Today I spent some time trying to track down an error with a fresh install of the Dynamics CRM 2011 311 Portal Accelerator. Having spent a fair amount of time setting it up on a VM and wanting to bulk out the content a bit, I discovered that when trying to edit content from the Front End, I was getting various errors, such as :
- An error has occurred while saving your content. Your changes have not been saved.
- An error has occurred while loading content required for this feature.
Doing a Fiddler2 trace for these requests, showed me that the endpoint it was trying to hit was /Services/cms.svc. So I fired up a browser to see if I could hit that endpoint directly, and got :
The server encountered an error processing the request. See server logs for more details.
Looking online, it seems many people were resolving this sort of an error by installing a hotfix. This didn’t work for me – a bit more digging indicated they were getting a 404 error and I was getting a 500 error. This 500 error seemed to be a generic sort WCF error and, unfortunately, inspecting IIS log files and Event Viewer didn’t give me any more clues as to what the root cause was.
However, after enabling debugging in my web.config file and generating a svctracelog file I got a bit more detail when opening the tracelog file in SvcTraceViewer.exe.
Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information
Great. So helpful. It seemed that it couldn’t find one of the requested types, it didn’t want to tell me what it was, and the service died.
Enter stage left Fusion Log Viewer. Fire it up, recreate the error and under 2 minutes later, I had the answer – Microsoft.Xrm.sdk.deployment.dll was missing. Dropped it in to the bin folder, and easy content editing was running smoothly.
If you are getting the same error, it may or may not be the same dll missing. Having re-checked the current download media for the other accelerators, it seems the CRM Partner Portal and the CRM Customer Portal already have this dll in the bin folder, but the 311 portal doesn’t – it should.
Brian Illand 
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