Personal Raves

I have decided to move everything to my person domain name, http://www.farhan-ahmad.net. I will be posting new content there, so head on to that URL...

Ok, I am finding this out the hard way, but I am telling this to everyone so you don’t have to go through the same frustration. The errors that SharePoint gives can be very misleading!

Since yesterday I have been trying to figure out why SharePoint keeps complaining that my web part is not marked as safe even though I have setup the whole site as part of WSS_Medium security and marked the assembly as safe (I have made sure 100s of times that the web.config is correct). Below is the actual error that I was getting:

A Web Part or Web Form Control on this Web Part Page cannot be displayed or imported because it is not registered on this site as safe.

Logically you would think that there is something wrong with how the web part is configured, or maybe there is something wrong with the web.config, or wait it could even be something with the Virtual PC running SharePoint. But… that’s not the case :-/

After spending a long time and after creating several different web parts with several different approaches hoping it would like one (including some with the default names like WebPart1, WebPartLibrary, etc.) I figured out that it was the class constructor!! I mistakenly did not put the scope classifier for the constructor and SharePoint wasn’t able to construct the class, but for some reason it decided that the web part was not marked as safe!

Lesson: be very careful when SharePoint complains, some times the actual problem isn't what it is says it is!

Everyone knows about GMail and most of the people already have GMail accounts. I haven't used my account for quite some time but lately I have noticed that almost everyday somebody is offering a GMail account because they have invitations left.

Do a quick Google search on "GMail invitations" and you will be surprised. All of all, check out this website dedicated to GMail invitations!

I guess this is dedication... but it just annoys me.

The Gixxer, again!

Here are few pictures of the motorcycle.


The Gixxer in the garage

Well, its been a while since I posted something, I have just been busy with all the things that I am working on. For some reason I couldn't sleep tonight so I took on the challenge of learning development of SharePoint Web Parts.

The MSDN web site for SharePoint technologies is probably a good point for starting. So I downloaded the Web Part templates for Visual Studio .Net and ran the file which extracted the setup files to a folder. Now, when I would run the 'setup.exe' it would say that I needed Visual Studio .Net before I could install the web part templates, duh!

Well, it wasn't that simple; the problem was that I already had Visual Studio .Net 2003 installed. After restarting the setup several times I decided it was time to find out what was going on.

Searching on google I found this post at TalkAboutSoftware.com, according to which the installer was checking the following two registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\Registration\PIDKEY
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\Registration\ProductID

My computer's registry had both of these keys but they were blank. The reply to that post suggests restoring the registry, but I didn't want to do that because of it's consequences (who knows what else has been changed since the last backup?).

Still not sure what to set those to, I kept searching. After a few minutes I ended up at this post at EggHeadCafe.com. Before I move on, I must point out one thing, EggHeadCafe looks more like a graphics website than a .Net portal, just an observation :). Anyways, according to that post the solution was to reinstall (a.k.a. repair) Visual Studio .Net, which I didn't want to do either! =(

Finally I got fed up and set the above two keys to "PIDKEY" and "Visual Studio .Net" respectively and ran the setup. Guess what?!?! It actually worked!!!

According to the first post those keys might have been removed by some add-in, since thats the case I am assuming those weren't really important. So this is my solution for now, hopefully that will work if you are having the same problem. I will post an update if the registry change screws anything else up.

Now on with the SharePoint development... Oh wait, I need to get some sleep it's already 3:29am! 'night!

I just became a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP)! I had to take the 70-229 exam, Designing and Implementing Databases with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition.

My goal is to become a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) for which I still need to take four more exams (Web apps, desktop apps, XML web services, and the solution architect exams).

You can find out more about MCP at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/mcp/default.asp.

Well, after spending quite some time playing around with the firewall and ipconfig I figured out what the problem was.

DTC for some reason requires both the machines to be able to communicate with each other using their hostnames. The problem in my case was that even though my machine could connect to the server through the specified hostname (in the connectiong string), the server couldn't talk back to my machine with the given hostname (that was probably sent by the underlying DTC classes when it made the call).

So to remedy this situation I had to manually add the IP mapping to my machine in the hosts file. The mapping file is called 'hosts' and is at '%WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\'.

Lets see what the next challenge is going to be!

Well, everywhere you go there is some problem. Once eConnect was installed now it can't connect to the SQL Server on the server. I created a desktop application in C# that I am planning on using throughout the development helping me speed things up (compared to the whole other realm of going through Web Services/perl).

Anyways, I get the following error when I run it:

Version=7.0.5.0
Unique MessageId = Customer
Error Number = -2147168246 Error Description = New transaction cannot enlist in the specified transaction coordinator. Error Source = Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server
Line Number=2540

First Google search returned a good a result set but after trying a few of the suggestions I am still getting the same error. I will update once I have the figured out.

Something went wrong and my computer started screwing up. IE stopped recognizing some commands like CTRL+ENTER, stopped doing autocomplete, task manager would stop showing the usernames, the date was moved back a few years. I have been using the same installation of Windows XP for about a year and a half now and have been wanting to do a fresh install. This was a perfect time so instead of figuring out what the problem was (one of my brother must have installed something weird on my computer) I decided to just do a clean install of everything on my computer.

Anyways, everything was going good except when I got to the eConnect installation part. When installing eConnect it asked me for the connection string so I went ahead and created it. I specified DYNAMICS as the initial catalog. Once the connection string was built I clicked 'Next' and got the following error:

Error -2147217865 Invalid object name 'dbo.Shield'. 

Now, I am working on figuring out whats the deal with that. Oh and by the way I am also planning on trying out SQL Server 2005 Express Beta :).