June 2011 - Posts

This post is long overdue, but better late than never.  I had a great time at SPTechCon 2011 in Boston.  I had the chance to meet a lot of people in person for the first time that I had only previously known through twitter.  I gave two talks this year.  The first being my Instant ECM talk showing you how to leverage out-of-the-box SharePoint ECM features.  My second talk was an advanced developer talk discussing how to build Business Data Connectivity models and custom connectors.  My slides can be found on SlideShare.  It was definitely great to get out to the east coast and see how people were using SharePoint.

Instant ECM with SharePoint 2010 - SPTechCon Boston 2011 Slides

Advanced BCS: Business Data Connectivity Models and Custom Connectors – SPTechCon 2011 Slides

Follow me on twitter @coreyroth.

One day when I wasn’t thinking, I encountered the following error when trying to execute a FAST Search for SharePoint PowerShell command such as Get-FASTSearchContentCollection.

Get-FASTSearchContentCollection : Failed to communicate with the WCF service.
At line:1 char:32
+ Get-FASTSearchContentCollection <<<<
    + CategoryInfo          : OperationStopped: (:) [Get-FASTSearchContentCollection], AdminException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : e107: Failed to communicate with the WCF service
   .,Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Extended.Administration.Commandlets.GetCollectionCommand

Searching on the Internet yields the following KB article.  However, this article did not resolve my issue.  In fact, the cause was actually a much simpler solution.  I realized I was running the PowerShell window with my personal account.  Obviously, this account does not have the required permissions needed inside FAST.  To correct the issue, I just did Run as Different User (hold down shift while right clicking on the icon), to run PowerShell with my fastuser account.  Once I did that, I could execute the commands I needed.

I’ve been doing quite a few new SharePoint farm installations lately and I have ran into this error twice in a row now so I thought I would share it.  When running the perquisites installer for SharePoint 2010, the following error message is received.

The tool was unable to install Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB976462).

This hotfix fails to install and as a result all over remaining prerequisites are not installed as well.  Your error message will look something like the screen below.

image

The resolution to this is actually quite simple.  Just run the Perquisites Installer again and the installation will be successful.

image

I’m not really sure what causes this but at least it’s easy to resolve.  If you continue to have issues, try downloading the patch for KB976462 and installing it manually.

I recently had a guest post on the MVP Award Program Blog.  The post covers simple debugging techniques that you can make use of when developing SharePoint Online applications.  Check it out.

Debugging Techniques for SharePoint Online Applications on MVP Award Program Blog

@coreyroth on twitter.