Thursday, March 31, 2011

SharePoint Migration: A Case Where Different == Good

So there I was, moving a 2007 Web from a site collection in a 2007 Farm to a site collection in a 2010 Farm [Some day I will get around to a long post about that – don’t hold your breath though] and I was going through the differences between the 2007 web and the 2010 web with a fine toothed comb (aka custom utility I wrote up for the purpose) when I found a difference in list templates:


2007 Web


<listTemplate Name="Document Library" BaseType="DocumentLibrary" CategoryType="Libraries" Description="Create a document library when you have a collection of documents or other files that you want to share.  Document libraries support features such as folders, versioning, and check out." DocumentTemplate="101" FeatureId="00bfea71-e717-4e80-aa17-d0c71b360101" Hidden="False" InternalName="doclib" IsCustomTemplate="False" Type="DocumentLibrary" Unique="False" />

2010 Web


<listTemplate Name="Document Library" BaseType="DocumentLibrary" CategoryType="Libraries" Description="A place for storing documents or other files that you want to share. Document libraries allow folders, versioning, and check out." DocumentTemplate="121" FeatureId="00bfea71-e717-4e80-aa17-d0c71b360101" Hidden="False" InternalName="doclib" IsCustomTemplate="False" Type="DocumentLibrary" Unique="False" />

See the difference? You should, since I highlighted it and all. Yes, the descriptions are also different, but I think you are safe from that difference causing widespread problems...


Having different doc templates for the doc library lists warranted some further investigation – just to make sure this was not going to be an issue. So checking into the document templates referenced by each, we have:


Template 101


<DocumentTemplate Path="STS" DisplayName="$Resources:core,doctemp_Word97;" Type="101" Default="TRUE" Description="$Resources:core,doctemp_Word97_Desc;">

Template 121


<DocumentTemplate Path="STS" DisplayName="$Resources:core,doctemp_Word;" Type="121" Default="TRUE" Description="$Resources:core,doctemp_Word_Desc;">

Result: Rather than have SharePoint 2010 date itself (2010 is last year at the time of this writing), it now shows the generic ‘Microsoft Office Word document’ as the type name, as opposed to ‘Microsoft Office Word 97-2003 document’. So this turns out to be a welcome change and a good idea – especially when it is 2015 and I am deploying SP 2010 to a datacenter on the moon (dark side of course).



Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Windows 2008 VM Freeze

This has come up multiple times now – so recording it for posterity:

Having VMWare Server based development workstations is usually great for controlling a SharePoint development environment. On several occasions a new VM for SharePoint 2010 development (Windows Server 2008 R2, Visual Studio 2010, SharePoint 2010) has frozen on us. And not frozen as in “it is all slow because the host is low on resources” – frozen as in “will be uncovered by alien scientists in a few thousand years who will recreate a scene with it’s adopted mother” (AI was interesting, if nothing else, right?)

So looking at all the usual suspects proved fruitless in the usual way: VMWare tools was installed and up to date. Physical disk was fine, as were the virtual ones. No viruses or malware detected. This all would have been too easy.

I stumbled upon the answer by observing that the machine still had a heartbeat once frozen – there was just no way to interact with it (including pause/shutdown commands) – but there were a few things that indicated life – network activity, CPU cycles, etc. So that narrowed the focus to video. Like I mentioned before, VMWare tools was installed and up to date – the VM was also using the VMWare SVGA II adapter.

The Fix

Disable video hardware acceleration.

If you think about it, it makes sense that you would not have hardware acceleration enabled within a VM. Problem is, these were all clean vanilla installs – so it was defaulting to a hardware acceleration configuration. If you think about it more, having hardware acceleration on should NOT cause a complete video freeze within a VM, since in theory the hardware ‘exists’ – it is just virtual is all.

In case you are wondering how to get to the place to view and modify video hardware acceleration, it is a little hidden in Windows 2008 R2:

image    image

 
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