Windows 2008 on HP ProLiant DL380 G3 hangs after loading crcdisk.sys

Couple of days back I decided to upgrade my ProLiant DL380 G3 (about 3 or 4 years old) server to Windows 2oo8 from Windows 2003.

First issue was this server did not have a DVD drive, so I copied the bits to the local data disk and started the install. The install went fine without any issues. My next mega issue was, when the server restarted after the install it just hung while loading Windows. Next, I tried to restart it in safe mode. This showed me that it froze after loading crcdisk.sys.

Googling for information led me to a HP support forum which said that Windows 2008 server is not supported on DL380 G3 models. On the same thread someone had mentioned that the latest SmartStart tool allows you to install Windows 2008 server on DL380 G3 models.

My next stop was HP's support site to download the software. I select my server model and for the operating system I selected Windows Server 2003 and downloaded HP SmartStart CD x32 version 8.25. Used the CD made from the downloaded ISO image to restart the server.

Using SmartStart I was able to select Windows 2008 as the operating system and it also allowed me to install it from a USB drive directly using the ISO image. After a few minutes the server was up and running. There is no option to upgrade using SmartStart, so I ended up deleting the system partition and recreating it again. Which means all your data is lost, lucky me I had my data in a separate partition.

Organization Hierarchy SharePoint web part.

Organization hierarchy web part shown on the profiles page of SharePoint My Site is defined in the person.aspx page of the SPSMSITEHOST site template (12 hive\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates).

<SPSWC:ProfileManages FrameType="None" id="ProfileManages" runat="server" />

in person.aspx is the line which renders the organization hierarchy web part. This is defined in "Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal" assembly and the namespace is "Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls".

Changing Silverlight player skin for Podcast Kit for SharePoint (PKS).

Here are the steps to change the skin for the Silverlight player in PKS:

1. Choose Site Actions->View All Site Content.

2. Select "Style Library" under "Document Libraries".

3. In Style Library navigate to PodcastingKit -> SLPlayerSkins. Professional.xaml file is the default skin applied.

4. Upload your skin to this library.

5. In Style Library select "XSL Style Sheets" folder.

6. Search for professional.xaml in PKSDetailItem.xsl and change it to the xaml file uploaded in SLPlayerSkins folder in step 3.

If you have Expression Encoder 2 installed, Check "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Encoder 2\Templates\en" directory for some skins provided by encoder. 

SharePoint Event handlers and Windows forms/Console application.

Couple of days back I was working on a windows forms application to add list items using the SharePoint object model. This list had ItemsAdded event handler registered to it using a feature. I noticed that while adding items programatically the event handler was not getting fired, the same worked fine if the items were added using the standard SharePoint interface.

My event handler was making use of some appSettings parameters. These appSettings parameters were included in the web.config while activating the feature for the event handler. It turned out that event handlers are called in the same context as the items being added. The solution was to add the appSettings parameters in the windows forms/ console applications configuration file. After doing so, the event handlers worked when adding items using the windows forms application.