I'm really far behind on the items I've wanted to write about, but I definitely have a list of things to post on. Maybe I'll write a post about all the posts I need to write... Regardless, this one is so short and simple that I thought I'd get it out here quickly.

Less than a week away from production and we start getting an error upon logon to our site - "This page has encountered a critical error." I'm all like "uh uh, no way" and SharePoint's all like "uh huh, you betcha" and I'm all like "wth sharepoint" and it's all like "lol".

After some digging around and we finally figure out that somebody had been using the ASP.NET configuration tool (available from the ASP.NET tab in IIS) to increase the timeout settings for our site.  This tool, in all its infinite wisdom, not only updates that timeout settings, but also adds a nifty little xmlns to the configuration element - <configuration xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0">.  Apparently, little Mr. SharePoint don't like that namespace.  We removed it, reset IIS, and danced a little jig when the site came back up again.

Lesson learned #1:  don't use a tool to do what you can easily do manually.

Lesson learned #2: don't trust the Internet.  I didn't get any useful hits on this error message.