SharePoint 2010 Web Services and Anonymous Access

Looks like SharePoint 2010 still has issues with Anonymous Access and its web services.
There are a fwe articles out there pointing at this issue in 2007 but I'm afraid its no better in 2010 (SharePoint 15?).

This article (Trinkit HQ) is short and sweet, and gets right to the point. Basically if your Web Application has Anonymous Access turned on, you will experience the 'Attempted to perform an unauthorized operation' error.

There are a few ways to deal with it, extend another web app, muck around with IIS (not recommended) but the bottom line is:
Anonymous Access = No Web Services

Customising RichTextEditor's Styles and Markup Styles Menu Items

OK, there are a few articles around discussing how to do this, this post by Marc seems to be the definitive article about what, where, how and why but I felt like writing a simplified version for myself.
So here goes...

What are we talking about?

First, I'll try and give my own spin on what the Styles and Markup Styles are and what they affect.
Below is the definition given by many when describing what the differences are between the two, my interpretation of these are given in italics.

Markup Styles

• Nest the text and its HTML tag within the html tag specified in the style if the tag to nest is a span element. What a mouthful, ok I think it means, if the text you are trying to apply a Markup Style to is a span element, then the text and its surrounding tag (probably div p or h1 etc) will get 'nested' inside the tag specified by the css class you create.
• Replace the current tag if is is not a span element. If the text is not in a span, then the current tags (again probably div, p etc) will be replaced with the tag in the css class.
• Remove all the styles for the children elements. This is easy, removes all the children styles so that the selected text will all be rendered using the specified css class.
• Remove the html tag if the same style is applied a second time (this is a way of removing a Markup style for an end-user). Simple, removes the style.

Styles

• Nest the text in a span tag with the style class if the text is not already inside an HTML tag.
• Just add the class to the current HTML tag if this tag is not a span tag.
• Replace the class of the HTML tag if this tag is a span tag.
• Remove the html span tag if the same style is applied a second time (this is a way of removing a Style for an end-user) Simple, removes the style.

Clear as mud, good. Now, both these 'styles' are used in the Rich Text Editors of both Wiki Pages and Publishing Pages and by default, the CSS classes live in \14\template\layouts\1036\styles\themable\corev4.css stylesheet.

Right, well how do we change it?

So we now have an idea of what the ribbon controls do, how do we add to or change them?

Syntax

OK, now for the cool way in which this stuff gets pulled together. All styles conform to a naming convention. This convention is then used by the RTE on the client side to build the ribbon control. So all you need to do is follow the convention and you can add a new class/style to the ribbon, easy.

.ms-rteStyle-xxxxx - for styles

.ms-rteElement-xxxxx - for markup styles

Simple? Just add the name of the class you want to create where the x's are and there you go, well almost. Inside the class definition, you need to add

-ms-name:"xxxxx";

Where again, you replace the x's with the name you want to appear in the ribbon control. So if I wanted to add a style like Heading 5, I could do the following:

.ms-rteStyle-H5
{
   -ms-name:"Heading 5";
   FONT-SIZE:14pt;
   FONT-WEIGHT:normal;
}

You get the picture, sky's the limit as to what you can do with your text. Either trawl through the corev4.css or just look at the styles applied to text after you change a markup style using developer tools (F12 in IE).

Well, sounds like we have all the information about these styles that we need so we can pretty much do anything right? Not quite. Removing a style is tricky. Adding and Changing is simple, because its just css. There are some ways to remove styles including custom masterpages, jQuery and custom page layouts etc so there is a way around it. I won't go into that in this article, use bingle.

Solution Management
So now you know what to change, where do you change it? What's best practice for lifecycle management of this solution? Depends :)

Testing / Debugging
Simple, wack the css into a file, upload it to the Styles Library and reference it using the HTML Form Web Part on the page you want to test. Simple, no code changes to pages, solutions etc. And you could get away with doing this in production if it was only on 1 or 2 pages, but having this as a reuseable solution just won't cut it.

MasterPage
In my opinion, the best way to do this is by putting a CSS Registration reference into a master page pointing to a specific css file you want to setup in the Style Library. This way, if you don't want to use any custom styles, you just don't have the css file in the Style Library, but if you do, then you can just edit the file. The added benefit of this is that you can have different files for different Site Collections. Just add the line below to your masterpage, up near the top, there is probably already similar references.

{SharePoint:CssRegistration name="{% $SPUrl:~sitecollection/Style Library/~language/MarkupStyles.css %}" After="corev4.css" runat="server"/}
(don't forget to replace the curly braces with greater than/less than symbols, and change the path where relevant)

Other Options
There are other options available where you are either editing the core files, editing existing pages or page layouts etc. but I wouldn't really go near them.

