Web.Config might be “unreadable”

A bit of a Mea Culpa here, as the information that would point out the problem most obviously to potential Good Samaritans was censored by me. Why? Because I didn’t want to share the DB connectionString with world+dog.

Turns out that a default Web.Config will also include, in the DefaultConnection connectionString, the term Integrated Security=True. Why is this a problem? Because this is telling IIS to use Integrated Security when accessing the DB -- as in, ignore the Username and Password, and just use its own credentials.

Which, of course, is an Epic Fail.

Now, I am not sure how the IIS built into Visual Studio 2015 is ignoring and/or bypassing this term. Either it ignores it altogether and just uses the Username and Password in the string, or the installation of Visual Studio somehow sets up an automatic handshake between VS and MSSQL. I just don’t know.

Let’s chalk this entire clusterfuck to this being my first truly independent (no prior version) project I have worked on to date. In all other cases I had a prior version of the site (and as such, the DB) to work from, and I must have just copied over the connectionString as a whole unit from the old project instead of just editing the one in the new project.

TL;DR: Altering the connectionString to Integrated Security=False or removing it altogether solves the problem with standalone IIS (IIS not integrated into Visual Studio) not being able to access the DB despite the IIS built into Visual Studio doing just fine.