SharePoint 2010 issue - Site owners are able to delete site templates or sandbox solutions from solution gallery without deactivating them

If you are using sandbox solution or saved site template on SharePoint 2010, you will noticed those solutions will be uploaded into solution gallery. We are currently run into an issue that site owners are able to delete site templates or sandbox solutions from solution gallery without deactivating them on some circumstances. More precisely site owners are able to delete site templates or sandbox solutions from solution gallery without deactivating them on load balanced multiple tier environment through edit item.

Here is the detailed steps to produce on SharePoint 2010 SP1 + June CU we are using.

1.       Setup SharePoint farm to have two IIS front servers and one or more application servers as multiple tier environment

2.       Save one site (Ex. http://sharepoint/it/EMS)  as site template ems.wsp and it will be loaded to solution gallery

3.       Navigate to solution gallery and active the solution if not already (Se screen shot the “Delete” icon is disabled from top ribbon)

4.       Click the Edit icon next to the solution and click “Delete Item” icon from the ribbon of the Edit Item dialog (See screen shot that it is not disabled!)

5.       The solution will be deleted from the solution gallery without deactivating

Two interesting observations are:

• You could not delete the activated solution directly from the top ribbon since it is disabled when solution is activated.
• Even you delete the solution from edit item dialog on single server environment, you will get an error without deleting the solution. See the screen shot for error if you delete the solution without activating it.

Since we have identical third party solutions and customizations installed, the only difference is the single server farm and front server with application server architecture. If we delete the solution without deactivating it, the template becomes orphan. Even it displaced when you create new site as show in the following screen shot, but you will get the error in the screen shot if you use it to create the site.

I also noticed that several people mentioned that might be a bug to delete solution from gallery that December CU 2011 might fix it. See the blog posting for details. I’m not sure whether our issues is related to this.

We have confirmed with Microsoft that can be reproduced on multiple tier architecture SharePoint farm. If you have web front servers and applications servers architecture, you will have this issues on the web front  servers. This is related to two services  “SharePoint 2010 User Code Host”  and the “Microsoft SharePoint Sandboxed Code Service” implementation.

This issue seems to be resolved on 2011 DEC. CU after initial testing.You can check the blog how to fix the issue on the existing site collections.