Troubleshooting SharePoint 2010 Errors Using Correlation ID

SharePoint 2010 has made tracking down error messages somewhat cryptic. If you ever get an error message, usually it looks something like this:

Assuming that this is a production environment, the error message above tells you pretty much nothing! So how can we make sense of what is going on behind the scene you may ask. To answer that, let's navigate to the LOGS directory of the SharePoint Server in question and find the most recent log file there (which should be at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\LOGS\):

Right-Click on the file in question, and open it using notepad. Copy the Correlation ID you obtained from the error message and perform a search for it. You will have multiple entries in the file which will specify what page the error occurred on, what the Scope was when the error happened, what event was triggered when the error happend, and finally; what the actual cause of the error was, which depending on what you did to upset SharePoint will be different.

Pete Soheil
DigiOz Multimedia, Inc.
www.digioz.com

The language-neutral solution package was not found

This error pops up from time to time when trying to deploy a solution to SharePoint 2007 or 2010 and when it happens it doesn't easily go away:

Error occurred in deployment step 'Retract Solution': The language-neutral solution package was not found.

There are several things you can try to resolve the issue, in this specific order:

1. Close Visual Studio Solution and completely exit out of it, then run it again and compile. This sometimes fixes the issue. 
2. Right-Click on your Visual Studio Solution, select "Clean" Solution, then Right Click on SharePoint Project and choose "Retract". Rebuild and Deploy. 
3. In PowerShell running as Administrator run Uninstall-SPSolution: 
• Unistall-SPSolution -identity {Name of WSP File} -allwebapplications
4. In PowerShell running as Administrator run Remove-SPSolution:
• Remove-SPSolution -identity {Name of WSP File} -force
5. In PowerShell running as Administrator run the Delete() command:
• (Get-SPSolution {Name of WSP File}).Delete()

If items 1 through 4 doesn't fix it, item 5 will definitely do the trick, but it shouldn't be run unless all the other solutions fail. 

Pete Soheil

DigiOz Multimedia, Inc.

www.digioz.com