Welcome to Salvo(z)

After making what I thought was a small change to a WCF service being consumed by a Silverlight Application, I was faced with an HTTP 504 error. My asynchronous call in Silverlight was started, and I know it was being received by the server because I had SQL profiler running and could see the data access call. Eventually the Silverlight application would throw an exception stating that a timeout exception had occurred.

I’m back doing another spike with WCF data services. This time using the Entity Framework 4.1 RC and the WCF Data Services CTP 2 (which enables support for EF 4.1’s DbContext API). Once again I am faced with a no so helpful error message. Remembering back to my last visit with WCF Data Services I made the change to include the exception detail to get a better idea of what was going on and was rewarded with the following.

I’m currently evaluating SQL Server Analysis Services and various methods for connecting to, and consuming the data. Excel has built in support for not only a “direct” connection to SSAS, but also supports an HTTP connection to msmdpump.dll hosted in IIS (see this article for how to set that up). In order to support a custom authentication store for the project I am working on (i.e. don’t rely on Windows Integrated authentication for the clients), I wrote a HTTP module that works with Basic Authentication and queries a database to validate a user.

Today I started a new WCF Data Services project, set my data context (well actually I didn’t as we’ll see in a moment), hit F5 and I was greeted with a very unhelpful error message: The server encountered an error processing the request. See server logs for more details (see image below).

In SQL Server reporting services, you can write custom code in two ways. The first is to embed VB.net code directly into the report. The second is to create a .Net assembly in C# or VB.net and deploy this assembly to the reporting server. Embedding the code is quick and easy, but you have no intelli-sense, code coloring, or any of the other nice IDE features. You can not share the code between reports without doing a copy and paste. A deployed assembly is more difficult to manage (as I will show below), but gives you the full power of the IDE for development, allows you to write unit tests, and allows you to share code between reports.