I’m currently working on a project and one part of the project contains the site definitions, site columns and content types defined in xml files. At some point I started to get deployment errors telling me that a certain site column already exists on the site or site collection. Retracting the solution did not help even while the the site column dissappeared in the site column list. After trying a lot of things it seems that changing the ID of the site column removed the problem. Setting it back the next time to the original ID was giving me the error again.

After doing some research it seems that  SharePoint 2010 / Visual Studio 2010 is using some kind of stale cache keeping the deployed site columns in memory for some time. I came accross an answer of Mujahid Hasan-MSFT – SDE, Visual Studio  at a Microsoft forum.  He suggested the following two workarounds:

Workaround 1:
• Right click on Project node in Solution explorer and click “Retract“. This will retract the Field.
• Close VS. This will flush the stale cache.
• Open the project in a new instance of VS and re-deploy the solution.

If closing VS after retract doesn’t solve the problem then a longer workaround is:

Workaround 2:
• Redeploy the project -> This will show an error during feature activation.
• Go to “Manage Site Features” under “Site Settings” in SharePoint UI in the browser.
• Activate and then Deactivate the deployed feature which contains the Field.
• Retract the Solution in VS i.e. right click on the Project node and click “Retract”.
• Close VS. This will flush the stale cache.
• Open the project in a new instance of VS and re-deploy the solution. This should work.

The workarounds work but it makes your life difficult. Closing VS is not an option for me. Lets hope that this will be fixed in the feature service packs.

Currently i’m working on a development machine for SharePoint 2010. Even the development machine is setup with multiple accounts as security describes. Therefore sometimes you run into strange (security) error messages. The following error message occured when i tried to deploy a SharePoint project from Visual Studio 2010.

Error occurred in deployment step ‘Recycle IIS Application Pool’: <nativehr>0×80070005</nativehr><nativestack></nativestack>Access denied

It seems that the account under which your Visual Studio 2010 is running needs to have sufficient rights on the web application to which you are deploying your solution. In my case this was easily fixed by putting my domain account in the site collection administrators list for that specific web application.

SharePoint 2010 offers functionality to export data to Excel 2010 while a link is maintained to the original data. This will allow you to use data from SharePoint in such a matter that suites your business. Whenever the data changes in SharePoint 2010 you are able to refresh that data in Excel. It is also possible to import data from Excel into SharePoint 2010 very easily. It allows you to import business data into a custom list and use it in your business processes defined in SharePoint 2010. This could involve BI related processes or just other lists and views linked to the custom list.

In the following examples i will show you how to export data to and import data from Excel into SharePoint 2010. We start with exporting data to Excel. When you browse to a list in SharePoint 2010 and choose from the ribbon “List” under “List Tools” you will notice an option called “Export to Excel”.

By clicking on the option in the ribbon, it tries to download an iqy file. This file contains the information needed for Excel to get the data from. Click “Open” to open de lin into Excel.

 The Excel application opens the link and shows the data from SharePoint in a Workbook sheet. Currently the data is linked which means that whenever data in SharePoint is changed the data can be refreshed in Excel again. This is only possible when the link is still there. As soon as “Unlink” option is clicked the link is gone and you need to do an export again. As long as the link is there you will see a square around the data which is linked to SharePoint.

Note: Data changed in Excel is NOT updated in the SharePoint list.

Because you now have the data in Excel you are able to use all the Excel functionality like generating nice graphs based on the data.

What if the the data is changed in SharePoint? For example we change the percentage of “Taak 4″ in SharePoint. After the percentage is changed to 90% the “Save” button is clicked.

To reflect the change in Excel (while we are still linked) we use the “Refresh” menu command in the “Table Tools” ribbon.

This will refresh the data and the depending graphs.

 Lets say we want to import data from Excel into SharePoint 2010. We have the following Excel containing usage data of different browsers over the months.

Go into SharePoint 2010 and select the option “More options…” under “Site actions”.

This will open the create dialog of SharePoint 2010 which normally allows you to create content like sites, pages and lists. Look for something called “Import spreadsheet” and press the “Create” button.

“Import spreadsheet” will create a custom list from an Excel data file. Give the custom list a name and use the browse functionality to select the earlier mentioned xlsx file. Click on the “Import” button to start the import.

This will open Excel and let you select the range of cells to import into the custom list of SharePoint 2010. The first row in the Excel sheet will define the column names.

When the “Import” button is clicked the Excel sheet is closed and the new custom list is opened in SharePoint 2010. As you can see the columns are based on the first row of the selected data. The data is not linked in any way back to Excel. So you will need to export it again to get linked data. The custom list is standard SharePoint and will allow you to do anything with this list what would be possible in SharePoint 2010.

The idea of performance and capacity management is that you setup your solution according to specifications which will result into specific hardware and farm setup.

Technet has some articles which decribe several elements which are important for performance and capacity management. Keep in mind that defining a system depends not only on SharePoint 2010, but also on your solution. Did you use a lot of customisation? How are you users using the solution? Are you using external data sources? and how are you connected with these data sources? I think you get the picture….

The following articles are available:

• Hardware and software requirements
  This article lists the minimal hardware and software requirements to install and run SharePoint 2010.
• Technical diagrams
  Simply a lot of diagrams describing different setups of SharePoint farms and use of feature sets.
• Technical case studies
  This include information about environments. Think of specifications of hardware, topologies and configuration. But also health and performance data, database content, indexes and external data sources.
• Software boundaries and limits
  This will help you understand performance and capacity limits of the product. Keep in mind that this depends on your solution. The capacity elements which are addressed are boundaries, thresholds and limits.
• Capacity and sizing
  A single whitepaper describing elements to understand targets, data architecture, hardware support versus number of users, monitoring and adjusting your environment.
• Capacity test results and recommendations
  This will include a set of white papers describing the impact of specific feature sets. This will include things like characteristics, test results, recommendations and troubleshooting performance and scalability.

Microsoft has a comparison list on their SharePoint Website which allows you to compare the features between SharePoint Foundation 2010 , SharePoint 2010 Standard and SharePoint 2010 Enterprise.

You are able to compare all features at once or by the known slices called Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights and Composites.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Editions-Comparison.aspx