Hi all, I'm tearing my hair out trying to figure out why I can't get DNN to work. I have a completely vanilla install now, the default page comes up fine but for some reason when I click on Login or Register I just get the IE "Can't open this page" generic error window. It doesn't even seem to be trying to redirect to the Login page since the URL just shows the Default.aspx page (which ought to display fine even if it's not the Login page I asked for). I have no idea why this is happening.

Here are the steps I took (btw, I am on Windows 7 (64-bit)):

1) I downloaded "DotNetNuke_Community_05.02.03_Install.zip" and unzipped it to "C:\code\DNNTest"

2) I loaded up Visual Studio 2008 and selected "Open --> Website" and pointed it to "C:\code\DNNTest"

3) I ran the website from the debugger and it launched the installer which successfully completed fine. The URL in the browser at that point is http://localhost:51638/DNNTest/

4) Once it finished installing it brought up the default page which looked fine. But clicking on the Login page takes me to: http://localhost:51638/DNNTest/defaul...? where the browser just shows "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage".

What did I do wrong? I've installed DNN before and never had this problem. i was having problems deploying it to a production server so I just wanted to start over with a fresh install and the latest version.

Thanks to anyone who can help me out!

Phil

Hi Ken, Thanks for the information. Are you saying it's not *supposed* to work the way I did it? I have to admit I find the number of different DNN packages rather confusing. Maybe I should start from the beginning. My intention is (eventually) to be able to develop custom DNN modules in Visual Studio 2008, but I want to be able to publish the entire website (along with any custom modules) to our production server from Visual Studio in one shot. Is that possible? If so, how do I go about setting it up? I don't think I need to modify the core framework or anything, which is why I didn't download the "source" version; I thought that was only for people who needed to make deeper modifications to the platform. If I need to go back and install the source version that's fine, but can you explain why I can't run the site from VS the way I did? I'm just wondering what would be different about the source version that would allow me to run it from VS. Thanks! Phil

Hi Ken,

Thanks again for trying to help. I really appreciate it. Unfortunately I'm still stuck in the same spot I was before. I had already done step #1 in your post and it didn't make a different. I tried giving access to "IIS AppPool\DefaultAppPool" as you described in step #2 but it seems that account does not exist. Are you on Windows 7 as I am? Maybe the app pool name has changed? Anyway I decided to just give full control to the "Everyone" account just to save time guessing at the correct name but I still got the exact same behavior. I.e. the default page comes up fine but the Register and Login links don't work.

What you said about the port number being removed from the URL is interesting. I don't remember my portal doing that, but it made me wonder why. I mean, how would it know to keep the port number on the URL if the url in the portal alias table is just localhost/dnntest or whatever? In any case as I was reading through the web.config file I noticed this key was commented out:

<add key="UsePortNumber" value="true" />

So I thought I would uncomment it and see what happened. And now I can't even launch the default page! I just get the lame IE "can't display this website" page. So that makes me wonder what the purpose of that web.config entry is, but whatever...

So now I'm back to where I was. I'm going to start over again with the source version and see if I have any better luck with that.

Thanks,

Phil