Get WebTemplate / WebTemplateId from page source

Noting this down so I remember.

1. Go to page
2. View source
3. Look for g_wsaSiteTemplateId

Reference: https://nickhobbs.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/sharepoint-how-to-check-which-site-template-was-used-to-create-a-site-just-using-a-web-browser/

Fogbugz API logon and tokens

I was trying to write some scripts to automate some Fogbugz processes. However, we still use "FogBugz For Your Server".

In order to call the api.asp, you need to pass in a token. According to http://help.fogcreek.com/8447/how-to-get-a-fogbugz-xml-api-token#FogBugz_For_Your_Server, you need to pass in your email and password as command line parameters. Talk about lame.

Since I do not have FogBugz On Demand or FogBugz On Site, I do not have the Create API Token button.

Fortunately, I found via a network trace that the cookie value for fbToken can be used. No more query string plaintext passwords.

Amazon Windows Activation Problems

Some of my instances recently started showing up with the black background with:
Error: 0xC004F074 The Software Licensing Service reported that the computer could not be activated. The Key Management Service (KMS) is unavailable.

I recall having done this a long time ago and searching around I found some old correspondence from back in 2011 with Amazon Support that involved activating with the external IP of their KMS servers. However this was what was giving me that error. Unfortunately, I did not make good notes of that so I was going to have to figure out again. Fortunately, Internet to the rescue, I found this: http://kwjblogs.blogspot.ca/2012/01/amazon-ec2-instance-windows-activation.html

... and recalled essentially doing this:

slmgr.vbs /skms 169.254.169.250

slmgr.vbs /ato

Done. Now I also have noted it.

SPBasePermissions enumeration - values in Int64, Hexadecimal, and Name

$t = [type]'Microsoft.SharePoint.SPBasePermissions'
[enum]::GetValues($t) | ForEach-Object {Write-Host "$($_): $([int64]$_) (0x$([Convert]::ToString([int64]$_,16)))"}

Haven't figured out a way to use Format-Table for this, but good enough for now.

Solutions, features, and CompatibilityLevel

I recently came across an issue where certain feature definitions were not available in 2010 mode sites in one farm, but they were in another. It turned out that the parameters supplied to Install-SPSolution are the reason. Essentially, the difference was specifying -CompatibilityLevel {14,15} vs specifying nothing. I found this article to be very helpful: Planning Deployment of Farm Solutions for SharePoint 2013

Error codes

Just some notes to myself on some resources to help decipher error codes that I often come across. These are sometimes mentioned in the ULS logs with something like hresult= or hr=

• ErrCo.de - awesome and searchable set of error codes on pretty much everything
• Win32 Error Codes
• MS-ERREF
• Description of HRESULT

A potentially dangerous Request.Path value was detected from the client (%)

Recently came across an issue with an error like the following:
Application error when access {some-url}, Error=A potentially dangerous Request.Path value was detected from the client (%).
at System.Web.HttpRequest.ValidateInputIfRequiredByConfig()
at System.Web.HttpApplication.PipelineStepManager.ValidateHelper(HttpContext context)

Looking more carefully at the URL, it turned out there was a %2520 in it. That is there was a space in the URL which was encoded into a %20, but then some errant code encoded it again into %2520.

What was tricky about this issue that I never saw my endpoint request actually get logged in ULS. Instead, it looked like this was caught by .NET.