SharePoint, .Net, SQL, MS BI, Collaboration and Gadgets

If you ever get this error during moss or wss 3.0 installation, you can follow the step below to fix it.

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):
This product requires ASP.NET v2.0 to be set to ‘Allow’ in the list of Internet Information Services (IIS) Web Server Extensions. If it is not available in the list, reinstall ASP.Net v2.0.
Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

Steps

1.  Run aspnet_regiis -i at .NET 2.0 folder.

2. If the error still exist, you need to manual “Allow” the asp.net 2.0 in IIS Web Server Extensions. 

If you have a main report that calls subreports.  When a subreport has enough data such that it will not fit into the remaining area of the current page, the renderer inserts a page break leaving alot of white space befere the subreport output. Please do not waste your time to find out how to solve it. Just go a head to remove the sub report and rebuild in the main reports. This is a known bug reported in MS KB. Here are the details:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938943
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2374376&SiteID=1

Here is an interesting article, “Last mile of Business Inttelligence”. You may face the same problem in the BI world these days.

http://www1.juiceanalytics.com/writing/2007/11/last-mile-business-intelligence/

We are getting error “Value does not fall within the expected range” when try to change the “Page Setting” in MOSS 2007. Yes, again same error message as in here (In fact, this error occurs is various scenarios). This error only happens when you copy an aspx page using SharePoint designer from one server to another severs (development server to production server).  Once you try to edit the Page Setting, the error will occurs. We did some googling around but no luck. Some sites mention that the page is link to the old Page Layout’s URL and we are not able to change it since we cannot access the page setting. But, there are a workaround where you can solve it! Here are the steps:

1. You cannot copy and paste the aspx page using SharePoint designer. First, export the aspx page using SharePoint designer to a physical file.
2. Open the aspx page with notepad and search on the “mso:PublishingPageLayout”. You will notice your development portal URL is there.
   <mso:PublishingPageLayout msdt:dt=”string”>http://xxxdevelopmenturl/_catalogs/masterpage/BlankWebPartPage.aspx, Blank Web Part Page</mso:PublishingPageLayout>
3. Replace your development URL (xxxdevelopmenturl) to the production URL and save it.
4. Open your production site with SharePoint Designer and import the modified aspx page.

That’s all. You should able to change the page setting without any error. Do note that if you are using reporting services in the aspx page, you can replace all the report’s URLs too. In that case, you do not need to reconfigure all the web parts again. This saves us a lot of effort since our aspx page contains more than 25 web parts. It will take us hours to reconfigure the report URL and parameters. 

** Special thanks to Mr. Goh TH who point out the Page Layout URL issue!

Last day, we learn 3 more modules as below:

Module 13: Integrating Business Rules

This module explains how to configure business rules and how to call a business rule from within an orchestration.

- Introduction to Business Rules
- Integrating Business Rules

Module 14: Monitoring Business Activity

This module explains how to configure business rules and how to call a business rule from within an orchestration.

- Introduction to Business Activity Monitoring
- Enabling Business Activity Monitoring

Module 15: Integrating with Trading Partners

This module explains how to track and manage rules, policies, agreements, and other information about trading partners.

- Enabling Trading Partner Integration

As a conclusion, the course provides quite a number of demonstrations, hand-on lab and study material. We did learn the basic overview, how the BizTalk works and some development skills. However, I think we still have a long way to go in order to able to become real BizTalk Developer/Consultant. The course just tells you the basic overview. It will be very challenging when come to real project/implementation. So, the best way to learn is gets in to real project. Start everything from scratch, getting requirements, building schema, creating Orchestration and so on… Personally, I think mastering in BizTalk is very challenging. I believe this is one of the reasons why there are not many BizTalk Experts in my country as well.

Here the modules cover in Day 4:

Module 10: Creating Transactional Business Processes

This module explains how to create orchestrations that support atomic and long-running transactions. Students will also learn how to create nested orchestrations, configure exception handling, and recover from failed transactions.

- Introduction to Transactions
- Configuring Transactions

Module 11: Deploying and Managing BizTalk Applications

This module explains how to create and deploy BizTalk applications in a production environment. Students will also learn how to manage running applications.

- Introduction to BizTalk Applications
- Deploying an Application
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Module 12: Integrating with Web Services

This module explains how to consume a Web service from an orchestration and how to publish an orchestration as a Web service.

- Introduction to Web Services Integration
- Consuming a Web Service

The day 3 training cover:

Module 7: Integrating with Adapters

This module explains how to configure common adapters to enable BizTalk integration.

- Introduction to BizTalk Adapters
- Configuring a BizTalk Adapter
 

Module 8: Creating a BizTalk Orchestration

This module explains how BizTalk orchestration services work and shows how to create a BizTalk orchestration. Students will also learn how to use debugging tools to monitor a running orchestration.

 - Introduction to BizTalk Orchestration
 - Building an Orchestration
 - Monitoring Orchestrations

Module 9: Automating Business Processes

This module explains how to use orchestration shapes to represent the logical flow of an orchestration. Students will also learn how to manipulate data and manage exceptions within an orchestration.

- Controlling the Flow of an Orchestration
 - Configuring Orchestrations

Today, we cover 3 more modules. Here are the details:

Module 4: Deploying a BizTalk Project

This module explains how to deploy a BizTalk project and how to view deployed assemblies.

- Introduction to Deployment
- Deploying an Assembly

Module 5: Routing BizTalk Messages

This module explains how to enable message routing and how to use BizTalk tools to monitor live and archived message activity.

- Introduction to Message Routing
- Configuring Message Routing
- Tracking Message Activity

Module 6: Creating Pipelines

This module explains how to create and configure receive and send pipelines for processing messages.

- Introduction to Pipelines
- Building a Pipeline

I was informed to attend a BizTalk Technical training for one week. BizTalk is still new in my country. In fact, not companies are using it. One of my cousins in UK mentioned BizTalk to me long time ago. BizTalk is very popular in Europe.  Most of the gigantic companies need BizTalk. What is BizTalk? And why it is important? Mm… I think you can easily find out the answer out there (googling).  Today is the first day of the training.  Here are some modules I learned today.

Module 1: Introduction to BizTalk Server 2006

This module describes the BizTalk message processing architecture and identifies the new features and toolsets provided in BizTalk Server 2006.

- What Is BizTalk Server 2006?
- What’s New in BizTalk Server 2006?
- The BizTalk Server Development Environment

Module 2: Creating Schemas

This module explains how to use BizTalk development tools to create XML and flat-file schemas.

- Introduction to BizTalk Schemas
- Creating XML and Flat-File Schemas
 

Module 3: Creating Maps

This module explains how to use BizTalk Mapper to create and work with BizTalk maps. Students will learn how to add functoids to a map and how to compile and test a map.

- Creating a BizTalk Map
- Configuring Basic Functoids
- Configuring Advanced Functoids 

The trainer is capable but sometime a bit too “tedious”. Overall, the training is good! This is a 5 days course. Hopefully, I can master some of the basic skill after this training.

Are you getting frustrated with “An unexpected error has occurred” in sharepoint 2007? I found some useful tips. You can get more error messages from MOSS especially when they are not written to the application log. Do follow the steps below to get more:

1. Go into the web.config and set custom errors to off:

<customErrors mode=”Off” />

2. Turn on tracing and the callstack by setting both to true:

<SafeMode MaxControls=”200″ CallStack=”true” DirectFileDependencies=”10″ TotalFileDependencies=”50″ AllowPageLevelTrace=”true”>

3. There can be valuable info in the Event Log, so check there for more information on any exceptions that may have been thrown.