January 17, 2017

SharePoint: Yet another way to remove orphan SSRS Content Types

Problem

In a SharePoint Web Application, SQL Server Reporting Services was installed when farm was on SharePoint 2010 level. Since then, the farm had been upgraded to SharePoint 2013 using content database upgrade method. New servers were set up for the new farm.

History is history, but for some reason, orphan SSRS Content Types were left on the site collection breaking when attempting to create team sites based on a template. In the saved site template there was references to Content types with names such as

“$Resources:ReportServerResources,DataSourceContentTypeName;”,
“$Resources:ReportServerResources,ReportBuilderContentTypeName;” and “$Resources:ReportServerResources,ReportBuilderModelName;”,

but subsite creation failed as it couldn’t find such content types. On the content type list of the site collection, you could see three content types with those exact names, meaning something was missing as valid names of the content types couldn’t be shown.

Solution

  1. Installed SSRS components on the new farm using (SKIPCA skips the custom action phase, as it was not succeeding in our case):

    Msiexec.exe /i rsSharePoint.msi SKIPCA=1
  2. This makes the content type names behave correctly.
  3. Now you can install the ReportServer feature

    Install-SPFeature -Path "C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\15\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\ReportServer"
  4. Followed by uninstalling that same feature

    Uninstall-SPFeature -Identity e8389ec7-70fd-4179-a1c4-6fcb4342d7a0
  5. And finally you can just uninstall the rsSharePoint.msi for good

    msiexec.exe /uninstall rsSharePoint.msi

January 3, 2017

Azure VPN install hangs on Windows 10

Problem

Tried to install Azure VPN client (x64) on Windows 10, but after double-clicking on the installer, Windows Explorer always froze and I had to restart explorer.exe to wake it up again.


Solution

Smart Screen is failing due to some reason. When double clicking on the VPN client (AMD64).exe, you can see CHXSmartScreen.exe process being starter. Kill that process and VPN client installation starts normally.

smartscreen