Removal of the OOTB styles is difficult. This can be done either through JavaScript or by adding server-side code to remove references to corev4.css etc, see Marc's article near the bottom for these.

If you are going to go down the path of modifying a Master Page, then perhaps you can insert your JavaScript in the master page and do some tricky stuff there but that is out of my league :)

SharePoint Search Web Services and anonymous access

Recently had to debug an issue with a 3rd Party app using the /_vti_bin/search.asmx web service which, at the time, stopped working with 'no changes' to the environment. We were receiving the SoapException: 'Server was unable to process request ... Unauthorized Operation'.

This turned out to be not quite the truth and infact Anonymous Access was enabled on the Web Application for use by a monitoring tool. The Farm configuration doesn't use Kerberos (jury is still out on whether Kerberos is needed in this situation anyway), just Ntlm and it seems that once a successful connection is made to another SharePoint web service (in this case /_vti_bin/lists.asmx) then a subsequent call to the search service works.

We did a bit of packet sniffing as well and it looks like the search service trys to authenticate differently than the other web services. Not sure why this is the case. I need to understand more about how Search works.

Here's the post on TechNet.

Moral of the story is to check, and double check the environment before spending time going down rabbit holes. Statements like 'it was working, then it stopped...with no change in the environment' just don't add up.

Issue with DNS using VirtualBox and the SharePoint 2010 VHD

After many hours of trying and reading I finally stumbled across an article that described my problem and solution.
Thanks very much Edward http://microsoftdevguy.blogspot.com/2011/05/sharepoint-demo-image-gets-error.html
It seems that trying to follow the MS Install guide didn't quite work and after you successfully run the image, the only site you can hit is CA. After following Edwards article and just using a Bridged Adapter and an available IP address in the Host networks range, then modifying the Guest adapter and DNS entries, viola! Magic!

SharePoint 2010 Debugging

This one always gets me… There’s a few things that need to be done in order to better debug SharePoint.

• Custom Errors Off
• Enable Call Stack Trace
• Debugging Mode
• ASP.Net Tracing

…and the big one.

• Multiple web.config files.

OK, to break it down. First, know what Web Application you want to debug. This might sound silly but I’ve been caught out a few times with a couple of (not straight forward) sp farm setups.

SharePoint web.config files

Make sure you are looking at the right Virtual Directory. Also, as mentioned as the last bullet, there are multiple web.config files that might need modifying. Below is a scrape from a good article by Daniel on blogspot (thanks)

The web.config files are genearally found in the following locations:

• web.config file in the root folder of each virtual server / IIS Application.

Local_Drive:\Inetpub\wwwroot
This is the usually the file that contains most of the web configuration of a SharePoint site collection. To display full errors you would need to modify this web.config file. There may be one for each of the SharePoint applications running in some cases (MySites, Multiple Portals or Instances of SharePoint, Central Admin, etc.). If this is the case, you will only need to modify the web.config file which is in the root of the virtual directory for the instance of SharePoint which you using. To find out which directory is used by various SharePoint applications/websites, view the properties of the SharePoint website in IIS and from the "Home Directory" tab, the value in the "Local path" field will take you to the directory where the web.config file is for the specific instance of SharePoint / Application in IIS.

• web.config file used in Web Part resources for the Global Assembly Cache (GAC)

Local_Drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\wpresources

• web.config configuration file(s) for extending other virtual servers

Local_Drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\CONFIG

• web.config file which defines configuration settings for the /_vti_bin virtual directory

Local_Drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\ISAPI

• web.config file which defines configuration settings for the /_layouts virtual directory

Local_Drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS

• web.config configuration file for Central Administration pages.

Local_Drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\60\TEMPLATE\ADMIN\Locale_ID

Now that you know what config files to modify, here are the key parts that need modification.

Custom Errors Off

Set the customErrors mode to "Off"
Find:
<system.web> ...
<customErrors mode="On" />
Change To:
<system.web> ...
<customErrors mode="Off" />

Enable Call Stack Trace

Set the CallStack value of the SafeMode element to "true"
Find:
<SharePoint>
<SafeMode ... CallStack="false" ... >
<SharePoint>
Change To:
<SharePoint>
<SafeMode ... CallStack="true" ... >
</SharePoint>

Debugging Mode

Set batch and debug to "true"
Find:
<compilation batch="false" debug="false">
Change To:
<compilation batch="true" debug="true">

ASP.Net Tracing

Include the following line in the <system.web> element of the web.config file.
<system.web> ...
<trace enabled="true" pageOutput="true"/>

And that’s about that. I will post a bit about debugging via log files soon.