Agent Desktop: Error: Failed to connect to the web server.

Published on 01 February 2007 Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

It appears that a few people have had the problem where everything works great in Agent Desktop, but not when selecting a contact to work with, as they get something like:

The underlying connection was closed: The remote name could not be resolved.

Stack:
at Microsoft.Ccf.Csr.Sessions.SetActiveSession(Guid sessionID)
at Microsoft.Ccf.Csr.Sessions.AddSession(String name, Int32 callID, Object customer)
at Microsoft.Ccf.Samples.Csr.AgentDesktop.Desktop.AddSession(CustomerRecord customer, CallClassProvider call)

and/or

Customer Care Framework 2005 - Agent Desktop: Error: Failed to connect to the web server. Please verify that you can connect to the web server.

Well, it would appear from the outside that the SetActiveSession method (at least in the .NET 1.1 QFE 3 version, and likely earlier .NET 1.1 versions) has the server hardcoded (since this is one of the few assemblies where you don’t get the source code, and Reflector wasn’t much help—so I can’t state this for sure). If it is hardcoded, it’s insanity, and hopefully fixed in the .NET 2.0 release.

But if you hit this because your CCF server isn’t named CCFIIS, the simple fix is either:

Add an entry to your DNS server to redirect to that, or
(If you can’t due to security restrictions during development) add it to the hosts file in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\.

Once that’s done, restart Agent Desktop and enjoy.

Update: Thanks to MattB on the CCF Forum for confirming it is hardcoded and that a hotfix is available for 1.1 from PSS, while 2.0 is already fixed! 😊