DiscountAsp.Net will not serve the default unedited Microsoft "Starter Site" template. I think this is due to a setting in the host's machine.config file. It expects you to be connecting to an instance of SQL server, but if you are using SQL CE, you will not have this connection information. Everyone wants to point to a kb article which states - If you receive the following application error message from your web application: Parser Error Message: The connection name 'LocalSqlServer' was not found in the applications configuration or the connection string is empty. The solution is to modify your application's web.config file and add the following line to the connection string element: <connectionStrings> <remove name="LocalSqlServer" /> <add name="LocalSqlServer" connectionString="Data Source=DBServerName;Integrated Security=false;Initial Catalog=DBName;User ID=DBLogin;Password=DBPassword" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> </connectionStrings> There are several problems with this recommended solution - 1. You have to have valid values for DataSource, Initial catalog etc. So just pasting this in to your web.config shouldn't work unless the string is never used. Entering this value in will actually cause an error in Webmatrix2 so that you can't publish because it expects there to be a valid SQL Server connection. 2. If you are using SQL CE, you will not have this connection string, and you won't have valid values to enter as described in the KB article. 3. The application is working locally on my own hardware, so I believe that DiscountAsp.Net's configuration is at fault. Maybe this worked with original WebMatrix, but not the refresh.
So the question is, has anyone else been able to get "Starter Site" to function once it has been published to the host? Unfortunately if I don't get this going, I will have little chance on getting my own source code to work either.
You need to add the blank connection string into your web.config post deployment using a FTP client, that will resolve the error being thrown by your server. You will still be able to specify another connection string for accessing your SQL CE database that your site will actually use.
