The search provider could not be installed… You might want to try again.

2015-01-08 Andy BurnsBrowsers, Google search5 Comments

So setting up a new machine, I tried adding the Google search provider plugin for IE11; I wanted to add Google as my default provider rather than Bing. However, the Add-On kept failing to install:

The search provider could not be installed.
This might have happened because:

A required file could not be downloaded

The website is unavailable

You are not connected to the internet

You might want to try again later.

Great. The problem was repeatable, and continued after reboot, and reset of IE’s settings. In desperation, I tried change the country that I was in (in the top right)…

I changed from United States to Turkey and back – and when I tried to add the extension, it installed without problem.

Hardly conclusive, but an interesting result nonetheless. Let me know if it works for anyone else!

401 Unauthorized from a content publishing site

2015-01-052015-01-05 Andy Burnsauthentication, Content Deployment, Web ServersLeave a comment

New job, new problem. We’ve a SharePoint 2010 Publishing site using content deployment to push content from an authoring site collection to a live one – and the live site collection started to return an HTTP 401 – Unauthorized to any request for a page.

Continue reading “401 Unauthorized from a content publishing site” →

Observations on hacked website

2014-12-262014-12-22 Andy BurnsBlogs, WordpressLeave a comment

Until recently, I’d hosted my own WordPress blog. I’d been thinking of moving to one hosted on WordPress.com for a while, but I hadn’t been bothered enough to move – though it would be cheaper.

Then I got hacked. Naturally, I investigated. Continue reading “Observations on hacked website” →

Nintex – “This task is currently locked by a running workflow and cannot be edited.”

2014-12-172014-12-16 Andy BurnsNintexLeave a comment

I had this exception start occurring on a workflow I was testing earlier. It was very strange – I’d already run through the workflow step at which this was happening successfully 3 times. Then I started to receive this error, consistently, at the same point of my unchanged workflow each time I ran it.

Continue reading “Nintex – “This task is currently locked by a running workflow and cannot be edited.”” →

Nintex fn-FormatDate inline function failure

2014-12-122014-12-10 Andy BurnsDates, Nintex1 Comment

I’m working with a Nintex workflow at the moment, and trying to do a simple thing – format a date. Unfortunately, the function fn-FormatDate does not work correctly. Continue reading “Nintex fn-FormatDate inline function failure” →

Making Managed Metadata Navigation work well

2014-12-102014-12-01 Andy BurnsjQuery, Managed Metadata, NavigationLeave a comment

In SharePoint 2007 and 2010, if you wanted a neat hierarchy of publishing pages, you had two options. Either, you structured your SharePoint site so that you got the navigation you wanted, or you built custom navigation providers. Unfortunately, customers typically want everything to be ‘out of the box’, even if that means some absurd structures just to get the navigation right. Developing custom navigation providers is a really tough sell, but I’ve also seen site structures 7 levels deep to try to avoid this – and a 7 level deep site structure is a really bad idea.

SharePoint 2013 gives us a standard alternative to structural navigation. Instead, we can use ‘Managed Navigation’. This is a Managed Metadata termset that define’s our site’s hierarchy.

That’s great, but there are some problems with this still. Continue reading “Making Managed Metadata Navigation work well” →

Why I moved my blog

2014-12-082014-12-05 Andy BurnsBlogs, Wordpress1 Comment

Just a reminder to myself, of why I moved my blog. Continue reading “Why I moved my blog” →

Add Breadcrumbs back into SharePoint 2013

2014-12-042014-12-01 Andy BurnsBreadcrumbs, Master PagesLeave a comment

SharePoint 2013’s master pages do not, by default, show breadcrumbs. SharePoint 2010 had reduced them to a fly-out menu (which was nice, as it used up less page space):

SharePoint 2013 doesn’t have them at all:

However, they can be restored… Continue reading “Add Breadcrumbs back into SharePoint 2013” →

File Path Lengths in Windows

2014-12-01 Andy Burns.NET, IO, LongFilePaths, Windows82 Comments

In the Windows API the maximum length for a path is 260 characters.

Slightly edited for length, but that comes from MSDN. Yes, it’s 2014, we’ve dealt with the 8.3 filename limit, found the Higgs Boson, landed a fridge on a comet, but the Windows API still doesn’t play well 260 character length file paths. That’s unfortunate. Continue reading “File Path Lengths in Windows” →

SharePoint vs (?) ASP.NET MVC

2014-09-192014-11-30 Andy Burns.NET, azure, Development, MVC, SP2013 Development4 Comments

I’ve been studying ASP.NET MVC 4 over the last while; this is the subject of second of the 4 exams required for the SharePoint Developer MCSD, and I really need to spend some time on that.

The idea of an MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework is to separate the different concerns of your code, and that usually this allows you to design a data model, and then let your tools create a scaffolding of your site. Such things aren’t new; I implemented a Chinese Chess web site in Ruby on Rails which uses this approach in 2005. I loved the MVC approach. Continue reading “SharePoint vs (?) ASP.NET MVC” →

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