SharePoint 2010 on Windows 8 RTM with SQL Server 2012 RTM

  • Article

SharePoint 2010 on Windows 8 RTM with SQL Server 2012 RTM

I thought I’d quickly share my experiences with installing SharePoint 2010 on the RTM version of Windows 8 with SQL Server 2012. Surprisingly this was a relatively painless experience. Here’s the high-level steps I followed:

  • Installed Windows 8 RTM - awesome product!

  • Installed SQL Server 2012 RTM Developer Edition.

  • Followed John Livingston's blog on installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 8 Preview. A couple of additional notes on this: 

    • Windows Identity Foundation is now a feature of the Windows 8 OS which you enable through the "Turn windows features on and off". You don’t need to separately download this prerequisite, you just need to enable the Windows feature:

    • As per John’s blog, the only other prerequisites I needed to install manually were as follows:
       

    • Make sure you change the default .Net Framework Version in IIS Manager

      • Load IIS Manager and right on the very top node in the left navigation pane (i.e. left click on the machine name).

      • In the right Actions pane click on “Change .NET Framework Version”

      • Set the .NET Framework Version to v2.0.50727

    • The SharePoint 2010 installer uses ServerManagerCMD.exe to validate which server features and roles are installed on the machine. Unfortunately this command has been deprecated and is no longer available on Windows 8. Currently it seems the only way to get around this is to trick the SharePoint Installer by creating a dummy ServerManagerCMD.exe file that simply returns the exit code that SharePoint is expecting (i.e. 1003). More details on this workaround can be found here as well as on the original (French) blog that provide a sample Visual Studio solution on how to build this "hack".

      NB: THIS IS DEFINITELY UNSUPPORTED AND I'M ASSUMING YOU ONLY DOING THIS FOR UNOFFICIAL LAB TESTING AND WON'T BE USING THIS IN ANY OFFICIAL CAPACITY OR ON A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. I AM IN NO WAY ENDORCING THIS CODE - USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

      I will update this blog if I find any other preferred method to get past this installation issue.

 

  • I installed SharePoint using a slipstreamed version of SharePoint 2010 with SP1 and the June 2012 Cumulative Update package included in the slipstream (i.e. extracted to the installation Updates folder)

  • If, after installing SharePoint, you get any errors accessing any web applications make sure all the applications pools used by SharePoint are all set to run under the v2.0 .NET framework version:

  • Windows 8 includes PowerShell v3.0. When you load up the SharePoint Management Shell you’ll receive an error:

    “The local farm is not accessible. Cmdlets with FeatureDependencyId are not registered.”

    This is because of the version of PowerShell that the SharePoint startup script is running under by default (v3.0) and SharePoint 2010 is currently not compatible with PowerShell v3.0. Fortunately this is quite easy to fix as you can run PowerShell in a previous version compatibility mode.
    Simply right click on the SharePoint Management Console icon in the taskbar and edit the properties of the shortcut:


     
    Add the “-version 2.0” flag after PowerShell.exe in the shortcut, i.e.:

    C:\windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\PowerShell.exe -Version 2.0 -NoExit " & ' C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\CONFIG\POWERSHELL\Registration\\sharepoint.ps1 ' "

 

That’s it! Everything else was pretty much as per John’s blog. Obviously there’s still the same limitations that applied to Windows 7 (e.g. User Profile Synchronization won’t work). I’m sure there may be other things that fail since this isn’t currently an officially supported installation configuration.

Happy SharePointing!

Brian