No data available with Entity Framework when consumed by second project - entity-framework

Question

I have a web app that uses EF5 to map to a SQL database. This is the standard membership database with some additional tables I've added. Works like a champ in that project.
I have a second project, a windows service running TCP a server, which needs to insert items into the same database. So I reference the web app from this second project and can see my DbContext and entity types as needed.
At runtime, however, none of my DbSets gets populated with data. I have tried explicitly opening the connection to execute queries too, like this:
public MyContext()
: base("DefaultConnection")
{
try
{
Database.Connection.Open();
var command = new System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand("SELECT * FROM dbo.Trackers", (SqlConnection) Database.Connection);
var reader = command.ExecuteReader();
bool result = reader.Read();
}
catch (Exception exception)
{
//handle exception
}
this.Database.Connection.Close();
}
The result is false, but the connection is created and the reader is aware that I have four fields in my table. Is anyone aware of a reason this should work in my web app but not in a referencing app?

Answer 1

I had forgotten that the connection string from the web.config file is only honored when running as a web app. The TCP service .exe needs its own copy of the connection string in App.config. It just happened that the default (implicit) connection string on my TCP service connected to a valid, but empty, copy of my database.