Question

The problem only occurs on a server with Windows 2008 Server, locally I run the application and have no issues. I’ve used the “bin deploy” and “Add Deployable Dependencies…” options and still no luck. Some more context…

The security settings in IIS are set for Windows Authentication, the web.config has a small exclude of anonymous users (not sure this even makes a difference in this scenario).

  <authentication mode="Windows" />

In the Global.asax.cs file I have the standard template generated code.

public static void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters)
{
    filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute());
}

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
    routes.IgnoreRoute("elmah.axd");
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{*favicon}", new { favicon = @"(.*/)?favicon.ico(/.*)?" });

    routes.MapRoute(
        "Default", // Route name
        "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
        new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
    );
}

The only addition I’ve made is for elmah and the favicon. I’m not sure what else to look at from this point forward, so any help would be appreciated.

Also, my connection string to the SQL CE looks like this:

<add name="BillingLogDbEntities" connectionString="metadata=res://*/Models.BillingLog.csdl|res://*/Models.BillingLog.ssdl|res://*/Models.BillingLog.msl;provider=System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0;provider connection string=&quot;Data Source=|DataDirectory|\BillingLogDb.sdf&quot;" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" />
    <add name="BillingLocalDbEntities" connectionString="metadata=res://*/Models.BillingLocal.csdl|res://*/Models.BillingLocal.ssdl|res://*/Models.BillingLocal.msl;provider=System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0;provider connection string=&quot;Data Source=|DataDirectory|\BillingLocalDb.sdf&quot;" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" />
    <add name="OverlayServicesDbEntities" connectionString="metadata=res://*/Models.OverlayServices.csdl|res://*/Models.OverlayServices.ssdl|res://*/Models.OverlayServices.msl;provider=System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0;provider connection string=&quot;Data Source=|DataDirectory|\OverlayServicesDb.sdf&quot;" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" />

Answer 1

The solution was a combination of two things:

1. I needed to set the appropriate permissions on the directory that the SQL Server CE files were located inside of.
2. The Entity Framework needed regenerated to point a the SQL CE databases again. For some reason the application was actually swallowing the errors that were simply a “couldn’t connect to the X database” Something in some of the generated code had gotten out of sync.