Today I troubleshot an error that bubbled up in PerformancePoint Service's Dashboard Designer while attempting (and failing) to create a data connection. The first visible error was: Dashboard Designer "An unexpected system error has occurred...

It's one of those moments that messes with your sanity. You need to run an stsadm command that is sufficiently complicated that you're tempted to copy and paste rather than to type just so that you can be sure not to fat finger it. You paste the command...

Problem Summary: SharePoint Administrators lost the ability to browse successfully to Central Admin on a SharePoint 2010 server Errors: 1) In the browser: An Unexpected Error Occurred 2) In the ULS Log: w3wp.exe 0x15EC SharePoint Foundation...

When you're troubleshooting webdav problems in IIS 7.0 and think that everything should be working (but its not), consider uninstalling webdav completely, rebooting, downloading the most current installer package from http://www.iis.net/download/webdav...

Problem and Symptoms: There is a trick to reinstalling IIS7x that is not well known. For those familiar with IIS 6.0, it is natural to try to uninstall IIS 7.0 (or 7.5), reboot, and expect it to reinstall fine. If it doesn’t, it is somewhat natural...

Problem: For the sake of comparison, in IIS6 (Windows 2003) if you add a mime type (example: .xyz - xml/text) at the virtual directory level and then also attempt to adds the same mime type at the web site level, IIS6 will alert you that a child...

Symptoms IIS compression overwrites the VARY header. If for example an ASP.NET Web Service adds the HTTP header "Vary: Accept-Language, Accept-Encoding” to every response, it may work fine until IIS compression is enabled. The vary header may still...

Problem: IE8 is unable to display some pages from http://en.wikipedia.org when IE 7 and other browsers can open the same pages fine. IE8 is able to open most wikipedia pages. The pages it cannot open seem to be very random and fit no pattern. ...

After installing the framework 3.5 SP1 (kb 951847) (which also updates framework 2.0) an asp.net web app occasionally began throwing the following exception, as reported by their custom error page: An error occurred attempting to process your request...

On a fully updated Vista workstation running Visual Studio 2005 SP1 a breakpoint would be set anywhere in a simple asp.net web application, debugging would begin, and the breakpoint would be missed. It would not break on the breakpoint. During troubleshooting...

Problem: If you're browsing to an asp.net page and your browser reports "Sever Error in '/' Application." and "The current identity... ASPNET does not have write access to 'c:Windows\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.net files', you...

Overview It’s not unnatural to assume an IIS process hang when web client browsers begin reporting either “Page cannot be displayed . . . cannot find server or dns error” (IE6) or "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage. . .” (IE7). But when...

Although there are many reasons why IIS might return the http response code of 401.2 ("Unauthorized: Logon Failed due to server configuration") there is one scenario I keep running into which must be solved on the client side rather than the server. An...

When a %windir%/system32/inetsrv/metabase.xml file is transplanted from an IIS 6.0 server to the inetsrv directory of another IIS 6.0 sever, the IISAdmin service on the target server won't run. This is by design. This happens because important portions...

I've become quick to consider disabling the TCP off-loading engine features (or “TOE”) when trouble-shooting a problem involving IIS 6.0 and detecting the slightest hint of a "networking problem" or "communication problem." With the right combination...