Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC 3 application which uses PowerShell to connect to Office 365 to retrieve some details about user licenses.

The code itself works in many cases:

• The project in my local IIS works
• A piece of code in LINQPad using the library works on my machine
• A piece of code in LINQPad using the library works on the target server

And where it doesn’t work is of course the only place it really should work: The IIS on the target server.

I always get an Exception when calling the Connect-MsolService cmdlet. The problem is that the Exception doesn’t tell me anything.

The Exception type is

Microsoft.Online.Administration.Automation.MicrosoftOnlineException

and the message is

Exception of type ‘Microsoft.Online.Administration.Automation.MicrosoftOnlineException’ was thrown

which is pretty useless.

The Office 365 user account I use in my code is always the same. The user account used to start the IIS is always the same, too (Local System).

I wrapped the PowerShell code execution in a class named PowerShellInvoker. Its code can be found here.

And here is the code that connects to Office 365:

var cred = new PSCredential(upn, password);

_psi = new PowerShellInvoker("MSOnline");
_psi.ExecuteCommand("Connect-MsolService", new { Credential = cred });

There is no Exception actually thrown, the error is found in the Error property of the pipeline. (See lines 50ff. of the PowerShellInvoker class.)

The problem is that I don’t know what could be wrong, especially because the same code works when I use LINQPad. The search results by Google couldn’t help me either.

The server runs on Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter SP1 with IIS 7.5.

Answer 1

I found the solution!

I don’t know the reason, but on the target server, the app pool’s advanced settings for my app had set Load User Profile to False. I changed it back to True (which should be default) and voilà, it works!

Edit: The Load User Profile setting was apparently automatically set to False by default because the IIS 6.0 Manager was installed and False was the default behavior until IIS 6.0.