MS Vine Beta Install review

If you had signed up for MS Vine, then you would have got an email by now with a link to the beta.

Installing MS Vine was a pretty straight-forward process, although there was a period that just took ages, Installing .Net Framework Client Profile. Note, a reboot would be required after install.

After the reboot I ran into an issue when I tried to launch Vine the first time. Got a 2755 error. This was probably my fault, as I should have installed Vine as a local administrator. I launched Vine again, this time via-Run as Administrator and all went through well. Problem was caused because the program tries to create some folders under the Windows directory, which I had insufficient privileges to do so on my Vista.

Running Vine the first time would require us to type in a 4 digit pin, a personal code number of sorts. Once done, we’re in. The Vitals tab is where we would fill out our contact information and so on. The Places tab is where we add in our favorite locations, I got 2, for now. My home and the office. The People tab is where we add in our contacts and get to put them in groups that we define. Haven’t added in anyone as yet, about to do so soon.

Vitals

Places

People

My Initial thoughts? Sexy and easy to use. Looking through it more, and will post up more thoughts, any interesting bits and/or errors that I come across.

Calendar Start Day?

We can easily specify a start day to be different from Sunday. Unfortunately, it’s not done through views. It is done on a site-by-site basis through Site Settings.

For example, on the Site Settings page under the Site Administration section click Regional Settings. Under the Define Your Work Week options, pick and select Monday as the First day of week and click OK. Now if we browse into our calendars we’ll have Monday as our Start Day.

Checkin Multiple Documents

We all probably already know that with SharePoint server we can do this via-Site Actions –> Manage Content and Structure. From there we can navigate to a particular library, tick and select all checked-out items and then click Actions –> Check In.

Unfortunately, as stated this is only available on SharePoint server and not SharePoint Services. We can however, programmatically checkin documents within SharePoint services. Below is a sample code snippet performing checkin for documents that are checked out. Hope this helps.

InfoPath File Attachment control and File Not Found error.

InfoPath forms have a default control for attaching/uploading files, called File Attachment. You can find it on the Design Tasks pane (View –> Design Tasks), under Controls within the File and Picture section. You can easily drag and drop the control unto your form in design mode.

InfoPath team blog has a post on this, which also explains the blocked file types (such as exe and bat).

Additional:

If you ever get a “File not found” error attaching or uploading files there is a wonderful post here by SaurabhKV. I resolved this issue by adding a tiny bit of JavaScript (see below) as per-SaurabhKV’s post into a hidden CEWP at the bottom of the page in where the form resides. Hope this helps.

<script type="text/javascript">
aspnetForm.encoding = "multipart/form-data";
</script>

MS Word Gotcha

Creating a MS Word document by right-clicking New –> Microsoft Office Word Document actually creates the file as 0 bytes in size! Note, this very same action with MS Excel or MS PowerPoint creates files that are about 9KB or so.

Now, this does not really mean much until we actually try to Upload the file into a particular document library. If the file is 0 bytes in size, we would get an error (this happens with Notepad files as well).

And creating a document by opening up MS Word Application and saving it completely blank however, saves the file as 9.60KB in size. Not really sure why the difference in size for the two separate actions. Just something to keep an eye out for.

Quiesce Farm Lesson Learnt

 

If we ever Quiesce a farm for a particular operation.  Always remember to perform an Unquiesce as soon as we’ve finished. Unfortunately, there isn’t an auto setting which would unquiesce it for you after x-period of time. And things would not be obvious as users could still connect, problems only arise when they attempt certain functions. This is really just a friendly reminder, it was a lesson learnt on my part.

SharePoint Designer Styling your Workflow Emails

Before getting started, let it be noted that this is a quick and dirty approach. As we create workflows through SPD we may have actions that send out emails. By default we would get a very plain and boring looking email. We can change this by simply placing the email contents within div tags that has inline styles. Easy :)