Applying SharePoint theme ‘Write error on file “/_themes/yourtheme” error

I recently went to apply a custom SharePoint theme and was presented with the unhelpful error message above.

It turns out that the reason for this error is that SharePoint has encountered an unknown file that it cannot read from in the themes’ directory.

Navigation to your custom theme directory  – [Systemdrive]\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES\yourtheme and delete the rogue file.

In my case it was the windows generated ‘thumbs.db’ thumbnail database in the folder that was causing the problem. If you have used an editor to edit any of your theme files then you may possibly have some temp files in the directory which need deleting.

If like me it was the ‘thumbs.db’ file then be sure to disable thumbnail caching for the folder. To do this click Tools in windows explorer then select Folder Options > View, look for the checkbox entitled ‘Do not cache thumbnails’ and click it.

Hope this helps 🙂

VseWSS 1.3 CTP March 09 – Still Buggy

I’ve been developing a web part today and thought I would try the VseWSS extensions to see if they would get the job done quicker, I normally just create the Visual Studio solution myself and use WSPBuilder (http://www.codeplex.com/wspbuilder) to deploy it.

After I had built my web part I clicked to debug and was presented with the following error:

To get past this error I used the following two blog posts:

http://blogs.msdn.com/steve_fox/archive/2009/03/18/vsewss-1-3-post-install-configuration.aspx

http://www.dotnetmafia.com/blogs/dotnettipoftheday/archive/2009/02/05/vsewss-1-3-ctp-feedback-and-feature-requests.aspx

It seems that the error is because the account running the application pool for VseWSS web application in IIS does not have the correct permissions. I was on a domain controller so simply gave the account domain admin permissions. This however did not fix the error and I ended up giving the account full control to the folder itself!

When I tried to deploy again I did not get the above error but now a different one (See screenshot below)! I cannot find any more details on this error and the folders specified in the error message do not even exist.  I think im going to go back to using WSPBuilder from now on as it seems the VseWSS extensions are still quite buggy.

If anyone has any more details on the above error and how to fix it then please let me know 🙂

Ten Themes for MOSS/WSS

I was looking around on the net for some downloadable themes for WSS or MOSS and found these – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0a87658f-20b8-4dcc-ad7a-09ad22641f3a.

This is a pack of 10 themes provided by Microsoft as a download. The download contains each theme as a Visual Studio 2008 project. If you open each one with Visual Studio and deploy it, a .wsp will be created allowing easy deployment to any WSS/MOSS Server. Screenshots of the themes included can be found below: