SharePoint 2013 – Bug with Alert Me on a Discussion Item

If you attempt to set an Alert on a specific Discussion Post, like this: You will end up a yellow screen of death, like this: [crayon-52909e124d2ee979018149/] This bug appears to be ‘long standing’, and still exists as of the October 2013 Cumulative Update for SharePoint Server. On the process of setting up the Alert, a process gets the Content Type ID of the Folder. We start in the Microsoft.SharePoint.SPViewContext.FolderContentTypeId method, executing: [crayon-52909e124d30c242024242/] From there, entering GetValueFromUrlOrViewState, we enter: [crayon-52909e124d316301222504/] Within this method, here are the key variable values: [crayon-52909e124d320084963572/] From there, we come back to the Microsoft.SharePoint.SPViewContext.FolderContentTypeId method and further on down, execute: [crayon-52909e124d32a331697242/] Where valueFromUrlOrViewState equals the variable “str”.  So you want to generate a new SPContentTypeID object with a hex string and a URL.  This is where things “go wrong”. [crayon-52909e124d332573213722/] We’re calling SPUtility.Hex where chArray has invalid characters (values outside of 0 – 9 and A – F) in it.  The first one that gets hit is the “,” (comma) character.  SPUtility.Hex has no return statement, so it throws a System.ArgumentException. This particular bug will require Microsoft to resolve it.  I’ve opened a PSS case on it.