Road trip

Here we are at the end of December & I realize I have been a neglectful blogger in 2011! I promise I'll get a post on SharePoint Web Templates before the end of the year, but I still have vacation on the mind for now...just back from two weeks in China with the family. The most indespensible tool of the trip: the iPhone 4g!!

iPhone in China

For those of you planning a trip to China, the news is yes, your iPhone will work just fine. I signed up for a 125MB data plan with AT&T before we left, then once the plane landed & we were through immigration, I powered up the phone, and it connected straight away to China Unicom. Note, in two weeks I used 180MB of data, even with many of the hotels having wireless access - so sign up for more than you think you'll need. 125MB cost me $49.95, we'll see what the extra 55MB is going to set me back! Apparently it would be prorated for the amount not used, so think big.

There were a few iPhone apps I found particularly helpful - the Explore Metro subway navigation maps were fantastic - I downloaded the Shanghai & Beijing versions, very helpful for route planning, finding the closest metro station, and knowing the fares, especially in Shanghai where fares vary by distance. These apps are $2.99 each but are well worth it.

TripAdvisor's app was also helpful for showing restaurants & attractions based on my current location, and being able to search by type. I used the hotel's wireless connection with the laptop to write reviews on the TripAdvisor web site.

The navigation & GPS capability of the iPhone itself was the most helpful of all. I was able to plug in an address in English (pinyin) & it would find the location just fine, then I'd be able to use the live navigation to make sure we told the taxi driver the right place! On one trip the taxi driver used it to help us find the hotel - the street names were shown in Chinese characters as well as pinyin. Maps worked just fine, had a lot of the points of interest already on the map, so easy to find them.

On the map, tap the location indicator twice and the phone display orientates itself to a relative, compass based setting. So now you know which way to head to get to the nearest Starbucks, is that useful or what!!!

Subway & Train Travel

If you're planning on traveling between cities, the train system was really convenient, reasonably priced, comfortable & on time. There's an app to help understand train schedules, really good. Armed with the "G" train number and time of departure, we were able to purchase tickets knowing the time & price before getting to the counter.

How the subway systems in Beijing & Shanghai work:

• The Beijing subway system has single trip tickets available. Buy then at your departing station for 2 RMB per person. The fine print: you can only use the ticket to depart from the station where you purchased the ticket...so don't be clever like we tried to be by buying the return ticket at the same time, figuring you'd save hassle later. No go.
  
• Shanghai's train system is a bit more complicated because fares vary by distance. Here you can purchase a 20RMB stored fare ticket, then just make sure you have enough stored up. The station booth can deposit funds onto the ticket, no problem, and the entrance gates show how much fare remains. When you're ready to leave, you can cash in the ticket, again at the station where you purchased them. We were able to cash in the ticket at the Shanghai Railway Station at a convenience store, it was a bit complicated though!
  
• Use the ticket with the entry gate (slide it in for the day tickets or touch with the stored fare tickets), then use the same ticket to exit. The day tickets will be stored in the reader.
  
• Get to the station platform & decide which train to use - use your handy iPhone app to determine the previous & next stations, then look to see the directions for the trains indicated & hop on. There's a TV that shows when the next train will be arriving.
  
• Station announcements are made in Mandarin & English & are very clear.
  
• The trains in Shanghai & a few in Beijing have LED indicators showing where the train is between stations & which station is next.
  
• Dig the animation displays in the tunnels in Beijing!
  
• If a seat opens up - don't think, go for it!! This is a serious you snooze, you lose situation!
  

Other Impressions

It's been 9 years since we were in China last, and the pace of change in that time was remarkable. In Shanghai, we saw a Bentley dealership, apparently they are completely sold out through next year's production. Saw a lot of Maseratis, Porche Panamera's, 7 Series, you name it. Now the country side from the train still looked about the same, but I kept an eye on the phone the whole 5 hour trip from Beijing to Shanghai & had a solid 5 bars of signal the whole way.

Food prices were higher than we remembered. Going to dinner at a not-so-fancy place, in a somewhat touristy area, dishes ran from $3.50 for my favorite Yang Zhou Fried Rice, $10 for a delish dish of beef and Chinese broccoli, up to $25 for a "gui yu" sweet and sour fish. Mind you it was mighty tasty, but those prices are about what we'd pay here in the States...but our incomes are much higher in proportion. In a not so touristy area, I paid $15 for three bowls of noodles and a plate of veg, so I guess it does depend on where one goes.

