Installing SharePoint 2010

As a developer, I needed to install SharePoint 2010 on a Windows 7 machine. There is an excellent guide on how to do that at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869.aspx

However, there are still a lot of things that this guide does not tell you.

Using a Different Database

This guide says that we should install a “standalone” server. With this option you do not get to choose a database server. It installs SQL 2008 Server Express on your machine without asking, even if you already have a SQL 2008 Server on your machine. Secondly, you have no control over this database. You cannot gain administrative access to this database, and you cannot change things in there. Given that the SharePoint 2010 administrative tools do a terrible job of managing the database, this will not work at all.

So I re-installed it and selected “Server Farm” and then a “New Farm”. With this option you get to choose a SQL 2008 R2 database server. Apparently anything less than R2 is not allowed.

It is my database and I can manage it now.

All of the Errors in the Event Log

1. SharePoint 2010 cannot load “TaxonomyPicker.ascx”. There are a lot of discussions online about “fixing it” by changing “,” to a comma, etc. But actually this file simply does not belong in the SharePoint folder and needs to be removed. The name of the class in front of the “,” is

“Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.TaxonomyPicker”.

The assembly name after that is

“Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.dll”.

I browsed through all of the classes in the namespace “Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls” in this assembly with Microsoft’s FxCop 10.0. There is no class by the name of “TaxonomyPicker”, period. Here is a good article here about this: http://davidfrette.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/why-the-taxonomypicker-ascx-is-no-longer-used/

2. DCOM 10016 error. There is a good article about how to fix it here: http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/Fix-the-SharePoint-DCOM-10016-error-on-Windows-Server-2008-R2.aspx

3. "The farm is unavailable". This happens to a long list of services, such as “SecurityToken.svc”, “MetadataWebService.svc”, and “ProfilePropertyService.svc”, etc. In the end each had to be deleted and recreated in “SharePoint Central Administration” > “Application Management” > “Manage Service Applications”. It turned out that this was easier than one would expect: From the “New” button on the ribbon control, each type can be easily selected. The deletion is not very intuitive: if you click on the name it tries to jump to the application’s setting if it has a blue link. You would have to click somewhere else in the row such as “Type” to select the service application, and then delete it using the delete button on the ribbon control.

Summary

Installing SharePoint 2010 is about as bad as installing Linux, you need to do several reinstalls and a lot of googling to get it right.