Import Spreadsheet with Sharepoint error

A customer ran into a problem where he is getting "Method 'Post' of object 'IOWSPostData' failed" when trying to create a sharepoint list via importing a SpreadSheet using Excel.  There are plenty of posts on the Internet about this and the fix is to update EXPTOOWS.XLA to force a different version number.

The original macro code uses a new method in the Excel 2007 object model Application.SharePointVersion(URL).  That method is returning 0 in the customer's environment causing spreadsheet import not to work.

As it turns out, Application.SharePointVersion checks the root site for a Sharepoint site to determine the version.  Because for this particular environment setup, I do not have a valid Sharepoint site at the root, it does not return the correct version number.

The solution was to create a dummy blank sharepoint site at the root of a web site and now users can import spreadsheets and create list using spreadsheets for all sites (root and sub site).

Reuse BizTalk WCF service publishing wizard settings

In BizTalk 2006 R2, there is a new WCF Service Publishing Wizard. It becomes quite painful if you want to update the published service to run the wizard over and over again. The settings from the wizard are saved in the output App_Data\Temp folder with a name of WcfServiceDescription.xml. You can reuse some of the settings if you launch the wizard from the command line and pass in the configuraiton file as a parameter.

BtsWcfServicePublishingWizard -WcfServiceDescription=C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\BizTalkWcfService\App_Data\Temp\WcfServiceDescription.xml

Saved me some time during development, however, it doesn't seem to remember the namespace specified.