Team Foundation Service: user account permission and authorization

I am working with online Team Foundation Service and got the message below while trying to connect. The "sign in" window was not giving me the possibility to update the credentials..

TF31003: Either you have not entered the necessary credentials or your user account does not have permission to connect to the Team Foundation Server at https://xyz.visualstudio.com/. Ask your server administrator to add the appropriate permissions to your account

I used Visual Studio 2012 running on Windows 8

 

Another possible message is:

TF205020: Could not connect to server ‘xyz.visualstudio.com\DefaultCollection’

or

TF30063: You are not authorized to access xyz.visualstudio.com

 

Solution:
Clearing all the cookies in IE resolved the issue for me. (Internetoptions -> General -> Delete...)

Colored events on a SharePoint Calendar

Here is a great blog post I came across on how to show events on a SharePoint Calendar colored in specific event types:
http://sharepointsolutions.com/sharepoint-help/blog/2012/10/color-code-events-on-a-sharepoint-calendar/

Works great!

Unsupported namespace in InfoPath code

System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server.Converter.DetectUnsupportedNamespaces.VerifyNamespace(String ns, String nodeName, ICollection`1 problems)
at Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server.Converter.BusinessLogicScanner.<>c__DisplayClass2.b__1(MethodBase method)
at Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server.Converter.BusinessLogicScanner.VisitMethod(MethodBase method, MethodInfoVisitor methodVisitor)
....

You are using custom code in InfoPath, and you are using code in your project that doesn't have the same namespace as the form.  For example a helper function that you've included in your code.
When InfoPath Forms Services attempt to validate your form, it finds that your form template contains reference to code that doesn't have a namespace!
Solution:
Just create a namespace for the helper class, or move the helper class under the namespace of the form's namespace.

Data is Null

The SharePoint item being crawled returned an error when requesting data from the web service. ( Error from SharePoint site: Data is Null. This method or property cannot be called on Null values. )

I found the code:
web.SiteGroups.Add(groupName, owner, null, null);

Solution:

It seems that the "default user" parameter is not the culprit here after all, but the fourth parameter is the one that actually causes this error. This is a description parameter, and even an empty string is OK. See this Microsoft Support article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2323206

Form Template's status remains forever in 'installing' or 'deleting' state

Form template’s status never leaves “Installing…”, “Deleting…”, “Upgrading…”  or “Removing…” states
These states seem to indicate that you're running a multiple-machine server farm, and on your server farm, you're running into some issues in propagating changes to all of the machines.  If you have not done so already, I highly recommend turning on the following services on each machine: SPAdmin, and SPTimerV3 You can do this by running:

                net start SPTimerV3
                net start SPAdmin

On each machine (If you are doing this on a SharePoint Farm , you want to make sure the Timer Service is running on all the Servers on the Farm).  Net start is a ensure semantic, so this will not inadvertently toggle or cause any damage if run on a machine where the service is already started.  Now that that's done, you can go on to correcting the problems that you have.
From Central Administration, go to the Operations page, under the Global configuration group, click on Timer Job Status.  On that page, look for timer jobs that have the name in the following formatting.  If you filename is FOO.xsn, it will look like:
Windows SharePoint Services Solution Deployment for "form-FOO.wsp"
See if there was a failure.  If so, go back a page, and go to Timer Job Definitions.  Drill down in the timer job definition that you care about and you can perform the following:

Generally:

1. Try to restart the job if that is available.
2. If restart is not available, delete the job, then attempt your initial action again .

SharePoint shows no help

Problem: Click on the help icon in SharePoint, it opens a window but shows no help text.
Instead you see messages like:

-No Help Collection was found.
-Help content cannot be displayed. (Or similar in your language)

Solution:
Then you have to follow this resolution: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939313/en-us

When you run the commandline (execution may take 10-15 min.)
hcinstal.exe /act InstallAllHCs
and you experience the error
Outcome code is: 256
you have run this code probably with not sufficient privileges to the database. Run this code with your farm admin account.

Unable to deactivate and delete sandbox solution?

1. I have made a template from a given SharePoint site
2. Uploaded it to another site collection to create new sites. (So the web site template is actually a sandboxed solution.)
3. Now, I created a subsite from that template, deleted that site and then wanted to remove the solution. Therefore I had to deactivate it before.
4. Tried to deactivate the solution - Boooom...

The error message I received was:

"Unable to access web scoped feature (Id: 10ef0abc-dbd4-484a-b9a9-4cc425e7dc0b) because it references a non-existent or broken web (Id: 56ab1e1e-a09a-4783-9947-3d79bc6473aa) on site 'http://wfe2'. Exception: System.ArgumentException: Value does not fall within the expected range. at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWebCollection.get_Item(Guid id) at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPFeatureEnumeratorBase.GetCachedWeb(SPSite site, Guid webId, Guid featureId)"

The solution is, there is still the deleted site in the SharePoint database and the features from within the template are activated. Sandboxed solutions containing site templates cannot be deactivated and deleted when there are still sites available based on this template. So the features are a reference to that template (and its solution) and you are not able to deactivate it as long as this reference exists.

You have to don't just delete the site, you have to remove it from the recycle bin as well. So you have to be a site collection admin and delete the site from "site collection recycle bin".