‘The configuration section 'connectionStrings' cannot be read because it is missing a section declaration’ message in IIS7

I spent the better part of this morning trying to figure out what was wrong with a 3rd party blogging utility that we recently started using. I was getting and error message stating that “The configuration section 'connectionStrings' cannot be read because it is missing a section declaration” when setting up my development environment.
The ONLY reference to this error that I could find was from MSDN HERE. No sections of the web.config were encrypted so, none of the recommended causes and resolutions helped.The web.config file for the 3rd party project was pretty large and I thought it might have been due to mal-formed xml somewhere. I validated the xml and scanned for anything obvious, but it all looked like everything was fine.
I eventually tracked down the problem with the web.config file. The problem was in the <configSections> section of the web.config. The 1st line within this section was <clear/>. The <clear/> tag can be used to removes all sections and section groups that were already defined (either earlier in the given configuration file or higher in the configuration hierarchy.) This is helpful in other sections when you want to clear a default provider before registering a new one, etc…
It looks like <clear/> is a valid tag for this section, so I’m not sure why it would be causing the error. Either way it solved my problem for my development environment. Hope this helps someone else in the future.
~ Paul

How to Import your Delicious Bookmarks into Google Bookmarks

So, like many of you, I’ve finally switched to Google Chrome as my web browser of choice (It has finally reached Default Browser status.) I still use Firefox for web development since Chrome lacks a lot of the tools I use day-to-day (Thanks firebug,) but the speed and usability of Chrome finally won me over.

Other than my development tools, the only other Add-on that I really miss is my trusty Del.icio.us Bookmark bar. It is great to have immediate access to my bookmarks in Firefox with tag support. To help remedy this situation I started to look at what options I have for accessing my Del.icio.us bookmarks from Chrome. You can do the obvious and just access them from http://delicious.com/, but that’s boring.

The 2nd option is to use bookmarklets. You can add these to any browser and they are basically bookmarks that give you access to your bookmarks. Not as good as a direct bookmark bar, but better than browsing there yourself 100 times a day. You can even get delicious bookmarklets that make it easy to pop-up the “Save bookmark” screen for the current page you’re on to add new bookmarks. Read about delicious bookmarklets..

The 3rd option (and the one I’m actually trying out.) Convert to Google Bookmarks. Unlike delicious, google bookmarks keeps your bookmarks private and makes them and their contents searchable. You can manage your bookmarks from the site or using Google toolbar. You can also manage them in Firefox using Add-ons. For users of iGoogle (Google’s home/startup pages), you can also get a Google Bookmarks Gadget that lets you interact with your bookmarks.

The next question is how to get ALL of your precious bookmarks out of Del.icio.us and into Google Bookmarks. Well, that’s easier than you might think. Mihai Parparita from Google has created a script that will import all of your Delicious bookmarks into Google Bookmarks automatically. You can perform the import at http://persistent.info/delicious2google or read more on their site..

You can also use a Google Bookmarks bookmarklet.

Does anyone else have a better solution for managing and accessing your bookmarks from Chrome?