Reza Alirezaei’s Blog

From the beginning of this month and mostly after work hours, I have been heads down building various *STANDALONE* VM and non-VM SharePoint development environments.  For the life of me , there is nothing more boring than dealing with all these infrastructural craps , but sometimes there is no other choice, you know!  Installation went fairly smooth on majority of the machines. I took some notes during the setup process and I thought I’d give you some bullet points in this blog post.

1) First of all, it took a good couple of hours to find out that sysprep in Windows 2k8 is located in “C:\windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe” (Thanks to Kit Kai). Sysprep previously was in the Support.Cab file on the CD , not part of the OS. So you would extract the support.cab to a directory located at the Root and when the process finished upon first boot, it would delete this directory.

2) WSS 3.0 is no longer shipped as part of Windows 2008 server family. So the question is, why should it be named *Windows* SharePoint Service?I’m sure you will hear an answer soon from MS.

3) WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 binary files can’t be used to install SharePoint on a Windows 2008 server. You get a compatibility warning saying that the product is not compatible with win2k8. Fine.Thankfully, there is WSS SP1 slipstream and MOSS SP1 slipstream that sort of bundles each product with its respective SP1 together. Okay, we are good to go again.

4) After installing MOSS 2007 SP1 and running the configuration wizard successfully, I browsed to Central Administration and I receive a JavaScript error on all the Central Administration pages and on multiple lines saying “object expected”. When I tried to create a web application (extendvs.aspx) , there is another JavaScript error saying “Webform_postbackoptions is undefined”. Well, without post back, my SharePoint installation is useless.Isn’t it?  I tried all the followings, but the bad boy didn’t want to work:

* Added the site to my intranet zone
* Reinstalled MOSS 2007
* Cleared Cache, did IISRESET and you name it!
* Reinstalled the page (extendvs.aspx) from another server in which the page is properly functioning

Alternatively, I created the web application using stsadm , but upon brwosing to the site and choosing the right template to provision the site from , I got an “Access Denied” error message. Now, I know there is something seriously going on because I was doing all this using the administrator account which was also used to install SharePoint.

Armed with Firefox with Firebug (Fiddler was not helpful!), I put my debugger hat on and found out that I am getting an error on all of the scripts injected by webresource.axd http handler. ASP.NET 2.0 uses this built-in HttpHandler to serve
pages by publishing JavaScripts and other resources embedded in the OOTB SharePoint assemblies to various pages. btw, just as a side note, I’m not a big fan of embedding images,scripts,style sheets or some other content in compiled assemblies and relying on this http handler. In many cases ,I have seen that the WebResource.axd finds the resource, but returns nothing! so I kissed and put it aside. Too much headache. I’d stick to my old school file system way of shipping resources (inside my WSP solution). I am not cool! Yeah right….

Back to the issue. I ended up reinstalling the Application Server role, IIS and .Net framework 3.0 in the following orders , which basically was for me the fastest way to get up-and-running again. And yes, it fixed the issue!

1. Ran SharePoint products and technologies wizard to disconnect from the farm
2. Deleted the left over databases from SQL Server 2k8
3. Uninstalled Application Server Role
4. Uninstalled Web Server role (Uninstalls .Net Framework 3.0)
5. Restarted the machine.
6. Installed Application Server role
7. Installed the Web Server role (Installs .Net Framework 3.0)
8. Registered the aspnet with IIS using the command
“aspnet_regiis –i”
9. Ran SharePoint products and technologies wizard successfully to create a new farm