Be prepared to reign in your personal space needs! There's a lot of people there, and the American bubble of space is much much larger than that of a typical Chinese! Expect to rub elbows & be gently nudged out of the way without an excuse me. Just the way it is, and it does work.

We bought some baby Mandarin oranges in Beijing & Shanghai, dang they were good! Great strawberries also.

Bargaining...it's all part of the program. Except in department stores, prices are negotiable. If you overhear someone buying the scarf of your dreams for 100RMB, when it's your turn the shop keeper will swear over their entire ancestores they never sold such a scarf for a measly 100RMB. Just be prepared to walk away...they'll come after you, but if the price still isn't what you want, really, walk away. The next vendor will have the exact same scarf at the price you want.

Hotels...the thing now seems to be glassed in bathrooms! Since how to put this delicately, when I'm enthroned I do like my privacy, there are shades to block the view. Goofy! Five star hotels are very nice indeed, but try some of the four star Chinese brands for a slight change of pace. If you can see if you can get breakfast included - at one five star, breakfast was RMB138 per person, so if that's included it'll save you some cash. If not included, go find a "Yong He Da Wang", get a bowl of fresh soy milk & some of those "yo tiao" doughnuts, and you'll have enough calories to keep you til the noon dumpling or noodle soup feed.

Money exchange...ATMs are now everywhere. The five star hotels we stayed in had money conversion machines - feed in your USD bills and get RMB back. This was convenient but expensive...the better bet is to take your greenbacks to a Bank of China office. Took us about 40 minutes at the BoC branch off People's Square in Shanghai, took about 15 minutes at the branch south of Tiananmen on Qianan Street. Same exchange rate for cash or traveler's checks now too, it seems.

Lastly, English...yes, there is plenty of English spoken, and be prepared to see people listening in to your chats on the subway & at restaurants, no worries it's just curiosity! At the same time, be armed with some basic Mandarin (or get the LearnChinese app & let it talk for you) to make things easier. For instance, "yi ge zhe ge" is your friend for pointing to a picture on a menu & asking for that item.

Needless to say yes we did enjoy our trip quite a bit. Our daughter really enjoyed it, she's a big fan of nui rou tang mian, had that for six straight meals & could keep going. Oh, one last thing...kudos to Delta Airlines for the seatback TV entertainment system - 13 hours of TV kept the daughter's attention with no fussing at all. Even some younger kids were parked still staring at Handy Manny for 13 hours. Even some, ah, older kids totally dug watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, Midnight in Paris, Harry Potter IV - 7 (could have seem them all & the LOTR trilogy), Tron:Legacy, and more!!

OK enough for now - next post will be about SharePoint web templates, promise!

Zai jian!

Referencing resources in SharePoint libraries

Wow, my first blog posting for 2011 - yes I have been busy, and neglectful!

One thing that's kept me busy is working with jQuery & SharePoint - very good stuff. But I have my jQuery js's and style sheets in a SharePoint document library. When I tried referencing them, I kept getting errors on the page...

because, I wasn't referencing these as:

<script src="./Jquery/jquery.tools.min.js" type="text/javascript">

Note the "." before the library name - that's what was missing.

Back to it! See ya!

DoDN Source & Presentation

Thanks for coming to Western Michigan's Day of Dot Net this past Saturday! The session went well, had some good questions about the configuration of a SharePoint developer's rig that I'll address in some detail in a subsequent post, but wanted to get this posted first. It's the presentation deck and the source code for the demos. The source code is all built for Visual Studio 2010. If you have access to the Expression Blend tools, all the better, but for the demos Visual Studio will definitely do the trick.


Here's the link to the zip file: DoDN-SharePoint-Silverlight.zip


Note that for the third demo, you'll need to host the compiled .XAP file in a SharePoint site that has a list named DayofDotNet. There's a .STP file (a SharePoint List Template file) you'll need to use to create this list, so that it has the fields & content the code is looking for. Post a comment or email me if you get stuck.


Thanks again for attending!


Steve & Charles

Visual Studio 2010 & Crystal Reports - change server at runtime

What? This isn't a SharePoint topic! You're right...every so often have to stretch a little bit.

