Microsoft cloud engineer - SharePoint, Office 365, Azure, DotNet, Angular, JavaScript.
Microsoft cloud engineer - SharePoint, Office 365, Azure, DotNet, Angular, JavaScript.

May 2012

Manually Run “Pause Until” SharePoint Designer Workflows

Recently I needed to simulate a future lapse in time in order to manually trigger the “Pause Until” SharePoint Designer function.  In the example below, the SharePoint server is a local DEV virtual machine running in Oracle VirtualBox.  That means it receives time from the parent machine.

 

Action Steps

  1. Move VM host clock forward 1 day (24hours)
  2. Move VM guest clock forward 1 day (24 hours)
  3. Run the Powershell command “Get-SPTimerJob | ? {$_.name –like ‘*workf*’} | Start-SPTimerJob

 

What the above steps will do is to simulate a future date and then trigger the SharePoint workflow engine.  If the engine finds any past-due activities (ex:  “Pause Until ___”) then it will execute those immediately.  Using this technique you can build “Pause Until ___” workflows and still test them to ensure everything completes as expected, without having to actually wait the full time. 

Smile

 

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An Unhandled exception CryptographicException occurred in OWSTIMER.EXE

I recently saw this error while patching SharePoint with a Cumulative Update.   Most people will never see this.  However, you are not most people.  You run Visual Studio. 

Smile

Visual Studio is trying to help us out with an unhandled exception by asking about launching debug.  That’s all well and good but I didn’t write the code and have no plans to change it.

Best way to work with this is to disable the JIT (Just-In-time Debugger) by following a few simple Registry Key changes:  http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsdebug/thread/9e6cb3fb-f8fb-4c22-8608-e521e13260ff

 

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Visual Studio Just-In-Time Debugger

An unhandled exception (‘System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException’) occurred in OWSTIMER.EXE [1344]

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@ SPJeff

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