In Place Upgrade - Windows Server 2008 R2 to Server 2012 (Including Hyper-V)

I upgraded my developer workstation yesterday and it was unbelievably painless. I think this is especially noteworthy since my workstation is a fully functional desktop with everything from Office and Visual Studio to Chrome and mRemote. It also acts as a Hyper-V host for a number of machines I need to do my work.

Before starting I took several precautions, all of which were unnecessary:

• Back up My documents
• Back up Downloads
• Defragmented my hard drives

and for my Hyper-V setup:

• Compacted one of the drives that was too big
• Shut down all machines
• Deleted all snapshots
• Set machines to use static MAC address
• Exported VM's (in case I had to start from nothing)

I upgraded from a DVD. Server 2012 setup gives you one button - Install now. A little over an hour later, it was done. Everything still worked. One virtual machine needed to be set to allow MAC spoofing. I was back to work just like that!

How to Disable Themes in SharePoint 2010

Once you establish a particular look and feel and you don't want users with lots of permissions to mess it up, you need to lock down themes. If you don't want to do anything stupid like mess with the page in _layouts and you don't want to add screwy code to look for the themeweb.aspx you can do it a simple way ...

For the site scope where you want to disable it, run from the SharePoint Management Shell (not valid for SharePoint Foundation):

Disable-SPFeature -identity enhancedtheming -url http://hostname.net/sitename

Then delete all the themes from the gallery. Done.

I will be monitoring the fallout from this as we move to QA, but this seemed obvious!