Author / Simon Doy

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Posts by Simon Doy

I am an avid SharePoint enthusiast who works as an Independent SharePoint Consultant based in Leeds, United Kingdom. I am one of the organisers of the Yorkshire SharePoint User Group in the United Kingdom. I have been designing and building SharePoint solutions since 2006.
by Simon Doy

>Infopath Form Services error due to Missing State Service


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In SharePoint 2007, if you tried to run an InfoPath form on InfoPath form services before installing a Shared Service Provider you received an error saying that there was no session state available.

I have been setting up SharePoint 2010 manually to understand the process in more detail and had been looking out for some service to do with Session State. However, the State Service is not a service you can create through the Central Administration site. As this is the cause, I presumed that session state would be handled by another SharePoint managed service.

After setting up a web application and site collection, I tried to publish a page and received an error something like the following, "An error has occurred with the Form Service there is a misconfiguration of the Microsoft SharePoint State Service”.

So there is a state service! Unfortunately the state service can only be created via the Farm Configuration Wizard or  manually by using Powershell.

After some digging I found the following post on Technet.

Essentially the process to create the State Service is the following:-

  • Logon to SharePoint Farm
  • Run the SharePoint Powershell Management Console
  • Create the state service app by typing: $stateserviceApp = New-SPStateServiceApplication -Name "My State Service"
  • Associate a database with the state service by typing: New-SPStateServiceDatabase -Name "MyStateServiceDatabase" -ServiceApplication $stateserviceApp.
  • Associate a state service proxy to the state service by typing: New-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy -Name "My State Service Proxy" -ServiceApplication $stateserviceApp -DefaultProxyGroup.

This will create a State Service for your SharePoint farm.

For more information please see the following Technet Article

by Simon Doy

Terrible VMWare Server Guest Network Performance


With SharePoint 2010 almost out, I started building a new development server using VMWare Server 2.0 running on a Windows 2008 R2 host. The details of the build will be posted on here later.
However, one of the biggest problems I faced was getting software installed on the guests. Currently I am trying to install SQL Server 2008 which was take an extrodinary longtime to install, so much so that I thought it was hanging. Eventually I decided to copy over the setup files to the guest machine. Originally the installer had been run from a share on the host, it was only when I started the copy did the problem become apparent.

The file copy speed was 10kb/s!! Obviously this is rather slow and I started to do some investigation.

There were a number of posts relating to TCP Offloading on the VMWare site however the fixes had no effect. I was disabling the TCP offloading within the guest on the Intel Pro e1000 driver.

However, it was this set of posts which lead me to solving the problem:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverhyperv/thread/bdc40358-45c8-4c4b-883b-a695f382e01a

Basically rather than disabling it on the guest you need to disable it on the host. My guest machines are all setup to use bridged networking so I disabled the TCP Offloading / Large Send Offloading (v4) for the Realtek device using Start->Network->Network and Sharing Centre. Click on the Local Network Connection->Properties->Configure (under network adapter)->Advanced->Large Send Offloading (v4) = Disabled.

Anyway hope that helps anyone else who is experiencing similar problems.

Whilst I write this post the SQL Server setup files have copied over in less than 10 mins (instead of 3 to 4 hours hurrah!)