LightSwitch v1 shows red X and unable to load data

Question

I have made an application using Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 (v1) running on Visual Studio 2010 Professional. It is a desktop application, and I use SQL Server Authentica

Answer 1

Thanks to Bryan Hong for pointing me in the right direction. I just want to put my findings in one place for others to refer to if they find themselves in the same situation.

The following is based off Eric Erhardt's article, which is meant for Lightswitch Web Applications. The steps I list below should apply to Lightswitch Desktop Applications instead.

Enable tracing in your lightswitch application. To do this, I had to modify the Web.config file located in the release/publish folder (not the file located in the Source folder for your project - LightSwitch will override that web.config -- this was the tricky part). Use a plain text editor to make changes to this: modify the following keys in configuration>>appSettings:

And under configuration>>system.web, make sure trace is enabled:

And the last change that you need to make is to set the customErrors mode to Off under configuration>>system.web

Add the following key (or modify it if it already exists):

Now, to view the errors, install Fiddler and then run Fiddler, and the run the silverlight Application. Click on the session on the left, then click on Inspectors, and Web Inspectors on the right. This should show the error message in detail.

For more information, please refer to Bryan's answer above, or to Eric Erhardt's article.