Today I had some really strange experiences while deploying some SharePoint application using a custom build WSP file.

First, I tried to re-deploy an existing solution, but that didn’t seem to succed. At least my SharePoint site replied with a “Service unavailable” notice. So I though, I should retract the solution – maybe someting in my updated solution broke my SharePoint site.

So doing a

stsadm –o retractsolution –name myapp.wsp –allcontenturls –immediate

also just failed on me. So next I was stuck. I couldn’t neither delete the solution nor retry to retract the solution because everytime I got the message, that another job is currently retracting this solution. This is why I couldn’t do anything at the moment. But what now? It didn’t seem like the was any other job running.

So I gathered a list of all running deployments using

stsadm –o enumdeployments

and then

stsadm –o canceldeployment –id

to actually cancel the running deployment. After that I could issue

stsadm –o deletesolution –name myapp.wsp –force

This actually remove the solution – but I had to find, that this wasn’t the cause for my “service unavailable”. So all this for nothing!

The strange thing about that is, that only one out of a dozen websites was not working. Then it strike me – looking at the IIS admin I found, that the app-pool associated with this SharePoint site was stopped – restarting the app-pool solved my “service unavailable” immediately.