User Profile Service–List of Synchronization Connections Shows Nothing

This has happened to me a couple times now.  I go to run a full profile synchronization in SharePoint 2010, it appears to cycle fully, but in the end no user profiles get updated.  I go to look at my Synchronization Connection settings and nothing is shown in the list – just a message “"The query returns nothing.".  Alas, I know I’ve configured the connection.

Can’t explain why this is happening, but its related to the Forefront Identity Manager Service.  It shows as startup type automatic in the Services Console, but the status is blank.  Manually start the service and the problems seem to go away.  Maybe when I have some time I’ll try to get to the root of this problem – why isn’t the service starting on its own?

SharePoint 2010 – The form cannot be rendered. This may be due to a misconfiguration of the Microsoft SharePoint Server State Service. For more information, contact your server administrator.

OK, so I’ve been just a little hands-off for the past couple years as I took on more project/practice management responsibilities. But here I am in my new position, eagerly getting my hands back in the dirt. I’m sure much of what I’ll post here in the beginning is common knowledge, but the blog thing for me is just as much of a personal reference as anything else.

Back to the purpose of this post. I just deployed my first custom workflow to my new SharePoint 2010 dev environment. When I tried to kick the workflow off from the browser, I got this (actually helpful) error message – “The form cannot be rendered. This may be due to a misconfiguration of the Microsoft SharePoint Server State Service. For more information, contact your server administrator.”. The guide I followed for setting up my environment didn’t mention anything about the State Service, but give it a quick Google and you’ll see that it’s quite important for InfoPath Forms Services. But how to create this Service Application? I didn’t come across anything in the Manage Service Applications interface, but thanks to Jeremy Taylor’s post, I was back up and running in no time. Here’s the PowerShell script needed to create the State Service Application:

   1: $serviceApp = New-SPStateServiceApplication -Name "State Service Application"

   2: New-SPStateServiceDatabase -Name "Dev_State_DB" -ServiceApplication $serviceApp 

   3: New-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy -Name "State Service Application" -ServiceApplication $serviceApp -DefaultProxyGroup

More to come...

Working now on recreating my old (and much neglected) blog that previously lived on SharePointBlogs.com. I've found backup copies of all my posts. Hope to get them all back up here over the next few days, and even hope to start writing some new ones as I get myself back into the swing of things.