I have a pretty tough install/db problem I hope a DNN guru might be able to solve with Knowledge.

I had a working portal set up, version 4.9.00 with SQL Express 2008. Unfortunately, when I installed SQE2008, I changed the default engine to SQLEXPRESS2008 because I had an existing SQL Express 2005 instance called SQLEXPRESS.  This works fine, as I just have to change the connection string in the web.config. This all works.

But, I have my development team with their own local versions of the portal working fine with SQLEXPRESS in the connection string. Since I didn't want to have to have my own special web.config, I figured I needed to get my box set up so that SQLEXPRESS pointed at my 2008 server, not my 2005 server.

So first, I ran the SQL Express 2008 (with tools) installer again and added a second db instance, and called it SQLEXPRESS. I turned off the 2005 server, of course. This seemed to go oK, but when i opened the portal, it did not show my pages any more. IE my custom home page as set in the db was not available, and the login link didn't show me the login module to the portal.

So, I figured there was a 2005 conflict somewhere, so I uninstalled ALL SQL Servers from my laptop, including all related services and items in the Add/Remove Programs control panet. I even went through the registry and pretty much removed all references to SQLEXPRESS except the default db entries for Visual Studio 2008, which didn't seem to matter in this case.

I reinstalled SQL Server 2008 Express from scratch, using SQLEXPRESS as the instance name, and the install went ahead without any problems.

Unfortunately, my portal still does not show properly. I even went back to my VSS and got the working Database file and web.config from VSS that all my developers are using, but still, no go.

Would a full DNN reinstall fix this? I don't see how, since the database works fine for everyone else, so the db itself is not corrupt.

Any ideas of where to go from here, short of reimaging my whole laptop (that would be very, very very x 10^12 bad).

Thanks, anyone...

Jesse

Chris,

That's good to hear! This is exactly what we're doing... giving each developer their own portal and db. What  I meant by my posting was that my other developers followed my setup instructions and had success.

I found the problem when I went to a coworkers working portal, used my template, and then suddenly his portal broke as well. 

It seems most of the directions for development want you to have the entire portal as a web project in the solution with all the source etc. I don't like this because I don't like the idea of my source code hiding in the DNN source tree, not to mention we are trying to do TDD and building the whole portal many times a day is going to be too slow.

So I thought I could keep my module (web application) project over in my source tree, then set up my http: project url in my module project template to be http://localhost/DotNetNuke/DesktopModules/MyModule. However, doing this just caused DesktopModules to become a virtual directory and thus all the standard module files were inaccessible via IIS.

I now have other issues, but I'll use another posting in the appropriate area (probably Extend It!).

Thanks again,

Jesse