So I have an ASP.Net web app and needed to add in a report. I didn't want to hand code it, and I had looked at using Crystal Reports for a different project & liked how nicely it integrates with Visual Studio. EZ-PZ to deploy it to the server, just install the runtime, deploy the project and we have reports!

Then came time to get the project up to production. I installed the runtime for Crystal Reports, clicked the Report link,and got the dreaded Database Login failed. Hmmm - I had updated the web.config appsettings to point to the Production SQL Server instead of my dev box.

That wasn't enough. Found a few entries suggesting to use the CrystalDecisions ConnectionInfo class, then another page saying to apply this change to all of the tables & subtables on the report, but that didn't help me - still got that logon error.

I ended up going the route of populating a data table with my report data, then using this table in the report - made things easier.

One other twist, I then needed to export this as a PDF, but I have SSL enabled; had to add in a few more lines of code. Take a look! And yes, this is VB.Net - it's an inherited project, too many lines to convert over!

Dim dt As DataTable

dt = BindReport()

rpt.SetDataSource(dt)

Dim reportDate As DateTime = Session("CurrentPayPeriod")

' Tell the browser this is a PDF document so it will use an appropriate viewer.
Response.Buffer = True
Response.ClearContent()
Response.ClearHeaders()
Response.ContentType = "application/pdf"


rpt.ExportToHttpResponse(ExportFormatType.PortableDocFormat, Response, False, "Timesheet Report")

Dim conString As String = System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings("connectString")
Dim con As SqlConnection = New SqlConnection(conString)
con.Open()
Dim cmd As New SqlCommand("usp_GetReportData", con)
cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure
cmd.Parameters.Add("@SelectedDate", SqlDbType.Date).Value = CDate(Session("ReportPeriod"))
cmd.Prepare()

Dim sqlAdapter As SqlDataAdapter = New SqlDataAdapter(cmd)

Dim dtReport As DataTable = New DataTable()
sqlAdapter.Fill(dtReport)
con.Close()

Return dtReport
End Function

Summer 2010

Hard to believe it's the last official week of summer - school starts next Tuesday, back to the old schedule! And hard to believe my daughter's already a third grader, time goes by!

So what have I been up to lately? SharePoint 2010 architecture. Haven't done a ton of coding lately, but I have inherited an ASP.Net application and have another one in the works. Did some coding with Silverlight & the Client Object Model for 2010 - blog post coming - it is sweet.

COM (the new COM, that is) is an EXCELLENT way to continue to deploy code to SharePoint, but do so without having to bug your administrators or your Change Management team. The code runs on the client, so no consumption of server resources, and the code can do only what the user can do, so the risk of deleting all sites on the farm is minimized.

Have also been looking at multitenancy. This is going to be big with 2010 - being able to partition off multiple companies on the same set of hardware, w/o needing completely separate farms.

Look for more blog entries about all of the above...really...I promise...

Visual Studio 2010 web parts and the type could not be found or it is not registered as safe

Not the story I'll ready to my daughter tonight, but the tale of a rename gone bad. When you're creating a web part in SharePoint 2010, and you rename your items from VisualWebPart1 to MyCoolWebPart, perform a Search in the Entire Solution scope for any remaining remnants of VisualWebPart1. There were a few...fix them up and your web part will register safely just fine & you'll be able to add it to your web part page.

SharePoint Saturday, speaking on workflow

It has been so busy it's about time I've reported this! I'm giving a talk at SharePoint Saturday in Ann Arbor on 3/13. The talk will be the SharePoint 2010 Workflow Smackdown. We'll be taking a look at SharePoint Designer 2010 & see if it's a contender for building workflows, compared to Visual Studio 2010.

As a developer, my first inclination is to go to the 'real thing', crack open Visual Studio and build out a new workflow project. But if my administrator won't let me deploy custom code, then what? In the 2007 days it would be worth the battle; we could create workflows in SPD 2007 but seemed it was always one action short of what I needed.

So can SPD 2010 help out? In short, yes! It has a lot more capability for workflow development, but I think more importantly it is a tool a (knowledgable) end user could use. Especially with Visio 2010 as the workflow designer tool, never did like trying to lay out the workflow in SPD 2007, wasn't visual enough.

