server in the normal <server name>\<instance name> format.
  6. When prompted for the FarmCredentials a pop-up will appear to enter a username and password. This is where you supply the local account name and password that SharePoint services will run as. It is vital that you supply the username in the <machine name>\<username> format or you will hit problems further in the process.
  7. You will then return to the PowerShell window where you are prompted for a Passphrase. This is the same as the password that you just supplied in the credentials popup.
  8. When this process finishes you will have a new SharePoint configuration and admin configuration database.
  9. Next run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard (PSCONFIGUI).
  10. Leave all the options as provided, making sure that the ‘Do not disconnect from this server farm’ is selected, and keep clicking next until the wizard is finished and you can click ‘Finish’.

You now have a new single server SharePoint 2010 installation.

Technical Debt – Why should I worry?

February 22, 2012 by m0gb0y74 | 0 comments

What is technical debt?

Technical Debt is a term first used by Ward Cunningham in 1992 and is a metaphor used to describe the price, in terms of future effort, that a design decision will cost. This is something that programmers who have ever had to maintain software will have come across but probably not realised that there was a term for. The term ‘debt’ is the most important. Just like a financial debt costs more in terms of interest the longer you have it, technical debt costs more in terms of effort to ‘fix’ the longer that it is present in the software.

How do I accrue technical debt?

The simplest way that you can accrue technical debt is by implementing a feature in a ‘quick and dirty’ manner, and not choosing the more maintainable ‘correct’ way. How many of us have shoe horned a piece of functionality at the last-minute into the software to meet a deadline knowing that if we had the time we would have done a better job of making the code cleaner and more maintainable? When this happens, that piece of software has accrued a technical ‘debt’ that will cost us to rectify or work around at some point in the future.

Why should it matter to me?

If you understand the concept of technical debt and what it means then it (hopefully) become integrated into your decision-making process during the planning, design, and coding stages of your project. While this may not have an immediate impact on your project, it will have a direct impact on enhancements and maintenance to the finished product. Another bonus is that it is a way of relating your decisions and concerns to your manager in terms that they (should) understand.

Where can I find out more?

The TechnicalDebt entry on Martin Fowler’s bliki is an excellent place to start. Assaf Stone’s post ‘How to measure technical debt’ is a good article on how to quantify the ‘debt’.