Common SharePoint 2010 Developer Installation Issues

This is one of those posts you hope will save a lot of people some time, but also a place to store my notes related to installing a complete developer machine on Windows Server 2008 R2 with local accounts, PowerPivot, and a full installation of SQL Server.  There are several posts out there that address the basics, but don’t mention the issues that are encountered afterwards.  This is my attempt to aggregate the various posts that helped me get through all of this and get a fully functioning environment I can use day to day.

Step one is a full installation with local accounts.  It is documented really well here by Neil Hodgkinson.  The key here is creating the configuration database using a local account before running the Configuration Wizard.  This is done using the New-SPConfigurationDatabase PowerShell command.

Once installation and initial setup are complete you may notice there are issues with search.  Specifically you will find Critical errors in the Event Log stating ‘The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.CrawlReportJobDefinition threw an exception.’  Søren Nielsen does an excellent job of breaking down the issue and even provides a PowerShell download to fix it.  His post also covers the installation without AD accounts.

The last issue I encountered centered around PowerPivot.  I ran the installation and went through the product configuration wizard.  It all went smoothly.  After the configuration wizard you are given the choice to run the Farm Update Wizard or manually configure your changes.  I chose to go through the wizard and that created my problem.  If given the choice, manually make the changes starting with #5 in this post.

If you allow SharePoint to configure PowrePivot you may end up with an error when you try to navigate to the PowerPivot Management Dashboard.  In my case the page wouldn’t’ even render, I would get a .NET error page.  On inspecting the ULS logs I saw that it was trying to access a ‘PowerPivot Management/…/1033/Server%20History.xlsx’ workbook.  When I went to the ‘All Site Content’ link to look for the referenced document library it didn’t exist.  Turns out that this gets created when you create the SQL Server PowerPivot server application, but at times not when you allow the wizard to complete the setup.  To get around this issue I deleted the current SQL PowerPivot service application and created a new one following the guidance from step 7 until completion.  Once I did this I was all set.

I hope this helps someone else trying to get a VM or other single environment up and running and save a couple of hours of headache in the meantime.