Just a quick little note of a quick solution I came up for a weird problem that occurred on my dev server.  I was preparing for a presentation and when accessing the site that contained all settings, data and code for the presentation was immediately receiving the error message: “The context has expired and can no longer be used”.

The context has expired and can no longer be used - Error Message

Checking the ULS logs showed the same error message being displayed.  What was weird about this was my root site collection was still rendering, but thinking back to that, I wonder if it was caching.  I don’t think so though.  I should have tested a bit further, but was starting to stress as it was 11pm at night and I had an early morning to get on the road to make it to my presentation on time.  I don’t normally do this, but lately I had been simply saving the environments without shutting down.  I figured the problem was with IIS as it hadn’t yet done either a proper restart or a IIS refresh in a few days.  Plus the error message sounded like a web issue and not a SharePoint issue.

I am sure you more experienced web devs immediately knew “Oh, that’s obviously an IIS issue”.  I however had never seen it.

And the resolution was to simply restart IIS.  Once that completed the page loaded just fine.  Hope this helps anyone with a similar issue.

 

Thanks for reading!