For all the people that do InfoPath 2007 development and deploys forms to InfoPath Forms Services this is something that you should be aware of. I’ve know this for quite awhile but for some reason I’ve never blogged about it and I’m not sure why. Well that might not be totally true, I think I’ve not blogged about it because I’ve never fully tested all the scenario’s to get a definitive answer and unfortunately I still haven’t done that testing but I still wanted to mention this because I thought it was important. The below scenario doesn’t happen if the form is brand new but only if you are updating an existing form.

Have any of you ever seen the below screen after you updated a form that’s all ready being used by InfoPath Forms Services?

 

If you say yes then don’t feel bad because you’re not alone because everybody else has the same problem as far as I know. I’ve seen this same error is several environments that I’ve worked in with InfoPath Forms Services and that’s what makes me believe this is happening to everybody. The reason that you are getting the above error is because InfoPath Form Services is automatically recycling the IIS application pool for at least the Central Administration machine but it could also be happening to the WFE or WFE’s but I’m not 100% sure because I haven’t completed my testing. The below images display what the w3wp.exe process id’s are before uploading a form and then what they are after I uploaded the form. As you can see the id’s are different after the form has been uploaded to InfoPath Form Service. From my experience it only happens to forms that already exist in InfoPath Forms Services and not new forms.

Before:
 
 
After:
 

For everyone that didn’t know about this, this could be a really scary discovery for you because now you know that each time you upload a new version of an existing form SharePoint is recycling the AppPool’s on the server that hosts the Central Administration web application. I’m hoping that I might get some extra time to do some more testing in the future and give a more detail answer on which servers this really affects and what Web Applications.

Cheers,
Michael