Of course, that does mean that user needs Visio 2010, and SPD 2010. SPD 2010 will still be free, but Visio of course is licensed.

Now, if your environment lets you deploy custom code, and you know your way around .Net development, should you even bother with SPD? Good question. I'd have to vote it is worth considering, from a maintenance standpoint. One of the things us developers always do (me too!) is to create some great crazy code, deploy it, it works, great, and we move on. But then down the road darn that thing, it's having a problem. With SPD, because it is declarative, debugging and/or modifying is easier...in fact you could even get that power user to take over! So it is something to consider.

With that - here's the link to the presentation: SharePoint Saturday Workflow Smackdown

Note that if you want to play around with workflows, I recommend making sure you've first enabled the User Profile Import Service - without it, if you assign a workflow item & wait for the approval to kick in, you'll get a nice REJECTED instead. No email address. I also use SMPT4DEV to test the email messages - much easier than standing up Exchange! It's really handy.

Access Denied with SP custom web service

This one was bugging me for a while! I have an application that has a SharePoint workflow, that then calls a custom web service that interacts with the SP object model (long story...has to do with credentials).

Things were working fine until of late I started getting Access Denied messages when invoking a web service. In particular, the web service would fail when I tried to intantiate a web object, either through .RootSite or .OpenWeb(). I tried all sorts of combinations of Information Policy settings in Central Admin, switching to a different app pool account in IIS, impersonation in the code, you name it.

Now, the curious thing was it appeared the 401 Access Denied message was coming from IIS, not from SharePoint. I could attach to the debugger, and my code definitely was being executed, just failing at that .RootSite/.OpenWeb call. More curious, switching from Integrated Autheticatio to Anonymous allowed the web service call to work fine.

Well, I found a reference to an issue introduced by the .Net 3.5 SP1 Framework with the loopback adapter. Since the web service and the workflow were executing on the same server, I think it was the Framework that was causing the problem, too many repeat calls to the same server. When I changed the URL for my web service from http:// to http://localhost, the service ended up working fine. Repeated on a second server hosting the same instance.

Time to update the deployment documentation!!

And, happy 2010! Learned PowerShell yet?

More on SP 2010 & Windows 7 install

I was getting a User Not Found error when I tried installing SharePoint 2010 on my Windows 7 host. The install log didn't let me know which user, and since it's a Standalone install I didn't specify any user accounts anywhere.

I was installing using my usual corporate domain login on my laptop, but I wasn't connected to the domain at the time (yes, I was installing away during my daughter's dance class I gotta confess!). The ID was given Administrator permission, and I had UAC turned off.

The fix was to log on with the local admin account created during the Windows install. Not sure if it's because this ID really is admin, or if there wasn't a need to contact the domain. In any case, finally got past configuration task 2 of 10!

Well not quite, blogged too soon. The install failed on Step 8 of 10 with:

Exception: Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileException: Unrecognized attribute 'allowInsecureTransport'. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive. (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\WebClients\Profile\client.config line 56)

It looks like there's a hotfix for this, it's a new setting apparently for WCF coming with .Net Framework 4. To get the hotfix one needs to go through the usual channels vs requesting the fix right off the page, so instead I just deleted the attribute entirely from the .config file, restarted the Configuration wizard, and it completed successfully.

Installing SharePoint 2010 Beta on Windows 7 or Windows Vista

It is indeed possible! Microsoft has a good set of instructions here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx

Note that the step where you copy the long Windows command needs to be concatenated to one single line. I copied the text to Notepad, then pulled things back to a single line & it worked fine.

Enjoy!

SharePoint 2010 and VirtualBox

Others have mentioned this already but I just wanted to give my vote of support also...need to run SharePoint 2010 but only have a 32 bit OS host? If your equipment can run 64 bit OS (check out your computer's Windows Experience page details report in the "View and Print Details" link - under system there's a setting for "64 bit capable", hope it's a yes!!) - then check out Sun's Virtual Box tool.

Virtual Box is similar to VMWare, both of which allow you to run a 64 bit guest on a 32 bit OS, provided your computer is 64 bit capable. Nice!

Link to Virtual Box

Now just hang in there a few more weeks until the public beta is released!!

Custom web service - 401 Unauthorized

So I remember what I did for next time...

