When starting a new DotNetNuke based website, I like to develop it on my local machine, and when everything is ready for a first deployment, I deploy to whatever staging or production server is relevant.

This has worked fine over the years, but I ran into a problem recently when applying this approach to DNN 4.03. I had everything working just fine on my local machine, but after deploying to our production server, I could not get the site to work. It would give me some message about a NullReferenceException when trying to get the portal.

Opening up Query Analyzer, I could select the records from the dnn_PortalAlias table and see that everything matched up. I banged my head on this for a long time.

I finally had the idea to change the connection string to point to a brand new database. I thought maybe I would find some discrepancy in the database records. Perhaps I deleted something or other important. After the change, I hit the site which invoked the web-based installation process. Once that was complete I tried to get a list of records from dnn_PortalAlias and got an error message Invalid object name 'dnn_PortalAlias'. Huh?

Executing sp_tables showed there was no dnn_PortalAlias table. Instead, there was a PortalAlias table. Aha! I looked in web.config and indeed the ObjectQualifier value was set to the empty string. So how did that change from my development machine to the production machine?

Well the source zip archive for DNN 4.0 ships with two config files. One named development.config and one named release.config. Before deploying, you are supposed to rename release.config to web.config. However, I had assumed that on my local machine, I could simply rename development.config to web.config for development purposes. I assumed that the only differences were in some debug settings. Boy was I wrong!

It turns out that the ObjectQualifier setting was set to dnn_ in development.config. This is the value I would expect as this was the typical installation I used in previous versions. In any case, I hope this saves you time if you happen to run into it. The fix on my production server was simply to change the ObjectQualifier value to be dnn_.