Given this is my first SharePoint-related post it seems prudent to keep things short and simple so as not to bore those of you who might be visiting here for the first time. I'm hoping this year to use my website to publish interesting facts and tid-bits I come across in my daily romances with SharePoint, and this might be a useful place to start.

When attempting to connect to a brand-new site with SharePoint Designer 2007 I received what was initially a somewhat cryptic error:

The server sent a response which SharePoint Designer could not parse. If you are trying to connect to a Windows SharePoint Services server, check with the server's administration to make sure Windows SharePoint Services is installed correctly.

But wait a minute, I am the server's administrator. And as far as I could tell, given this was an out-of-the-box, virgin install, everything was installed correctly. So the poking and prodding and kicking of tyres commenced, along with a flurry of Google searches.

As it turns out, my web.config had gotten itself muddled. The <remove verb="*" path="*.asmx" /> httpHandler directive had somehow landed after the .asmx verbs that need to be included, resulting in all .asmx files becoming inaccessible. The following was how the httpHandlers section of my web.config stood:

    <httpHandlers>
      <remove verb="GET,HEAD,POST" path="*" />
      <add verb="GET,HEAD,POST" path="*" type="Microsoft.SharePoint
      <add verb="OPTIONS,PROPFIND,PUT,LOCK,UNLOCK,MOVE,COPY,GETLIB,
      <add verb="*" path="Reserved.ReportViewerWebControl.axd" type
      <add verb="*" path="*.asmx" validate="false" type="System.Web
      <add verb="*" path="*_AppService.axd" validate="false" type="
      <add verb="GET,HEAD" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="System.W
      <remove verb="*" path="*.asmx" />
    </httpHandlers>

This then became a very straightforward fix. Simply move the last line north until it sits above the previous .asmx line as follows:

    <httpHandlers>
      <remove verb="GET,HEAD,POST" path="*" />
      <add verb="GET,HEAD,POST" path="*" type="Microsoft.SharePoint
      <add verb="OPTIONS,PROPFIND,PUT,LOCK,UNLOCK,MOVE,COPY,GETLIB,
      <add verb="*" path="Reserved.ReportViewerWebControl.axd" type
      <remove verb="*" path="*.asmx" />
      <add verb="*" path="*.asmx" validate="false" type="System.Web
      <add verb="*" path="*_AppService.axd" validate="false" type="
      <add verb="GET,HEAD" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="System.W
    </httpHandlers>

And there you have it. Jump out of SharePoint Designer and sign back in. It will now parse your server's responses to its heart's content.