Speaking the language of business intelligence with an Australian accent

Friday, February 22, 2008

PPS Web Service Connection Issues & .NET 3.5

Recently I came across another connection problem that was not related to data sources or application pool account privileges. We were unable to connect to the web service in Dashboard Designer but couldn't figure out why not. We checked everything. Eventually we tried to simply browse to the web service location in IE. On trying to browse the .asmx we were faced with a descriptive stack trace that gave us more more of an idea of where to look to solve the problem. BTW, it is worth noting that we were working on a standalone PC being using for development, not a server.

The solution came courtesy of Hassan Syed, an excellent .NET consultant I have been working with recently who maintains a blog named "From fragile to agile" (love the name). Without stealing too much of his thunder I will say that the problem was probably related to installing .NET 3.5 long after PPS M&A had been configured and had been working without issue. Hassan has documented what was done to bring the web service back on line here.

It should come as no surprise that a newer version of the framework could possibly cause problems with software that was written on an earlier version. Nonetheless, if you do want to upgrade to 3.5 Hassan's post is worth noting.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I just had the oposite problem: I was trying to install the PPS Monitoring Web Parts on a SharePoint server. The PPS web service etc had been installed on a different server a few weeks earlier. On the SharePoint server, .NET framework 3.5 had been installed, and .NET framework seems to have Ajax pieces in it. This tricked the PPS prerequisites (and me) to believe that Ajax was alreay installed. THe installation went well, but when I tried opening the site collection that the web parts were deployed to, all I got was an error. After working with a Microsoft support guy for a while, he found some information indicating that PPS does not work with the Ajax version that is part of .NET framework 3.5 and that I needed to install the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0 after all. Installed ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 1.0, and the site collection was OK.