I have a custom web service that interacts with SharePoint. I created a new method so I could test the service from a Windows Form application - invokes a method without any parameters, then returns an item from a SharePoint list. Simple enough.

Of course, never say "simple enough"! In my code I could get a handle to the SPSite object, and the SPWeb object, but when I tried to get an SPList object or do an rootweb.Lists.Count property check I'd get a "thread was being aborted" message, and a 401 Unauthorized back. I increased the timeout in my proxy class, increased the HttpRuntime timeout, all no luck.

But then in my web service ASMX class, I added in SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges - and poof the web service now works.

TreeViewDataSource ShowDoclibChildren

Been spending my time getting my web site to be Section 508 compliant. I'm using the CSS Friendly Control Adapters off of CodePlex. I got the top level menu working nicely, then on to the Site Hierarchy tree view. Headache! My customer wants to see the first two levels expanded in the tree, so not just the libraries but the first two folders in the library also.

When I enabled the control adapter in the compat.browser file, I lost those subtree items - worked fine when I have the out of the box tree view set up, but when I switched to the control adapter, I lost the subitems - only the doc lib appeared, not the folders.

Digging around, I saw that there's a property for the tree view data source object called "ShowDocLibChilden" and "ShowFolderChilden" - set these to 'true' and hey hey there are my items!

Tomorrow's fun will be to get the CSS to work correctly, the indenting and expand/collapse aren't working right, but that'll be for tomorrow's post-coffee labor.

BTW, seems my blog comments are mostly spam, Japanese spam at that (is that tastier? I did like the teriyaki burgers at MOS Burger in Japan, burger patty, sweet soy sauce, rice 'bun' instead of bread!) - so send comments directly to my email, smushkat@hotmail.com

Project Server 7882: Unable to start services process.

Early morning panic attack! We did a database move of our Project Server database over the weekend. Rather than use the renameserver command, we figured to take the cautious route and set up an alias from the old SQL Server to the new SQL Server - that worked very nicely.

One of the other changes made was to start up the Search Service - previously we had the Office and SharePoint search services disabled, as they were causing errors with the old SQL Server - long story about that! In doing so, I had to update the SSP config page to start up the services.

Looking in the event log, there were a ton of errors complaining "unable to start service process. SSP: Service: ProjectQueueService", then the same error with the pjevtsvc instead. There was also a .Net Runtime 2.0 Error, EventType clr20R3, microsoft.office.project.server. system.nullreferenceexception.

I stopped & started both the Timer and Queue services, but that didn't help. Tried restarting both a few times. Tried an IISReset. Still didn't help.

My service account was set up to Log On As Service in the Local Security Settings User Rights Assignments, Log On as a service, so that wasn't it either.

What did the trick was to change the account used for both services in the Services control panel. The services were set to use the Farm account - I switched this back to using the SSP account instead, restarted the services, and we're up & running with nice quiet logs.

The workflow failed to start due to an internal error

Another fun bout with SharePoint! This one was a good challenge. I have a big WSP solution built with the VSEWSS extensions, and I wanted to add in my workflow to the solution. The workflow had been working just fine, so I merged in the project file, created a new feature in the WSP View of the project, added in the reference to the project output, and we're good to go!

Except after I associated the workflow and tried to use it, I got the very helpful error "the workflow failed to start due to an internal error". Nothing in the Application viewer, in the 12 Hive logs, just the friendly ol error message and nothing more.

We'll leave off all the things I tried (removing old copies of the workflow, new GUIDs, new namespace, new...well, you get the idea) and here's what did work: when I associated the workflow, I created a new Task and Workflow History list rather than use the ones that were in the site definition. Did that and the workflow is flowing along now. Nice!

I do indeed have a copy of the Tasks list in the site definition.

Convergence 2009

Just came back from working at the HP Booth at Convergence 2009, the Microsoft Dynamics show at New Orleans this year. I learned a lot about Dynamics, and in particular about CRM. (note, I work for EDS, an HP Company). We were the Platinum sponsor of the event & had a nice big booth in the Partner Expo area. I was there discussing SharePoint & how it can work together with CRM. I'll be blogging a bit about that over the next few weeks. Seems to be good stuff!

Magic Jack

One last post for today. Now I normally want this blog to stay focused on SharePoint & related products - like I said this is my virtual memory site, helps me remember stuff I worked on way back when - but I wanted to post about the Magic Jack.

