Whilst looking at implementing a site search feature for one of my client sites I thought I'd look at Microsoft's free Search Server 2010 Express to see if I can use it to crawl my MVC3 razor website that I'm working on.  

First of all I'd try to install Search Server 2010 but quite quickly found that if you don't have a domain account then you'll receive the following error:
"the account must be a valid domain account"

Thanks that's really useful!  I came across this excellent article which with a bit of PowerShell allows you to work around the problem by:

1.  After install cancel the SharePoint configuration wizard
2.  Drop down to the SharePoint Management Shell
3.  Run New-SPConfigurationDatabase
2.  Now you're good to go with the wizard by running PSConfigUI

This can be useful if you're looking for blogs in a certain niche:

intitle:makeup intext:comment inurl:blog

I’ve just started to look at SharePoint 2010 and from first glances it seems to be a bit nicer than SharePoint 2007 in terms of look and functionality for developers.  Anyway the purpose of this post is to describe getting a fresh install of SharePoint 2010 working with Visual Studio 2010 to debug a straight forward hello world web part.

So once you’ve got your server built and ready to go and if you try and follow the MSDN HelloWorld sample http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms415817.aspx you will more then likely encounter the following errors.

Error occurred in deployment step 'Activate Features': Cannot start service SPUserCodeV4 on computer '[server]'.

This one is quite straight forward just fire up Server Manager –> Services and make sure that the “SharePoint 2010 User Code Host” service is enabled and set to start up automatically.

Next if you try and build your project you’ll receive:

Error occurred in deployment step 'Activate Features': This feature cannot be activated at this time. The contents of the feature's solution requires the Solution Sandbox service to be running.

To fix go to Central Administration
Under "System Settings" -> Manage servers in this farm
You'll see a list of services running, click on the server name.
Make sure "Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandboxed Code Service " is enabled.

Job done!  Apparently this is by design as an out of the box install.  Why doesn’t the MSDN HelloWorld artiicle tell you about these fundamental things!?

If you get this strange error whilst working in Sharepoint:

Exception from HRESULT: 0x81070201   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequestInternalClass.CreateListFromFormPost(String bstrUrl, String& pbstrGuid, String& pbstrNextUrl)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.CreateListFromFormPost(String bstrUrl, String& pbstrGuid, String& pbstrNextUrl)

Check your disk space and event log!  Why doesn’t Sharepoint give you nice error messages…

I've just started to use Sharepoint 2007 and must say it's a powerful product but on first attempts at customisation etc it's quite painful, hopefully this will ease!

Using WSPBuilder is an absolute must to to get you back into Visual Studio.  Anyway today I got stuck with a WSPBuilder "Could not load type" error whilst viewing the deployed webpart in Sharepoint.

This is quite simple to fix:

- Make sure you are using the latest version of WSPBuilder, the older versions have some problems in this area
- Check you have the right assembly name in the aspx file or use the fully qualified name and check the PublicKeyToken!

<%@ Assembly Name="Funky.Sharepoint.Webparts.PageLinksUI, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=72a1fe2990079bf8"%>