Note to self: I keep needing/using this tool to avoid IISRESETs during SharePoint development. Much faster…
SP2007 Admin
The registry and "Word could not create work file"
I had an interesting problem earlier this week. I had a MOSS VM that seemed to work okay, except whenever I tried to create a document using the template on a Document Library. Then I would get the error:
Word could not create work file. Check the temp environment variable.
Okay. So I did – and the temp variable was just fine. Odd, I thought. Eventually, after digging through news groups and so on, I found a suggestion to check parts of the registry. Well, actually, one of my colleagues found it. The value in the key
HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerUser Shell Folderscache
was wrong – it pointed to an invalid directory. Not sure why, but I’d been monkeying around with some stuff which could’ve mucked it up. Anyway, fixed up the filepath in that key, and it was fine – I could create documents from Document Library templates.
SharePoint Folders Ending in _FILE
Here’s an interesting thing a colleague noticed – SharePoint folders with names ending in _FILE are renamed to end in _FILE_. In the image below the names and titles were the same when I typed them in:
Notice the line for A_FILE. Name and title are now different. No idea why that happens. I’m guessing that SharePoint uses folders with a suffix of _FILE for it’s own internal stuff… 
Create a SharePoint Timer Service
More linkage – I know, quite a lot now – but this is stuff I’m sure I’ll want to remember later: Add your own Timer service by Andrew Connell
Creating Site Templates
Note that Site Templates aren’t the same as Site Definitions. Good article about how to do this here. Or read Creating a Custom SharePoint 2007 Portal Site Definition using the PortalProvisioningProvider Class for ‘portals’ (I agree – that’s the most over-used word in SharePoint, along with confuse over what a ‘site’ is (sometimes a collection, sometimes just a site…)).
It’s worth considering the differences between (more here). Some of the differences demystified (note – about Beta 2). Info on how to create a custom site definition (hint – copy an existing one – bit more here). And information on which existing templates are right for me.
Content Query Web Parts and Site Categories
Here’s a thought – wouldn’t it be cool to have a way of getting content from Sites in a Site Collection, but filtered by their category data?
At the moment, the Content Query Web Part gives you 3 options as to what sites it queries:
- A specific site
- This site and its children
- All sites in the collection
Wouldn’t it be great, though, to form that list of target sites based on a category? For example, in a big company it may have a number of divisions, each with their own ‘Finance’ department. A content query web part that could show content from all the ‘Finance’ category sites across the organisation would be very cool.
Can’t see a way of doing it at the moment though. I suppose I could write my own web-part – but the Content Query Web Part gives you so much already, I don’t want to have to replicate that.
Best Practices Analyser
SharePoint Licensing
Found on Cornelius Van Dyk’s blog – SharePoint Licensing Information. Interesting stuff. No, wait, the other thing – tedious. Still, quite how you license your Internet facing WCM site did strike me as an interesting issue, especially as one of my colleagues kept going on about having external sites as ‘read only’. What, no feedback forms? Comments? Survey submissions? Well, it seems that the definition is one of accessibility – so long as everyone can access these features, you can use an Internet access license. I wondered how they’d deal with that.
(For content accessible to employees/partners only, I presume it’d be a normal client access license).
Update: See the Logical Architecture Model: Corporate Deployment document for details on this, and dealing with partners. That’s quite interesting – you can host partners sites on Internet or Intranet farms.
Site Collection Usage Reports
So, I wanted to view the Site Usage reports after reading a post by Joel Oleson.
I went to SharePoint Central Administration > Operations > Usage Analysis Processing. I enabled the logging there. Following the further instructions, I then enabled logging for MOSS. This is in SharePoint Central Administration > Shared Services > Usage reporting. (If you don’t do both in MOSS, it gives you an error message saying that it needs ‘Both Windows SharePoint Services Usage logging and Office SharePoint Usage Processing’ enabled. That’s why Joel mentioned it!)
I then went to view the usage for my site collection (Site Actions > Site Collection Usage Reports).
I was prompted for my username and password 3 times, which was puzzling. It looked like the HTTP Basic authentication dialog…
… and after that I got a page saying “Service Unavailable”. Worse, when I tried going back to my site, I got the same message. Checking IIS, I found the AppPool had stopped.
Examining the event log, I’ve got a bunch of errors from the .NET Runtime saying:
.NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.42 – Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A05E2B3) (80131506)
I’ve got no idea what’s going on, and can’t find any documentation. Great 
More Info: Further info – I reverted my VM and tried again. I’m now getting a “401.1 Unauthorised” response on the page, but at least the AppPool isn’t dying.
I did get given a plausible answer, though I haven’t tried it yet
Comments from my old blog:
If I remember correctly this is caused by the Reporting Services components that it uses to render the pages. Somewhere there is a dependency on the service’s user profile, perhaps the Temp folder, but regardless usually there is no profile created since the service account has never been logged on interactively to the server so that the profile could be created. This results in a crash of the w3wp process which gives you the symptoms you have experienced.
I have been fixing this by logging on one time as the service onto the server which will be serving these pages.
Yup, that’s pretty much what the answer I was given was – log in once to create that profile.
Andy Burns' Blog 