I've gone wireless at home for some time now, but working from home I didn't want to chew up my cell minutes on those long conference calls. I had been using Skype, and was generally pleased with the quality and price, but I did have a few bad/dropped connections and on one conf call folks said I sounded like I was talking in a fish bowl 800 miles away. Not good, especially since the call was with some MS Professional Services folks!

Over the weekend the wife and I saw an ad on TV for The Magic Jack, only $19.95!! Ever skeptical, I decided to try it out anyway. I bought the kit at the local Radio Shack for $40, which includes the first year's service, and I gotta say, I'm impressed. The call quality is quite clear, it's easier to use than Skype - none of that 001 - 866 - 1235466 * thing to dial out, just pick up the phone and dial the number. I used it quite a bit yesterday and my audio was fine, and no one mentioned that fish bowl. Looks like a nice product.

If it turns out to be otherwise I'll let you know! There's a deal with it too, $60 for 5 years of service, instead of $20 per year (OK, $59.95 and $19.95 respectively but a spade is....)

DR with SQL backups and PSCONFIG

As promised...for my client we are only taking SQL Server backups of the databases used by SharePoint, although we may soon be taking disk image backups as well, but that's another story!

Anyway, I had to put together a DR plan documenting the steps to recover SharePoint. There's a great step by step on how to do this for Project Server, posted here. Great article, but there was one thing I didn't understand after reading this...what about my IIS sites? I wasn't sure if I had to create the IIS sites needed for my web apps before I ran that PSCONFIG CONFIGDB command.

Turns out is is NOT necessary. The first thing that command does is to unprovision the provisioned Central Admin site. We follow a standard deployment guide & use the same ports for Central Admin & the Shared Services Provider on all our installs, so even though I did use that same port in the steps prior to the PSCONFIG CONFIGDB step, not necessary. After unprovisioning the site, the process then creates the web apps, the IIS sites, links in the content databases, even for the SSP. Worked just fine.

Now, one last question...what about SSL? Does that also get configured after the IIS site is created? I doubt it, and I need to ensure the existing server's private key is saved off somewhere so we can reinstall it. I need to do one more test on the DR process, I'll let you know what happens.

SSL Exporting to a .PFX....not!

Yesterday I had a bit of a panic. I had a change request scheduled to publish my Project Server site over to our ISA Server. Normally to do this, one goes into the Certificates MMC snap in, locates the Personal certificate assigned to the server, and export it as a .PFX file.

Well, the option to export to .PFX was grayed out, with a warning about "the associated private key cannot be found" - but on the screen where I view the SSL certificate, I was told that there is a private key associated with this certificate. Since ISA Server requires the private key, this was going to be a show stopper!

Digging around I did find one helpful post on the Verisign site: http://forums.iis.net/p/1154109/1888980.aspx

This post lead to me look in the directory C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\MachineKeys, and then further, I was able to locate the file (named with a GUID) in the MachineKeys folder with the time stamp of when we installed the SSL certificate. Turns out even though I'm domain admin, that folder was not owned by the local Administrators group, and that further that GUID named key was owned only by the guy who installed the cert and SYSTEM - Domain Admins & the box admins didn't have permissions to the file or to that folder.

So once I took care of that, changing the ownership on that GUID file & then granting Full Control rights to that key, I was then able to export the certificate as a .PFX file...big relief!!!

The Startup Disk Could Not Be Written To

Well that says it all, ey? I've been working on some DR testing (stay tuned, post coming!!) to recover a Project Server deployment. I created my original VPC, up to the point where the DR stuff kicks in - installation of SharePoint, mainly; so the VPC has the host OS, joined the AD domain, has SQL Server installed.

I copied the VPC at this point then finished up installing the rest of the components - SharePoint, Project Server, service packs, December update, etc.

When I then went to boot up the DR VPC, I was told very nicely that "the startup disk could not be written to"! The VHD file had only the Archive bit set, was not set to be read-only.

I am using Vista w/o SP1 as my host OS. I went into the security settings for the file & saw that the file has entries for System, Administrators & Users. I thought my ID is a member of Administrators, but Users was marked for read-only rights, no Modify or Write rights. So I added in Modify and Write, must have got it right (heh) because then the VHD worked just fine.