Hi guys,

The context:
I've spent ages putting together a custom built ASP.NET site with oodles of forms and squillions of lines of business logic. It's time to add a CMS to it, and since I'd dabbled in DNN a few years ago I figured it was the big name to go to.
I soon found that in Soviet DNN, CMS adds you. I now have to convert my app (3 tier web forms using entity framework) into using the same database as DNN (it apparently doesn't like others much) and change every aspx into ascx controls. I investigated other CMSs and found that while others may not take over your app and/or be easier to integrate and develop going forward, DNN has forums and paypal subscription built-in and the biggest community to ask questions like this one. So I came back.

Anyway, I have a server out there in the intertubes that is both a web and sql server. It has both my custom site and the default dnn site/db on it.
On my local PC here I have visual studio with my custom site's source code, and a local copy of DNN I installed on sql server express.

The question:
What I want to do is start converting my site into a custom module. I tried pointing my local DNN's web.config to the remote server's DNN DB but it just keeps kicking off the install wizard, and I can't "open web site" on the remote server to use it with my local code. I'd prefer not to copy my site's DB to my local PC (It's enormous and I can't attach it here yet with just sql server express).
I've been going through walkthroughs and I've added a basic hello world level test module to my local DNN site, but how do I point it to the remote server's DNN DB?

While it's big and might take a while, it wouldn't be a bad idea to get a copy of the live db on your side. That way, just in case something happens to go wrong, you aren't losing any real data. The extra time it takes to get the db on your machine, or a test server, is well worth the headaches that will come later when things break during the development process. That being said, just make sure you can connect to the remote server via SSMS express first. Use the SQL Auth, not windows auth and use the same credentials from your web.config. Might just be the login you are using doesn't have permissions, but SSMS will show you a better error message.