How to remove the My Site and My Links in SharePoint

If you want to remove the two links at the top of the page, My Site and My Links, follow these steps:

Start the Central Administration web application.

Click the "Shared Services Administration" link.

Locate the SSP that is managing the My Sites web site and click on it.

Go to User profiles and My Sites ->  Personalization services permissions.

Select the Authenticated Users group and click on Modify Permissions of Selected Users.

To disable My Site, un-check the Create personal site checkbox.

To disable My Links, un-check the Use personal features checkbox.

 

How to determine which databases SharePoint uses

In order to tell which databases your SharePoint 2007 / WSS 3.0  installation uses, you will have to look at multiple locations.

Content databases

Open Central Administration and go to Application Management  and then Content databases
Review for all Site Collection URLs

Shared Services Databases

Open Central Administration,  Application Management, Manage this Farm’s Shared Services
There you will find
SSP Database
and
Search Database

Configuration database

Look in the registry at:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Secure\ConfigDB

The type or namespace name ‘UserRegistrationContext’ could not be found

I have just downloaded and started to play with Silverlight 4 in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.

In attempt to create a Silverlight Business Application, i got this error message:

Error    1    The type or namespace name ‘UserRegistrationContext’ could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)    h:\Personal\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\BusinessApplication1\BusinessApplication1\Views\Login\RegistrationForm.xaml.cs    22    13    BusinessApplication1
 

I also got this warning:

Warning    1    Assembly ‘h:\Personal\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\BusinessApplication1\BusinessApplication1.Web\bin\BusinessApplication1.Web.dll’ could not be loaded and will be ignored.
Could not load file or assembly ‘file:///h:\Personal\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\BusinessApplication1\BusinessApplication1.Web\bin\BusinessApplication1.Web.dll’ or one of its dependencies. Operation is not supported. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131515)    BusinessApplication1
 

This was not good, and searching it using Bing didn’t get any useful information.

As it turns out, the reason was that I have created the project on a network drive. Creating a Business Application on the local driver worked. It seems that the reason was that the project on the network drive was not trusted, and therefore the reference to the Web project failed.

 

 

 

Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window

Cannot start Microsoft Outlook

Cannot start Microsoft Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window. The set of folders cannot be opened. An unexpected error has occurred.
MAPI was unable to load the information service msncon.dll. Be sure the service is correctly installed and configured.

Got this rather unpleasant error message after installing the Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus, and after trying to start Outlook.

It turned out the my previous Outlook profile had Hotmail accounts in it. So installing the Outlook Hotmail Connector solved the problem.

One can wonder why the error message isn’t more descriptive…

Hyper-V freezes on my Asus P5K

I started to prepare my old desktop PC to become a development server running virtual servers on Microsoft Hyper-V.

Hardware Specifications

The hardware specification is as follows:

Motherboard: ASUS P5K

CPU: Intel Xeon X3210

Memory modules: 4×2 GB Kingston Value Ram DDR800

Hard disks: 1×120 GB Hitachi (boot), 1×120 GB Seagate, 1x Western Digital 640GB

Graphics: An old ATI GTO800

Installing Hyper-V Server

My first attempt was to install the free standalone Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.

Everything went smoothly until I connected remotely with my Windows 7 laptop and started to create virtual hard disks. The PC started to hard freeze. Ctrl+Alt+Del didn’t help, it totally locked itself.

Very frustrating. I did have some bad experience with memory modules before, so I suspected that this was a case of bad memory modules.

Downloaded Memtest86 v4.0 and let it ran for an hour. Nothing. Rock solid.

Since the problem happened during creation of the virtual hard disks, I started to suspect some I/O issue with the disks. Removed all but the boot drive and tried again. No. Hard lockups continued. Bad.

I started to run out of options now. The PC had been running Windows Vista 64bit and Windows 7 64bit rock solid, without a glitch. What on earth could cause the Hyper-V behave like this?

Installing Windows Server 2008 R2

Since the possibilities to troubleshoot is rather limited on Hyper-V Server, being console based, I decided to wipe my boot disk and install a full fledged Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Hyper-V role hoping that at least something in the event log could shed some light on the issue. Said and done.

It started good, I could create virtual hard disks and install operating systems without a glitch. I was happy.

I thought I had it going until I prepared remote management for the Hyper-V role, and connected to the server remotely….. bam! Hard freeze again.

This was not good at all. Re-booted, and tried to map a network drive from my laptop to the PC… bam! Hard freeze. Like on order.

Now I started to remember something… didn’t I actually had some network issues with the motherboard before? Indeed, sometimes the built in network card stopped working when I ran Windows Vista. A reboot didn’t always help, I was sometimes forced to do a full power cycle.

Enter the crappy Attensic L1 Ethernet controller

Reading the ASUS support forums I found out that there was a lot of people that had network issues with the built in Attensic L1 controller.

The joy of an Intel network card.

Ok, I had to find an alternative and went out and bought an Intel PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter, installed it, and disabled the on board Attensic controller.

Every since that moment, the PC has been rock solid. No freezes, no lockups.

 

Lesson learned: when it comes to network adapters, there is only one make that cuts it: Intel. Period.