I was learning to develop a feature in Sharepoint, and started with Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 by Tedd Pattison. It is a really awesome book. But this post is about a problem which really frustrated me and I ended up wasting some precious minutes struggling over a non-issue. I was in chapter 1, and I started copying/pasting the code to get a feel of how the features work. In the end, when I was supposed to see my code in action, I started getting this…

Now, you can’t blame a book when you are new to the technology, right? I thought I must have goofed up somewhere, or did something bad with my Sharepoint site… and just ended up making the problem worse. Anyway, in the end, I did something which I think I should have done first…

“READ THE ERROR CAREFULLY”

Failed to create feature receiver object from assembly "HelloWorld, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=e7bceefb86be0469", type "HelloWorld.FeatureReciever" for feature a790f1c4-0f27-4ba6-bace-1d7ff3a4ff29: System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: type
   at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type, Boolean nonPublic)
   at System.Activator.CreateInstance(Type type)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFeatureDefinition.get_ReceiverObject()

Notice the typo above. FeatureReciever!!! This came in my project, because I copied/pasted it from the book .

ReceiverAssembly="HelloWorld, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b59ad8f489c4a334" ReceiverClass="HelloWorld.FeatureReciever"

Just fixed the typo and everything was good. Hope you don’t do the same mistake I did. ALWAYS read the error SLOWLY and CAREFULLY. <preaching ends />

Until next time,
Rahul

Quote of the day:
My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the hell she is. - Ellen DeGeneres