SharePoint 2010 Branding Frustrations

This is not a solution to anything, just a place to vent my anger. I hate it how SharePoint 2010 page layouts go against basic CSS best practices. The biggest issue for me at the moment is that the page layouts are rendered once again in nested tables and that nearly every web part zone has an ID of "_invisibleIfEmpty". Come on guys! It is not that hard!

Search Delegate Control in SharePoint 2010

Currently I am in the process of upgrading a SharePoint 2007 Internet site to 2010. One of the things that had me stuck initially was that after I did the upgrade and created a 2010 specific master page, my search delegate control was not showing up. I finally figured out that search delegate controls must have the Web Application feature scope in order to work. For my 2007 site, it was using Site Collection level scope.

Prerequisite install gotchas when installing with no Internet connectivity

I am installing a SharePoint 2010 environment at the moment for a client where Internet access from the SharePoint box is blocked. I have found that even though I installed the compulsory prereq components, unless you install all of the prereqs, the prerequisite install function fails (e.g even though the speech components are optional, the prereq installer will fail if it doesn’t find them already installed). A bigger issue is that Microsoft currently has 3 versions of the prerequisite item 'SQL 2008 R2 Analysis Services ADOMD.NET' available, where only the one at http://go.microrosft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=160390 will work because of the registry settings it makes (which the prereq installer looks for). The correct version of SQLSERVER2008_ASADOMD10.msi is 6924KB. The versions that don’t work are http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=188442&clcid=0x409 (SQL 2008 R2, which is 7099KB) or http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=130651 (SQL 2008, which is 4416KB).