Anonymous Access SharePoint WCM Site prompting for login in IE only.

Watch out for those SharePoint anonymous access demons, while a new site that I have been working on was going through testing on its way to UAT we encountered an odd bug where only IE 6-8 would request a login box when loading some pages, we traced this down to one Custom control that was pulling an item from a SharePoint list and displaying some images with their description.

As this was not an issue in other browsers we concluded that it was not the control or a case that the images were not published (though we checked to be sure), after a long night and a few tufts of hair lost to frustration I had a look at the html output, there plain as day was the culprit, an image tag with no alt or source, I have come across this before and could kick myself for it but what happened was the developer simply fetched the value of the image field and rendered the html supplied by SharePoint. When no image Url is supplied SharePoint outputs a blank image tag like this <img src=”” alt=””></img>, this tag causes IE to try and authenticate the user(don’t know why never botherd to look any deeper).

So the lesson learnt Don’t trust SharePoint’s Html it can be a Demond in disguise.

SharePoint 2010 and the NDA

I have been lucky enough to be working with the next release of SharePoint 2010 through the TAP program and have wondered what I can and can’t say about it, Joel Oleson has recreantly posted a helpful blog in regards to what we can and can’t say(What’s Up? NDA or NOT? Office 2010 Technical Preview vs. SharePoint 2010 Technical Beta), Till the NDA is lifted I won’t be saying much other than so far I have found 2010 to be looking really good and I can’t wait for it to move on to RTM.

For those that are interested.
My SharePoint 2010 environment is all beta/rc at the moment
Windows Server 2k8 R2 RC hyper-v Host with Windows Server 2k8 R2 RC VMs
With SQL 2008 running as the backend database on one.

So far so good, look forward to sharing what I have found in the future.