Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3 Tools Installation failed with error code: (0×80072EFD).

This is caused by the fact that the installation tries to download the Silverlight 3 Developer Runtime. This is how to get around this problem:

1. Download the ‘Silverlight Developer Runtime’
2. Open the command line on the machine installing Silverlight Tools on
3. Navigate to the directory Silverlight3_Tools.exe is saved in
4. Run ‘Silverlight3_Tools.exe /x:C:\sli’
5. Copy the Silverlight Developer Runtime installer to C:\sli
6. Run ‘SPInstaller.exe’

Everything should install fine as long as you have Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installed.

[INFO] WMI Deploying 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 Microsoft.BizTalk.GlobalPropertySchemas.dll'
[WARN] AdminLib GetBTSMessage: hrErr=80070002; Msg=The system cannot find the file specified.;

After searching Google I came across a few posts that were of use including one by Wade Wegner. This describes an environment very similar to may own – a VMWare ‘Template’ is used for each new server.

The following are the steps that I ran through to solve the problem using Wade’s post:

• Download DTCPing
• Extract the contents onto both the BizTalk Server and the SQL Server.
• Run DTCPing.exe on both machines
  • I did notice that you needed to start the one you wanted to issue the ping command needed to be started first but that might just have been a glitch.
• On the BizTalk Server enter the SQL Server name into the ‘Remote Server Name’ box and click ‘PING’

If you recieve a message on the SQL Server saying that the ‘…CID values for both test machines are the same…‘ then this problem has been caused by ‘cloning’ the machines from the same base template.

To fix this problem I carried out the following on the BizTalk Server:

• Remove ‘Network DTC’ using ‘Add/Remove Programs’ under the ‘Windows Components’ section.
• Via the command line run ‘MSDTC -install’
• Delete the following keys from the registry (if present)
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\DTC
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSDTC
  • HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CID
• Reboot the server
• Via the coommand line run ‘MSDTC -install’
• Add ‘Network DTC’ using ‘Add/Remove Programs’ under the ‘Windows Components’ section.

Try to ping the SQL Server from the BizTalk server using DTCPing as described above. All being well you should see a message ‘RPC Test is successful‘.

To further validate that everything was working with MSDTC I downloaded the DTCTester Tool and ran it.

I tried to configure the ‘Group’ under the ‘Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 Configuration’ and it failed! Checking the error log there was a problem with ‘Enterprise SSO’. A quick look and it turned out the SSO service hadn’t started due to the fact that I had uninstalled MSDTC. After starting up the service everything worked fine.

Thanks Wade…..

The woman below replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You’re between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”

“You must be in Information Technology,” said the balloonist.
“I am,” replied the woman, “how did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is probably technically correct, but I’ve no idea what to make of your information and the fact is, I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help at all. If anything, you’ve delayed my trip.”

The woman below responded, “You must be in Management.”
“I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”

“Well,” said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you’ve no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my f**king fault.”

The following is an up to date list of the MW2 Callsigns that I have earned:

Half an hour later, just by chance, a door-to-door baby photographer happened to ring the doorbell, hoping to make a sale. ‘Good morning, Ma’am’, he said, ‘I’ve come to..’

‘Oh, no need to explain,’ Mrs. Smith cut in, embarrassed, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

‘Have you really?’ said the photographer. ‘Well, that’s good. Did you know babies are my specialty?’

‘Well that’s what my husband and I had hoped. Please come in and have a seat !’

After a moment she asked, blushing, ‘Well, where do we start?’

‘Leave everything to me. I usually try two in the bathtub, one on the couch, and perhaps a couple on the bed. And sometimes the living room floor is fun. You can really spread out there.’

‘Bathtub, living room floor? No wonder it didn’t work out for Harry and me!’

‘Well, Ma’am, none of us can guarantee a good one every time. But if we try several different positions and I shoot from six or seven angles, I’m sure you’ll be pleased with the results.’

‘My, that’s a lot!’, gasped Mrs. Smith.

