Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer has stopped working

I've been facing quite an annoying problem when trying to modify a SharePoint page throug SharePoint Designer. I could open SPD without a problem and I could easily navigate to the page I wanted to modify and when I opened it, it did render the code and the design, but it also gave me a dialog box to "Choose an encoding". Whatever endocing I selected, SPD immediately stopped working, every single time I tried it.

Luckily, I've found a workaround for this: in stead of opening the page in "Design" or "Split" mode, open it in "Code" view first. Then, when everything has loaded, just switch to Design or Split and it will work (well, it did for me...). To do this, just open SPD without opening the page already and pick "View" --> "Page" --> "Code".

SharePoint Designer error: The server could not complete your request

When the designer (or anyone else) tried to modify an aspx page or master page of one of our public sites, he could open aspx pages, but when he tried to save those or when he tried to open a master page, he got the following error:

"The server could not complete your request. Contact your Internet service provider or Web server administrator to make sure that the server has the FrontPage Server Extensions or SharePoint Services installed."

Clicking on "Details" gave a blank error. A lot of googling suggested recycling the application pool (didn't work) or extending the web application (that didn't apply to our situation, since that was when you were using FBA in stead of Windows authentication and we were using Windows authentication). The last option made me take a look at the security settings though, and that's where I found a solution that worked for me. It turned out that "Client Integration" had been turned off.

To enable this (and hopefully resolve your problem), go to your Central Administration and then navigate to Application Management --> Authentication Providers --> Default. On this page, you can enable client integration. For me, that did the trick...

"... is an invalid IP address" when editing a site binding in IIS

I was trying to change a binding in IIS 7 on a VPC to test something out and I wanted to make the url "http://intranet" point to my newly created web application on port 567.

To do this, I went to the web site in IIS, right clicked on it, selected "Edit Bindings...", selected the only entry there, clicked "Edit..." and filled in "http://intranet" in the "Host name" box. When I clicked on "OK", I got the message "'*:567' is an invalid IP address.". Turns out you can't fill in "http://" there, which makes sense cause it's already mentioned in the "Type" field, but I still think it's not a clear error message you get...

So long story short: just fill in the actual host name and not the "http" part.

Error when deploying a solution

Today I was trying to install one of the "fantastic 40" templates and when I tried deploying the wsp file, the job started running and resulted in an "error" state. There was nothing in the Event Logs and nothing in the ULS logs either. After some reading on the MS forum, I saw a post where someone suggested (for a similar problem) that the Windows SharePoint Services Administration service had to be running. So I restarted this service on all servers and tried to deploy again... and it worked! I don't know if this will apply in all situations where you just get an error when deploying a solution (most likely not), but it's something you can give a try...

Something completely different this time...

I just want to do a little promotion this time. I've got a friend who's a photographer and together we've created a website to showcase some of her work. So you should all go to www.sarahdewilde.be and give her pictures a look!