State Service Application – SharePoint 2010

 So, you decided not to use the Configuration Wizard to setup your Service Applications like I did eh?  So you probably got as far as I did…one item you can't create from the menu is the "State Service Application".

So how do you create it manually?  Well you could try the PowerShell commands in some order like this (dont do this by the way):

new-SPStateServiceApplication
new-SPStateServiceDatabase
new-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy

This of course will create everything, but for some reason the state service application doesn't see the database.  I'm not a 10 of 10 on PowerShell just yet and b/c I'm currently too lazy to open up Visual Studio and reverse engineer the Object Model, I decided to figure out how to get it to work in some other way!

Turns out, the solution lies in the Configuration Wizard for the farm on the Central Administration site.  Just delete the State Service Application, then run the wizard.  It will give you the options for anything that doesn't exist, that would include our lovely state service application.  It will then build the appropriate connections and ta-da!  it all just magically works.   I'm still not totally satisfied that my PowerShell commands didn't work, but hey, beta right?

One other step, you have to turn on the "In Proc" asp.net session state in the IIS 7.0 Manager for each web application.

Chris

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