Cannot start SPAdmin service on Computer

MOSS 2007. Not sure if it was due to SP2 installation but after SP2 was installed, any restart of WFE02 for some reason SPAdmin (WSS Administration service)  could not be started.

In the system event logs with Eventid  of 7000 mentioning SPAdmin start timedout (30000 millisecond) and thus failed to start.

I followed option 4 of the below blog post and increased the timeouts to double of the default and alas all was well! But it was most likely be due to the slow performance of the QC environment which we hopefully would not see this in production.

Blog Post

Command Prompt History

Can’t believe I didn’t know about this shortcut before. If you use the command prompt (Run->cmd) then you will know that you can traverse through your previous commands by pressing up or down.

There is actually a built-in shortcut to list all the commands in a nice GUI interface. Press F7 and wholla, scroll to your previous commands with ease!

Windows 7 Beta

So I’ve made the plunge and installed Windows 7 beta build 7000 on my thinkpad x200. Most of the drivers were installed which I found impressive and so far everything is working brilliantly.

As this is my work computer, I was paranoid if I would run into problems, but I have yet to come across any!

A few opinions

• Toolbar is obviously different but it is easy to adapt to.
• Quick and responsive. No more of that Vista waiting annoyances
• Deleting from rubbish bin is fast, vista mucks around too much when deleting from the bin
• No more memory leaks from gadget sidebar becoz there isn’t a side bar!
• You can set your wallpaper to change automatically natively supported by the OS
• Uses Less Memory!
• Boot up and shutdown times are absolutely a blessing. Its faster than WinXP boots.

Anyway, there is nothing but praise with working with Windows 7. There are a few program behaviours that need to be tuned for Windows 7 so I wont be installing this on my home workstation, but when it is released hopefully by end year you can bet I will be installing Win7 ultimate for sure.

Error with Out-of-box Calendar List and week view

So I was playing around with the out-of-box SharePoint Calendar list and pressing around the different views.
It would always produce an error when I pressed the week view but day and month view were OK.

The error would be something like, server error in “/” Application blah blah, so I googled it and found a simple fix!

Just create a new Groupboard workspace as sub site and the week view suddenly works again. (weird).
So goto View All Site Content > Create > Sites and Workspaces -> Select the Groupboard workspace template.

After creating it you can delete the site. The calendar will function as normal.

Customizing DateTime format on a list view web part

This is a quick way of customizing a date within SharePoint listviews. By default, DateTime columns always displays 25-01-09 11:00AM etc, and sometimes users would like to see just the date. in another format

The following example in the link gives an example of using calculated columns! Therefore no need to code!

Customize Date Time

Using JQuery to fix Web Part Height in SharePoint

I came across this on EndUserSharePoint blog.

Its a simple fix to the height problem in display items from a list, the items in the list will override the height setting in the web part.

Therefore using JQuery + Content Editor web part you can add a scroll bar to the offending web part.

Read more at endUserSharePoint

SharePoint Security Tip- SPuser and SPGroups, ExplicitlyContainsCurrentUser

I’m linking to this tip that might help in future when I code for SharePoint. It basically is a check to see whether a SPUser belongs to a group, but the key point is for Nested Groups.

This might come in handy in the near future:

http://www.sharepointsecurity.com/blog/sharepoint/sharepoint-security-tip-explicitlycontainscurrentuser/

Accessing Web Part Maintenance Page

Do you have a problem with a web part that went wrong and now the site does not load?

All hope is not lost, for all sites there is a web part maintenace page where you can delete the offending web part! hoorah!

Follow the below instructions:
Append ?Contents=1 to the webpart page’s URL to display the Webpart Maintenance Page.

Example: http://moss/default.aspx?contents=1

Don’t know why Microsoft didn’t include a link to it from the Site Settings page.

What would you do

I was hired by a big software company last year but agreed on a salary that was lower than market rate. At the time I didn’t want to negotiate that hard because I was a bit green and the big name will help me down the road. So I decided to focus on building up my experience and adopted the put your head down do the work type of attitude.

Fast forward to one year – contract is up – I have a 1 on 1 with my resource manager, he knows about my underpay suitation so I ask just to get my salary back to market rate but alas, he cannot do it since they have to go by the HR Policy and cannot just readjust like that. Which I think is total bull.

The best he can do is a measly 2%, which is billion of light years away from the market rate. How could he do this to me? Knowing how much I put up with the s.h.i.t at the customers, given crap projects. I thought my contributes were noticed, apparently this doesn’t mean jack.

Also, how is this going to effect me? I know my colleagues, who have been in the company for about 6 months who are on the market rate. I thought things were going to be sweet alrite when my contract is finished and renewed with what should be the market rate.

Why am I always being the outkast, why do I have to put up with shit. You know, I would never expect this from a well known company. A COMPANY WHO created the most popular browser called Windows. I should never need to be put in this situation in the first place because I thought they cared about their employee’s work ethic.

Maybe things work differently in HK. Why would they ever bring themselves down to the level of smaller software companies. Its just stupid, what happened to the spirit of wanting to work for a reputable corporation? At this moment they are not different to any other crappy firm.

Things better turn out for better. Or else more trouble will start to happen down the road.

Another thing, I feel so gutted when I think of this, I reckon our admin assistant is making around the same amount of money. Heck, I might as well be the person who brings around the fruit every afternoon.

SPDataSource + SPGridvew + DataRowBound

When using a SPGridView and having the datasource binded to a SPDatasource object, the object type that is binded to each SPGridviewRow is a SPListItem.

Sometimes you will need to access the data after the DataBind method to format the data in the SPGridviewrow. For example, you might want to create a link for a title string from a hyperlink field from the SPList.

To do this, override the DataRowBound event of SPGridView, retrieve the SPListItem and access the hyperlink field and format your data.

protected void SPGridView_RowDataBound(Object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
{

SPDataSourceViewResultItem viewResItem = (SPDataSourceViewResultItem) e.Row.DataItem;
SP.SPListItem item = (SP.SPListItem) viewResItem.ResultItem;

// Retrieve data from SPListItem and format the data in e.row.cell[0]

}

This is particularly useful when you need to access the data within the SPListitem, when using the SPDataSource.