The SI SharePoint Blog

So now I’ve installed SharePoint Server 2010 beta 2, along with the Office beta and the Visual Studio beta – I wonder if all this beta software will turn me into a nervous wreck before long.

I’m running on Windows 7, and followed this guide on MSDN.  It’s not difficult, but there are many manual steps, and I hope this will be unnecessary in the final release.

After installation, the Configuration wizard gave the following error during the sample data step: “Unrecognized attribute ‘allowInsecureTransport’”.  I solved that by running this hotfix, (thanks, The 14 Folder), restarting, and running the configuration wizard again.

Next I jumped into these hands-on developer labs, which seem like a great way to get some SharePoint dirt under your fingernails.  The documents refer to various data and PowerShell scripts that I couldn’t locate anywhere at MSDN, but if you’re familiar with SharePoint already you can probably adjust the code and/or create the missing data you need to make it work.

The first lab, on web parts and LINQ, gave me some problems.  With SharePoint 2010 you run spmetal.exe to generate the LINQ data context of a particular site, but this failed with the message “The Web Application at http://servername could not be found”.  The site existed, and I had access, but spmetal.exe couldn’t find it.  After some experimentation I solved it by turning off User Account Control.  I don’t know why that worked, but when you work with beta software you have to expect irrational behavior.

My first impressions are generally good. The changes appear to fall into three categories: UI changes (ribbon etc.), new technologies/services, and making life easier for developers.  All of them are welcome, and I look forward to exploring them further.