Whether you are working with forms in custom workflows - or simply trying to publish a form to a form library in MOSS so you can collect information from the user, you may encounter this error.

Initially if you Google the error - you may find comments that state that you need to uncomment the following line in the web.config for the web application:

<!-- <add name="Session" type="System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateModule"/> -->

DO NOT uncomment this field. Many do this and the forms may work - and this appears to be the solution - but it is not the best practice and it is not recommended by MSFT.

You probably have not created a Shared Service Provider and associated the web application in question with the SSP.

MOSS uses the Shared Service Provider to allow / manage session state for a Farm - and specifically for the associated web applications under that SSP.

CREATING THE SHARE SERVICE PROVIDER

When you installed MOSS - the first thing you began to get familiar with is the Central Administration tool. Take a look at the following snapshot:

Notice on the left side - under Shared Services Administration, there are 2 SSP's - SSP Administration and SSP Services. These were created after the farm was deployed (a farm is used relatively here - in essence, after MOSS was deployed).

When you first setup MOSS - there are no SSP's out of the box deployed for you. You must manually create them.

The first SSP you create will contain the SSP/Admin site - and you will also receive a warning that you should not create things like My Sites or Search services scopes within this SSP. It is a best practice to first create an initial SSP - like the example above - name is SSP Administration - and then create a 2nd or successive SSP's for shared services (like Forms, Search, Excel, My Sites, etc).

Finally, when creating a SSP - you will notice that the SSP site will default to an existing web application. See the snapshot below:

Under the Basic Sites in this example, you would click the Create a new Web Application - the objective is to place the SSP in its own web application and not an existing one. Once that web application is provisioned - you will be returned to this screen and you'll be able to select the appropriate web application for the SSP.

Ping me if you have any questions - hope this is helpful...

As Vista gains momentum, and many of us get our hands on it - we're quickly faced with a question that not many seem able to answer. More disconcerting - there is nothing solid out there to provide direction.

If I am a ASP.Net developer - I want IIS available for my development pleasure.

More important, I will probably be using Visual Studio to crank out my applications.

There is a lot of effort in the launch of Vista and the new Office products - but what about the development community? Especially if we're not one of the few that can afford to travel the globe and partake of the special developer launches sponsored by MSFT?

A good start is here for the latest developments regarding Visual Studio and Vista. Pay special attention to that one line about VS .Net 2002 and 2003 not being supported on Vista! This is very important to many in the development community.

Be sure to get up to speed on the Visual Studio SP1 release. A touted 70+ enhancements, including:

Yes, MSFT announced a SP1 for Vista, covered pretty decent here but you should know that this release is beta. The official release will not appear until RTM Vista is launched in January/February this year.

Planning automated deployments of Visual Studio on Vista workstations? Be sure to review this blog on some issues identified early on. The honeymoon is over!

Be sure to check out the latest podcasts that highlight the latest Visual Studio tools / technologies / direction.

As I ramp up to start doing all of my development on Vista - I'll keep you posted on the pitfalls and niceties - if they're to be found!