SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 Hangs after Visual Studio 2010 F5 Debugging

Darrin Bishop — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:58:44 GMT

Lately I have been having some issues with debugging a fairly simple Visual Studio 2010/SharePoint 2010 project. Whenever I deploy the project to the farm, Internet Explorer launches, tries to connect to the SharePoint site and more often than not the web server times out before the debugger is attached and the site is up and running. Occasionally it loads after a long wait period but will normally time out before I get a chance to do any real debugging.

Watching VS 2010 I can see that the Visual Studio has packed and deployed the solution quickly. What I notice was the symbols loading slowly. This was noticeable because VS displays the symbols loading at the bottom of the screen. Normally these will load quick enough that they are hard to read. Now I had time to write them by hand.

Retraction of the solution by VS2010 performed quickly. If I did a Ctr-F5 to Run with out Debugging the solution was deployed and the site was displayed very quickly which makes sense because the debugger was not trying to attach to the process.

After doing some Binging on symbols slow to load there seems to be a set of potential reason why Visual Studio ( and not just VS 2010) will slow down when loading symbols. Most issues relate to someone changing the location to retrieve the symbols such as Microsoft ( internet latency) and having networked drives that were not attached ( time outs waiting on the drives). There was even an article about multiple version of the .Net framework potentially causing an issue. None of these issues appeared to be the cause of the problem. I even went as far as doing a repair on VS 2010.

After more digging, I ran across a single forum thread that someone commented on the fact that the debugger was slow to attach because of a "bad" breakpoint. Basically the post suggested that a breakpoint that might have been valid at one time, was no longer valid for whatever reason and the debugger was stumbling over it slowing down the attachment process.

The solution to my issue? Simply delete all the breakpoints in the project. Right after I deleted all the breakpoints Visual Studio deployed the solution and the site launched in seconds, not minutes. It appears that deleting all the breakpoints using the "Delete All Breakpoints" menu item under the Debug menu removed all valid and "invalid" breakpoints and let me get back to work which for today is a custom Web Part using Model View Presenter.

Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools Available

Darrin Bishop — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:27:56 GMT

Mike Morton and the Visual Studio team that created the SharePoint tools have released a VS 2010 SP Power Tools pack. The Power Tools pack includes a Visual Web Part that can be deployed as part of a Sandbox Solution and an extension to display build errors when a developer inadventantly uses types or members in a sandbox solution that are not allowed.

For those who have not yet used a Visual Web Part it is a Web Part that encapsulates a user control which allows for a very nice design experience but up until now it was not allowed in a Sandbox solution. The ability to create a Visual Web Part and place it in the sandbox will make it easier to deploy Web Parts. Hats of to Mike and the VS team!

Download the VS 2010 SharePoint Power Tools at:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/8e602a8c-6714-4549-9e95-f3700344b0d9

The local farm is not accessible. Cmdlets with FeatureDependencyId are not registered

Darrin Bishop — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:30:06 GMT

The SharePoint 2010 Management Shell shot me this message earlier this week. I was logged on as a local administrator and farm administrator to boot. I was able to manage the farm using the Central Administration site PowerShell simply refused to load the cmdlets.

This warning is displayed when the logged in account does not have the correct permissions. When you get this warning as show above the simple solution is log in as someone with the appropriate permission - like the setup or farm account and run the Add-SPShellAdmin cmdlet supplying the user name as a parameter. For example to add Dbgdemo\dbishop as a Shell Admin I would run:

Add-SPShellAdmin -UserName dbgdemo\dbishop

To determine which accounts are Shell Admin accounts use Get-SPShellAdmin as shown below.

The Add-SPShellAdmin cmdlet will add the account to the correct database and windows groups. This can all be done manually but it is genreally easier to run the Add-SPShellAdmin cmdlet under an account that can run the managment shell. Once the account has been added as Shell Admin you can switch back the user and PowerShell should load the cmdlets.

What can be confusing is the fact that administrators can manage the farm using the Central Administration pages but not using the managment shell. Why is that? When administrators manage the farm using Central Administration pages they are accessing the farm using the Central Administration's app pool account - which has all the necessary privillages on the local macine and the databases. When working with SharePoint using the managmemnt shell there is no app pool to get between the administrator's account and the farm. The account requires the permissions.

To get more deeper into the hows and why's check out Zac's blog post on the topic:
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/zach/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=56

Live Chats to Learn more about SharePoint

Darrin Bishop — Tue, 25 May 2010 18:55:19 GMT

Live Chats to Learn more about SharePoint - with 28 MVP Experts Do you have questions about SharePoint? Want to learn more about the recently launched SharePoint 2010? By popular request, 28 SharePoint MVPs from around the world are participating in two live chat events about SharePoint: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx . These events are a great opportunity to tap into the vast knowledge of these industry professionals who are regarded as the best in their field. Two opportunities are available to join the conversation. Times were chose to accommodate most of the world.

On Tuesday May 25th, tune in between 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Pacific time to chat with the following MVPs:

Agnes Molnar
Bill English
Brian Farnhill
Bryan Phillips
Clayton Cobb
David Mann
Matt McDermott
Paul Stork
Rob Bogue
Rob Foster
Sahil Malik
Saifullah Shafiq Ahmed
Serge Tremblay

On Wednesday May 26, tune in between 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Pacific time to chat with the following MVPs:

Andrew Connell
Becky Bertram
Bil Simser
Chandima Kulathilake
Claudio Brotto
Gary Lapointe
Darrin Bishop
John Ross
Michael Mukalian
Muhanad Omar
Paul Galvin
Randy Drisgill
Shane Young
Todd Bleeker
Zlatan Dzinic

Learn more and add these chats to your calendar by visiting the MSDN event page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/chats/default.aspx