Visual Web Developer, SSX and "FSOITD"
Fellow HDRite Mark Sowash has a phrase that we loves to fling at me about some Microsoft products: Feature Supported Only In The Documentation. Yeah, sometimes he's mostly right about that too. But there's one that I've not been talking about until I saw somebody from MS post on it first.
One of the really cool things that your supposed to be able to do with Visual Web Developer is that you're supposed to be able to attach to an SSX database simply by specifying to do so in the connection string. And that works in testing, but not in deployment? Why?
Security Contexts. If you're living the non-admin lifestyle, it wouldn't work from Studio either, because in Beta1, attaching to a database file requires the calling process to have administrator rights. In the recommended configuration of IIS, all active users are running in a very low right, annonymous access account, so this approach consistently generates an Access Denied exception.
Roger Wolter address this the other day in the SQLExpress newsgroup and let us know that the team is working on changing the behavior for -- hopefully -- Beta Two. That's a relief!
Now putting one and one together, you might understand why I had to abandon the "Alter View, Create Function" series that I was working on over on SSWUG. Sorry about that, I didn't want to, but I also felt it was important to not start leading folks down this path once I discovered it.
This is out in the open now, I can resume my regular programming.