In the past week I have implemented several custom workflows for a client using SharePoint Designer.  The workflows were pretty simple:  A Forms Services form would be completed, in the form would be a the Manager’s name and e-mail address.  The workflow would use the "Collect Data" action to perform an approval workflow, assigning an item to the manager specified in the form.  Trouble was, the manager would receive the task notification, click the link in the e-mail to edit the task item, and receive an access denied error.

For the purposes of troubleshooting I opened the permissions on the task list as much as possible, granting nt authority\all authenticated users the Full Control permission.  Still the users received "Access denied".  Then, I found the following forum thread:

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1838253&SiteID=17

The solution wound up being a combination of two posts, this was by "Vansen":

I opened up the Site using the Sharepoint Designer. Then i right-clicked the workflows folder and chose properties. In the Security Tab i clicked the link "Manage Permissions using the browser". Then a new Browser window opened and i was able to adjust the rights for the Workflow Folder. In my case the rights inheritance was broken. I restored it and it worked.

And this one by "Andre Rentes":

I found a solution but not is the better…

-> Open Sharepoint Designer,

-> right click on Workflow 1 (My workflow)

-> select Publish Selected Files…

-> choose  File System and write a location ( c:\ ) for example

-> Click OK

 

Combining these two solutions fixed all three of the problematic workflows!  Thanks guys!

I have taken over maintenance of other people’s code in the past, and its generally a mixed-bag. Sometimes you inherit a plate of spaghetti, sometimes you luck-out and actually get a well architected and implemented codebase. The real payoff when inheriting maintenance though, is to read the fantastic comments left behind, such as this gem I unearthed today:

// if it’s a number we should sort it descending because it is probably a date
// bad? no, this is AWESOME!!!! Regular expressions are for assholes.
int.Parse(f.SubFolders[0].Name);
dv2 = this.GetFolderViewSorted(f, “DESC”);

Had an issue today where a developer was testing a web part that required a user profile, and an exception was being thrown that the user profile did not exist.  We verified in the SSP that the user profile indeed existed, and also used the "stsadm -o sync" command to force a profile synchronization.  However, we discovered that SharePoint was not seeing the actual user name that the user was logged in as, instead SharePoint saw it as "SHAREPOINT\System".  This led us to the following forum thread:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1195418&SiteID=1

What ended up being the issue is that the developer had configured the SharePoint application pool to run as the same identity that he was logging into SharePoint as.  We changed the configured identity in Central Admin -> Operations -> Service Accounts to use Network Service instead and the issue was resolved.

The other day Tomas Restrepo released a new Visual Studio Color Theme called Distant Shores.  It is a low-contrast theme with a dark background, and I must admit I am a BIG FAN!  Have a look at the following screen shot.  BTW - The font I am using is Damien Guard’s Envy CodeR font that Tomas Restrepo recommends in his blog posting.

Give it a shot!  Your eyes will thank you!

Came in the office today to an issue with a MOSS box that was recently stood up in our lab environment.  The server was configured to do automatic updates, and installed SharePoint updates overnight.  Turns out the upgrade portion of the update failed, and perusing the diagnostic logs revealed the following error:

Cannot start service SPAdmin on computer ‘.’

I came across the following blog posting that ultimately supplied the remedy:

Bill Baer : KB934525 Troubleshooting "Cannot start service SPAdmin on computer ‘.’."

Option #4 took care of things:

• On the machine where psconfig failed to start the SPAdmin service run:

%commonprogramfiles%\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN\psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force