Windows SharePoint Services and ASP .NET 2.0!

After a day of many, many server upgrades to our internal systems today I received a rather sad message from our internal sharepoint site when I went to post an announcement about the excitement of Windows Server 2003 SP1:

The Windows SharePoint Services virtual server has not been configured for use with ASP.NET 2.0.xxxxx.0. For more information, please refer to Knowledge Base article 894903 at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=42660

Although this seems to be an uncharacteristically helpful message in that it provides the Microsoft knowledge base ID number, the KB itself was less than straightforward.

The main solution offered by the KB is to run the command line command:
stsadm.exe -o upgrade -forceupgrade -url http://URLOftheVirtualServer

The problem is that the version of stsadm.exe that exists on our internal server (Windows Small Business Server 2003) does not support the "upgrade" command. It offers a great deal of helpful commands, but no upgrade.

If you find yourself in this same situation, you can manually adjust the web.config file for your SharePoint site.

You need to make 2 changes:

1. (old tag) <trust level="WSS_Minimal" originUrl="" />
(new tag) <trust level="WSS_Minimal" originUrl="" processRequestInApplicationTrust="false" />

2. (old tag) <pages enableSessionState="false" enableViewState="true" enableViewStateMac="true" validateRequest="false">
(new tag) <pages enableSessionState="false" enableViewState="true" enableViewStateMac="true" validateRequest="false" enableEventValidation="false"> <namespaces> <remove namespace="System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts" />

The KB does a good job of explaining why it wants you to run these updates so I'll leave that up to Microsoft. This post should hopefully just help you out in the event that you've spent the last 8 hours running the 14 steps to upgrade your Small Business Server to SP1 and you just want to go home.