Blank Screen following initalisation

Posted by gybol on 13-Dec-2019 13:54

I recently had to rebuild my development machine and now when running  Sitefinity all I get is a blank screen, the server is not delivering any content.  This happens for everything front-end and back-end.   I see the cogs screen and as the site gets going but once it's ready.. blank!

The site is running version 11.2.6927 on .NET 4.7.2 on Windows 10

If I use the "Sitefinity Project Manager" to run the site it works fine - it just won't work under IIS Express or IIS (tried both). 

I've :-

  • checked all the pre-requisites are installed, HTTP Activation, Windows Identity Foundation, etc (as per here)
  • tried resetting my Nu-Get cache and re-connecting Telerik.Sitefinity.All and associated libraries. Deleted all the Temp ASP.NET files, etc.
  • tried using a completely blank, brand-spanking new, clean project

After two days looking at this, I'm now out of ideas. I'm hoping before I lose all my hair that someone here may have some ideas??

Thanks,

Mark.

Sitefinity - Front- & Back-End Development

All Replies

Posted by alan.wallace@oit.edu on 13-Dec-2019 16:49

Is anything being logged to ~/App_Data/Sitefinity/Logs/Error.log?

Posted by gybol on 13-Dec-2019 22:16

Hi Alan,

Thanks for following up.  No, nothing is been generated in the logs.

Posted by gybol on 14-Dec-2019 11:09

Thanks for following-up Alan.  No, there is nothing been logged at all which is quite frustrating.

Posted by alan.wallace@oit.edu on 16-Dec-2019 18:04

Since you're not even getting any log files generated, I would suspect that the issue is related to the application pool account in IIS not having the appropriate permissions to write to the App_Data folder (and potentially not having the appropriate permissions to even read the entire website directory).  Starting at step 13 on this document, it talks about adding the write permission, but the same account should also be ensured to have read permissions to the entire folder for your site.

www.progress.com/.../windows-server-2012-r2-and-windows-8.1-with-iis-8.5

Posted by gybol on 16-Dec-2019 19:50

Hi Alan,

That was one of the first things I checked and definitely wasn't the problem.

As it happens - I found a solution 10 minutes ago, and as always the solution was simple - run Visual Studio with as Administrator.

I discovered an exception was being thrown when Sitefinity tries to automatically use a test X509 certificate for the Identity Server.  For some strange reason, Telerik flagged the temp certificate as Persistent so the cryptography library tries to write it to the certificate store which results in an Access Denied exception.

I'm back up and running now but thank you for taking the time to help.

Mark.

This thread is closed