‘Ma’am, in my line of work a man has to take his time. I’d love to be in and out in five minutes, but I’m sure you’d be disappointed with that.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ said Mrs. Smith quietly.

The photographer opened his briefcase and pulled out a portfolio of his baby pictures. ‘This was done on the top of a bus,’ he said.

‘Oh, my God!’ Mrs. Smith exclaimed, grasping at her throat.

‘And these twins turned out exceptionally well – when you consider their mother was so difficult to work with.’

‘She was difficult?’ asked Mrs. Smith.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so. I finally had to take her to the park to get the job done right. People were crowding around four and five deep to get a good look.’

‘Four and five deep?’ said Mrs. Smith, her eyes wide with amazement.

‘Yes’, the photographer replied. ‘And for more than three hours, too. The mother was constantly squealing and yelling – I could hardly concentrate, and when darkness approached I had to rush my shots. Finally, when the squirrels began nibbling on my equipment, I just had to pack it all in.’

Mrs. Smith leaned forward. ‘Do you mean they actually chewed on your, uh…equipment?’

‘It’s true, Ma’am, yes.. Well, if you’re ready, I’ll set-up my tripod and we can get to work right away.’

‘Tripod?’

‘Oh yes, Ma’am. I need to use a tripod to rest my Canon on. It’s much too big to be held in the hand very long.’

Mrs. Smith fainted.

Microsoft.SharePoint.Tools.Utilities.VSeWSSServiceException
Microsoft.SharePoint.Tools.Utilities.VSeWSSServiceException: VSeWSS Service Error: Feature 'xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx' could not be installed because the loading of event receiver assembly "..." failed: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly '....' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
File name: '....'
   at System.Reflection.Assembly._nLoad(AssemblyName fileName, String codeBase, Evidence assemblySecurity, Assembly locationHint, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean throwOnFileNotFound, Boolean forIntrospection)
   at System.Reflection.Assembly.nLoad(AssemblyName fileName, String codeBase, Evidence assemblySecurity, Assembly locationHint, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean throwOnFileNotFound, Boolean forIntrospection)
   at System.Reflection.Assembly.InternalLoad(AssemblyName assemblyRef, Evidence assemblySecurity, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean forIntrospection)
   at System.Reflection.Assembly.InternalLoad(String assemblyString, Evidence assemblySecurity, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean forIntrospection)
   at System.Reflection.Assembly.Load(String assemblyString)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFeatureDefinition.get_ReceiverObject()

When I checked the GAC this Assembly was there and when looking at the solution Manifest.xml there was an entry for the ‘missing’ Assembly.

In the solution I had a list definition that was to be bound to a feature activated event. After numerous attempts and poking around in the files I found that an entry had appeared in the content type Feature.xml file that the list defintion was based on trying to bind that Content Type feature to a feature activated event. After removing the offending ‘RecieverAssembly’ and ‘RecieverClass’ attributes the solution deployed fine.

In short, the message from VSeWSS was not clear. It complained that the Assembly was missing but what was actually the problem was that a Content Type was linked to a feature reciever that it shouldn’t have been! I still don’t know how the content type got bound to a feature activated event though….

The Scots raised their threat level from “Pissed Off” to “Let’s get the Bastards” They don’t have any other levels. This is the reason they have been used on the front line in the British army for the last 300 years.

The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from “Run” to “Hide”. The only two higher levels in France are “Collaborate” and “Surrender.” The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France ’s white flag factory, effectively paralyzing the country’s military capability.

It’s not only the French who are on a heightened level of alert. Italy has increased the alert level from “Shout loudly and excitedly” to “Elaborate Military Posturing.” Two more levels remain: “Ineffective Combat Operations” and “Change Sides.”

The Germans also increased their alert state from “Disdainful Arrogance” to “Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs.” They also have two higher levels: “Invade a Neighbour” and “Lose”.

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual, and the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels .

The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.

Americans meanwhile are carrying out pre-emptive strikes on all of their allies, just in case.

