Oh hey, this thing's still on

We're almost to the end of our upgrade from MOSS to SP2010. One of the minor gotchas I've had to correct recently involves the docicon registry on the server. For whatever reason, even though Microsoft negotiated a deal to incorporate Adobe branding/trademarks for Office clients (to save to PDF), this evidently didn't extend to SharePoint, and so SharePoint 2010 is, once again, without an official PDF icon.

Accordingly, I have to complete the traditional administrator journey of looking up information on something I did years ago once and never had to worry about again:

http://www.sharepointedutech.com/2010/02/17/changing-file-associations-icons-in-sharepoint-2010/


Of course, the instructions are pretty straight-forward, but the icon insertion didn't work, and suddenly I found all the icons broken. The answer is pretty obvious once you know about it, but it's so simple to forget about. Consider the string below:

<Mapping Key="pdf" Value="icpdf.gif" OpenControl=""/>

When copied off some websites using fancy new-fangled fonts and the like, instead of the regular ASCII quotes, you'll get elegant opened/closed quotes, which will still paste as extended ASCII in Notepad, but they'll break the XML syntax and upon an IISreset, you will no longer be able to load the icon file at all. Brilliant, eh?