This page has encountered a critical error. Contact your system administrator if this problem persists.

ERROR:"An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately. "

Do you get this error in your sharepoint site ?

Just one bad day you come in to see that your main page is bombing due to this error with no proper clue .Well it happened to me and i had no idea what went wrong.After lot of research i found something.

I had "?" marks all over my web.config file , which even erased some of characters.

Solution :

Search for "?" in web.config and start fixing the character in the file. I would suggest replace the web.config (obviously retain the custom entry ) with working one , i replaced my web .config with a working one and Volla!!! it worked for me .

In short the culprit is web.config and not SharePoint installation.

Cheers!!!

If this helps do leave comments , i would like to know how many SharePointeers got into this issue. :-)

Custom Activity for SharePoint Designer 2007

Every time you start workflow development there is big question in mind, Should i use Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer 2007 and you might end up visual studio if the workflow requirement is bit more than the "out of box" functionality of SPD.

Would'nt it be nice if i can plug in more functionality to Sharepoint Designer.

When MOSS 2007 came into market the impression was that SPD is not much extensible and is to be used for very simple workflow , but i am glad Microsoft didn't made it that stringent and have provided a way to attach custom activities to the SPD.

I have created custom activities in number of work flow scenario and belive me its great .I won't put my procedures in this blog as there are blogs where you can get the complete process. They helped me a lot of understand the "Custom Activities" development.

Here they are :

By Carlos Segura Sanz
http://www.ideseg.com/AddCustomWorkflowActivitiesToSharePointDesignerPart1.aspx
http://www.ideseg.com/AddCustomWorkflowActivitiesToSharePointDesignerPart2.aspx

John Holliday
http://johnholliday.net/archive/2007/03/27/Add-Your-Own-Custom-Workflow-Activities-to-SharePoint-Designer-2007.aspx

SharePoint Designer Team Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2007/03/15/adding-activities-to-spd.aspx

Well majority of them speak about same stuff , but cross reference helps to make understanding much clear .

HAPPY WORK~FLOWING!!!!