A while back, we upgraded our servers to Team Foundation Server 2010. Recently, I was tasked with the creation of a solution for COBOL.NET. This solution required Visual Studio 2008, so I created the team project while in VS 2008. This morning, I come in to emails that our Team SharePoint sites are down. Here’s the error message.

An error has occurred on the server.http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkID=96177

The link led me to believe that SharePoint needed to be upgraded, and I thought it was pretty suspicious that Microsoft would prevent use of our sites due to an uninstalled patch. Despite the oddity of the error, I sent a note to the help desk to patch the server and went about my business.

That wasn’t the problem.

I soon received a message back that there weren’t any pending updates. I asked team members when they noticed that the site was down, and I eventually traced it back to Friday. Since I added the team project on Friday, I decided that was unlikely to be pure coincidence.

I got on the server and shifted through the logs. Note that I’m running WSS 3.0, so your locations may be different if you’re running a different version or MOSS. I eventually found this item in a recent log located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\LOGS:

Exception stack trace:    at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPContentDatabase.ValidateDatabaseSchemaCompatibility()

This was among other information where the site could not load. This indicated to me that when the team project was created, it used an old schema. The original message was correct: I needed to upgrade SharePoint. Here’s how. Run the following command.

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN>PSCONFIG.EXE -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait –force

This corrected this problem. In the future, I will be sure to create the team project in VS 2010, then add the solutions through VS 2008.