Master data services – configuration glitch

A fairly high percentage of any developers life will require troubleshooting. And yes, I found myself back in that position with a recent install of master data services.

Symptom

When trying to load the mds IIS site through the browser, the default.aspx would simply not render. So, the loading wheel would simply keep spinning in the tab, without returning any content. Occasionally I would be fortunate to get a ‘page could not be loaded’ timeout response, but most times the wheel would literally keep spinning.

Factors

This install was distributed, I.e SQL database was on separate server to IIS. Also SQL server was configured in non-standard port for security.
The install of mds ran successfully.
The config tool ran successfully, creating the site and db successfully.
But still, no page loading?

Resolution

Turns out that the config tool drops the SQL port specified when storing the connection string to the web.config XML file. Update this string in the web.config file by hand, and suddenly the page starts loading as expected.
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