Deploying a Solution in a Farm Fails Because of OWSTIMER.EXE

Today I had a strange error happening trying to deploy a WSP package on a SharePoint farm that had 2 front-end servers. On my local development virtual machine it deployed and activated flawlessly, but on the farm it deployed itself only to the local server and not the other server, stating that the deployment failed.

SYMPTOMS

It also gave the following misleading log entry in SharePoint logs:

OWSTIMER.EXE (0x065C)       Windows SharePoint Services       Timer

The Execute method of job definition "SPSolutionDeploymentJobDefinition" (id "0943ea83-88d3-4eae-b2d0-21ffca1c66ec") threw an exception. The method or operation is not implemented.

I double-checked the class name, the receiver assembly name. I removed all traces of the package (FEATURE files, DLL in the GAC), I did countless IISRESETs…in vain. The error repeated itself back and back again.

SOLUTION

I had a moment of inspiration and I restarted the WSS Timer Service on both front-end servers. I tried to deploy the solution again. It worked perfectly this time!

Five hours lost to a deadlocked OWSTIMER.EXE thread :-(