I have been working on an issue with a SharePoint environment and looking through ULS logs, Database logs as well as looking at endless Debug logs to figure this out. Of course that sounds like loads of fun as you can imagine.

Anyway I was surprised while discussing this issue with others that not many people knew about the quick way to see what error is being caused when you get the following error in the browser.

This error is most common when trying to access the “ProfileService.svc” and a failure occurs for some reason.

You can spend hours trying to trace this, to find what it actually means, when in reality the easy way to see what is happening is to look at a stack trace. And where do I see that I hear you say?

Look no further than the source of the error page you see.

At the bottom of the page source you will see the stack trace you need to try and figure out what the issue is, without having to go the event viewer to see the same details.

Page Stack Details

Event Log Details

If you already knew this, then you are one of the chosen ones, if not you just learned something new about SharePoint, feel smarter 🙂