Unable to find User Profile Service

One of our features had feature activation code which modified the user profile, adding some custom fields.

Upon feature activation we received this error:

Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileApplicationNotAvailableException: No User Profile Application available to service the request. Contact your farm administrator.

We had created a new User Profile Service application and set it up to synchronize profile information with Active Directory. The web application apparently was not seeing our new service application, but was using the default service application.

So I removed the default User Profile Service application and tried again. But I still received the same error message upon feature activation.

Then I realized that I probably need to reconfigure the service application associations with the web application, but when I checked, they looked correct.



The fix? Select "custom" from the "Edit the following group of connections" dropdown and manually select all items. This appeared to correctly associate the new service application and we could finally deploy our solution!