Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome on stage Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 !!!

Since today, both products are available for MSDN subscribers, earlier than I expected to say the truth. At the time I am writing this post, I already started the download :-)

Friday last week, the SharePoint Team announced a major milestone in the SharePoint 2010 release process. One day after the TechDays in Geneva, Microsoft has frozen the code of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, meaning that it gives a go to release the software to the vendors.

Shortly, the bits should be available on MSDN (probably by the end of this week), but the official launch will take place the 12th of May.

Because I had to move my virtual machines to VMWare to enable the 64-bits guest operating systems to be installed (for SharePoint 2010), I encountered a very weird problem.

When using the NATed network, the guest OS was able to connect the Internet, but then, I had a separate network on my LAN and it was not very convenient. That is the reason why I switched them to "Bridge" on one of my NIC. The guest OS was receiving an IP address from the DHCP, was able to access the local resources (router, shared printers, etc) but impossible to go on the web.

When pinging an internet server, I received a "host unreachable" message and I tried things like "route print", setting a fixed IP, nothing solved the issue. And googling was not that successful as many people had more or less the same issues and their resolution did not help me.

In a final try, I launched a nslookup for www.google.com and got a "DNS request timed out", which was strange as the guest DNS settings were exactly the same as my Windows 7 host OS. That popped something in my mind and tried to ping google and then browse google using its IP address directly and......it worked !

The problem was then the name resolution that was not done for the guest OS. I was then able to refine my search on the web and found this : http://communities.vmware.com/message/1472066 . At the end of the thread, the solution was there "...it turned out that ShrewSoft VPN client was interfering with VMWare...". As I have Shrew VPN installed, I checked the status of this service : started.

The final word is that I stopped the "ShrewSoft DNS Proxy Deamon" and everything was working like a charm, at least on the VMWare machines side.

Today, I had a problem I never had before with SharePoint 2010, being with the Beta or even the RC.

My Managed Metadata Server was running and a proxy created. To that proxy, I connected a site and everything seemed to work correctly. Until I created a site column of type Managed Metadata. In the place where normally you can select the term store to use for the column, there was a message saying "The required feature is not enabled for this column type", which was quite strange as I checked several times and all the needed features were activated.

As most of the times, my friend google :-) helped me. I found this post, not that new so it means that it is a know problem, not only on the RC.

Basically, according to this post, you have to activate a feature that has the ID 73EF14B1-13A9-416B-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C. But this feature is not present in the feature list from the user interface, so you have to run the stsadm command for your site.

This solved the problem, but I really wonder why it happened only this time....