Explorer view not working due to different casing in configured URI

Although this is not my ‘core business’ I wouldn’t keep this for myself:

Recently I’ve been investigating a problem with using the ‘explorer view’ on a document library in SharePoint. The problem was that the explorer view wasn’t working when browsing sites that were created using the url http://SERVER/Sites

After searching through Google and trying a bunch of different options that did not work I decided to put Fiddler in between. That was the moment when I saw a working and a failing url just a line below, together on my screen. The difference was the casing of the ‘sites’ part of the uri!! The working uri was the one with all lower case characters… just like the configured defined managed path in SharePoint. As it turned out later it was not the case for all of the site collections but especially the ones that were created by TFS.

To be short, the cause was a ‘misconfigured’ uri in TFS that is used when a site collection is created as part of a new team project.

I’m not sure whether WebDav or SharePoint is the problem here…but the solution is to correct the url of the site collection (backup/restore to new url) and reconfigure the Uri in TFS (TFSAdminutil.exe configureConnections /SharePointSitesUri:<newuri>) to make sure that new site collections created by TFS will have the right URL. Changing the managed path doesn’t work, because SharePoint stores the paths lowercase…

When running WSS 3.0 on a Windows 2008 Server and IIS 7.0, make sure the WebDav extension isn’t installed (disabled is not enough) and that the Desktop Experience feature is installed on the server. For more info on this specific Windows 2008 related subject see: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/thread/023f4b23-3ce6-4d83-8cb0-7398b88ba6ab/