1:  using(SPSite site = new Site(http://www.portal.com)) 
   2:  {    
   3:      SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb("/anotherWeb/"); // no exception
   4:   
   5:      string title = web.Title;  // throws exception
   6:  }

The first line in the using clause will not throw an exception even if anotherWeb doesn’t exist , but you’ll encounter a FileNotFoundException exception in the second line since web is a null reference.

To make your code more robust, you should check the existence of the web before using it as follows:

   1:  using(SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb("/anotherWeb/"))
   2:  {
   3:     if(web.Exists)
   4:     {
   5:         string title = web.Title;
   6:     }
   7:  }

Alternatively, The SPSite.OpenWeb method has a (string, bool) overload. If you set the bool to true you should get an exception if the site doesn’t exist. Waldek Mastykarz has explained this behavior on his blog @http://blog.mastykarz.nl/inconvenient-opening-spsite-openweb.

Just thought of sharing this MSDN forum-thread with my blog followers since I have received this question more than once. Usage Analysis is really a common source of confusion among SharePoint administrators.

Q :

I have 3 Web Applications, webapp1, webapp2 and I recently added webapp3. each web application hosts about 5 site collections.
I have enabled usage analysis processing  on the farm level but it’s only capturing information for web app1 and web app2. And it’s not capturing any information for any site collection for web app3.

A :

Usage reporting from within MOSS runs on a daily schedule that is user configurable from the central administration, you must wait at least one day for any meaningful reporting to be available for new web application. By the way you should activate the reporting feature on all the site collections in the web application.

Q :

I have already activated the reporting feature on all the site collections and about 48 hours elapsed to collect the usage statistics.

A :

Run the following commands from the command prompt, wait for 24 hours and it should work.

stsadm -o setproperty -pn job-usage-analysis -pv no

stsadm -o setproperty -pn job-usage-analysis -pv yes

This sequence disables, then re-enables the job-usage-analysis job within SharePoint. It’s important to execute this sequence after adding new web applications.
Let me know after 24 hours.

Q :

Now the new web application usage info is captured.

A :

Note that when you add a new Web application to MOSS, usage analysis is not automatically reconfigured. In order to make usage analysis processing available for the new Web application, you must disable, then re-enable via central administration or through STSADM as I showed you.

Sometimes you will encounter something very weird in the ULS logs. The only entries that are logged are “Tracing service lost trace events” log entries. To resolve this issue, just restart your Tracing service. You can do that from the command line using the following commands:

net stop sptrace (to stop the tracing service)
net start sptrace (to start the tracing service)

This will do the trick for you.

In addition, you may want to check out the free SharePoint Troubleshooting issue I recently authored forUnderstanding SharePoint Journal .

Microsoft so very graciously provides a free version of SQL 2005, SQL Express, with MOSS. If you install MOSS using the Basic option or Single Server under Advanced you get SQL Express automatically. So what if as a budding newbie SharePoint admin you chose the Basic option, but now as a wise aged SharePoint admin you’ve seen the error of your ways and want to use a more respectable version of SQL for your SharePoint backend? You’re in luck. This blog post will walk you through upgrading SQL Express to SQL Standard or Enterprise.

When you create a site collection from MOSS publishing site template , you get an OOB permission level called “Restricted Read” . The description of Restricted Read in SharePoint is “Can view pages and documents, but cannot view historical versions or review user rights information.”
This is true. But, you can also use this permission level to give users permission to open items in a list without letting them to navigate to the list and enumerate the list items. For example, if you have a document that you want to share with all the portal users, you can upload it to a document library and provide a link from the home page to it and you can still prevent the portal users from browsing the document library directly.
Nice and easy 🙂