Silverlight deployment issue with RIA Services

Question

I'm wondering if anyone can help with a strange deployment issue I am seeing with my Silverlight application.

It has been deployed hundreds of times without issue and I (thought) I was aware of all the pre-requisites but recently I've been seeing some issues with RIA Services after deployment.

I get 500 System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException errors when I look in Fiddler and when I try to debug them further, with custom errors turned off, executing the WCF service directly, it appears to be caused by a FileNotFoundException for the System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting DLL.

RiaServices dependencies are not installed into the GAC when we deploy, but they are included in the bin directory of our application (so CopyLocal = True).

This has always worked fine before, but now it's as if IIS cannot see these DLLs. If I run msiexec /i RiaServices.msi SERVER=TRUE on the server it all starts working fine. I'd rather not have to install the DLLs into the GAC like this for every install and require another step when it should work fine deploying them ourselves (and always did previously!).

Has anyone got any ideas why this would suddenly stop working for new installations? As far as I am aware everything is being installed the same as it always was, so .NET 4, IIS 6, ASP.NET etc. on a Win Server 2008 R2 machine.

Thanks.

Answer 1

We were missing the System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.OData.Dll reference which had somehow been removed from our project, hence the issues seen above.