New Zealand has also raised its security levels – from “baa” to “BAAAA!”. Due to continuing defence cutbacks (the air force being a squadron of spotty teenagers flying paper aeroplanes and the navy some toy boats in the Prime
Minister’s bath), New Zealand only has one more level of escalation, which is “Shit, I hope Australia will come and rescue us”.

Australia , meanwhile, has raised its security level from “No worries” to “She’ll be alright, mate”. Three more escalation levels remain, “Crikey!’, “I think we’ll need to cancel the barbie this weekend” and “The barbie is cancelled”. So far no situation has ever warranted use of the final escalation level.

Both these articles explain how this is done – via the ‘Master Page‘ option under ‘Look and Feel‘ on the ‘Site Settings‘ page. Quickly going to this page I hit a major problem – it wasn’t there. After doing a quick dig around I found out why – it is only available on a ‘Publishing Site‘ by default and my site collection root site was a ‘Blank Site‘. What was I going to do – I didn’t want to have to go into every site and change the master page using SharePoint Designer manually? 

After a bit of further digging I found the solution. Within the ‘Site Features‘ on the ‘Site Settings‘ page there is a feature called ‘Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure’. When activated this provides the options to manage master pages on your SharePoint sites. Of course, as is alluded to in the above articles this feature is only available in MOSS and not in WSS .

When I tried to find a solution to this problem I came across a couple of interesting resources. The first was an article by Hristo Pavol called ‘Lookup Fields to the same list‘ in which he posits that you can just provide the value ’self’ to make the column reference the current list. I could not get this to work and so I looked at another solution by Chris O’Brien which he has made available on CodePlex – http://sp2007lookupfields.codeplex.com/ - which is based on his article ‘Creating Lookup columns as a feature‘. This uses the feature activated event of a list that is based on the content type that I had defined.

I tried this solution and managed to get it to work but of course it creates a Site Column and did not add the column to the list which is what I wanted. Using Chris’ code as the basis I came up with the following that finds the list and adds the lookup column that references itself to the list:

    public class PortfolioListFeatureReceiver : SPFeatureReceiver
    {
  
        public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
        {
                SPWeb currentWeb = null;

                currentWeb = properties.Feature.Parent as SPWeb;

                using (currentWeb)
                {
                    SPList referencedList = currentWeb.Lists["Portfolios"];
                    string columnDefintion = "<Field ID=\"{8D626343-FEBE-438b-B76E-8CEC89EA9A9D}\" Type=\"Lookup\" Name=\"PortfolioParent\" DisplayName=\"Parent\" List=\"{" + referencedList.ID.ToString() + "}\" ShowField=\"LinkTitleNoMenu\" UnlimitedLengthInDocumentLibrary=\"FALSE\" Hidden=\"FALSE\" Required=\"FALSE\" Sealed=\"TRUE\" DisplaceOnUpgrade=\"TRUE\" />";
                    string fieldInternalName = referencedList.Fields.AddFieldAsXml(columnDefintion);
                    SPFieldLookup lookupListField = referencedList.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(fieldInternalName) as SPFieldLookup;
                    lookupListField.LookupWebId = currentWeb.ID;
                    lookupListField.Update();
                }
        }

        public override void FeatureDeactivating(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
        {

        }

        public override void FeatureInstalled(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
        {

        }

        public override void FeatureUninstalling(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)
        {

        }
    }

This code is placed in a seperate assembly from the one containing your Content Type and List  Definition. As this Assembly needs to go in the GAC it also needs to be Strong named. To associate this Feature Reciever with your list defintion you need to add the RecieverAssembly and RecieiverClass attributes to the Feature element in the feature.xml file for your list definition:

<Feature Id="guid" Title="ListDefinition" Scope="Web" Version="1.0.0.0" Hidden="FALSE" DefaultResourceFile="core" ReceiverAssembly="AssemblyName, Version=Assembly Version, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=Assembly Public Key Token Value, processorArchitecture=MSIL" ReceiverClass="AssemblyName.PortfolioListFeatureReceiver" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
   <ElementManifests>
    ...
  </ElementManifests>
</Feature>