FIX :HTTP 404 returned Searchadministration.aspx after Infrastructure update

After installing Infrastructure update + Dec CU to local VM, my SSP got a lot of UI pages to administrate the search functionality. But unfortunately the /ssp/admin/searchadministration.aspx was not provisioned properly which results in a HTTP 404 error page whenever I click over the link from the quick launch.

After looking in to the \12 hive\Features\ folder this searchadministration.aspx file and a bunch of webpart definition files(ActiveCrawls.dwp, CompletedCrawls.dwp,SubSystems.dwp & SystemStatus.dwp) comes with a feature called S2SearchAdmin which required a forceful activation to bring up this search admin page in SSP.

Finally the following STSADM command did the trick
STSADM -o activatefeature -name S2SearchAdmin -url http://ssp-public/ssp/admin/ -force

Integrate SPDisposeCheck tool to Visual Studio 2005

SharePoint developers always used to take additional care to dispose SPWeb and SPSite object as their unmanaged memory footprint really large, failing in this will create serious performance issues.

Luckily Microsoft released a command line tool to inspect the assemblies to identify such issues.

Download SPDisposeCheck here

Find more info here : Roger Lamb's developer blog

Install the SPDisposeCheck.msi installer package and ensure that you have the executable in C:\Program Files\Microsoft\SharePoint Dispose Check\

In visual Studio Select Tools--- > External Tools
Click Add and fill the fields as follows

Now build your project first and run this tool to get the memory leak fix instructions in your output window.

Look who's watching MSDN blog

Yes, it's Google Analytics watching Microsoft  MSDN SharePoint blog home page
Give a check .

Developers need spell check in Visual Studio

Even Microsoft also needs this functionality, while debugging some issue just got this spelling mistake induced by the product team.

Perfmon counter labels turned to numbers

While I executing a few troubleshooting steps in local dev environment, I opted to put some perfmon counters to monitor the performance of the code. Unfortunately all the perfmon counters turned to numbers instead of their subsequent labels.

Tried adding all .net by using following lodctr command (This command is responsible for updating all performance monitor counters and their explain texts)

lodctr C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\corperfmonsymbols.ini
lodctr C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_perf.ini

but no luck, not able to see the counters back.

Finally rebuilding the whole counters did the trick

lodctr /R

For those who are not able to succeed even after this command can try the following Microsoft Support article
How to manually rebuild Performance Counter Library values
Troubleshooting Performance Monitor Counter Problems

IIS management console presents blank window

You open the IIS management console using Inetmgr and you are presented with a empty console no application pools, no web sites, no virtual directories.

This happens occasionally on IIS 6 /IIS 7 which is hosting SharePoint sites. The very quick fix for this issue is restarting Sharepoint's OWSTimer service or make an IISRESET.


Microsoft support explains as follows

"Consider the following scenario. You have a process that has more than one thread. Additionally, the process uses the Internet Information Services (IIS) Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) provider to access IIS. Two threads access IIS at the same time. In this scenario, you may be unable to manage IIS by using Server Manager"

Microsoft provides a hot fix for this nasty issue, that can be downloaded from the following link

FIX: You may be unable to manage IIS by using Server Manager if two threads access IIS at the same time

Browser Speed test . . . .

I did few benchmark for all my browsers on my desktop to just check who is fast,faster, fastest using SunSpider JavaScript. Ok let's see the stats

Google Chrome	1757.6 ms
FireFox 3.0	3695.8ms
Apple Safari 3.1	5021.2 ms
Opera 9.50	5237.2 ms
Opera 9.62	4681.0 ms
Microsoft IE 7.0	36744.6ms
Microsoft IE 6.0	60803.8ms

Obviously Google chrome is the front runner and we are expecting more in Microsoft IE 8 because the results of IE 7 and IE 6 soars. If you look at the stats you can notice Opera improves a lot in its latest 9.62.

Want to test your browser how fast it is ? Here you go
http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider-driver.html

Who ever wins or loses , the end user is surely getting the best out of the market :-)