pdf not opening in ie in production evironment with load balancer

Question

I have a silverlight application with browsercontrol that needs to use Acrobat PDF Reader to display PDFs in the browser. I am using Acrobat Reader XI and internet explorer as browser. When the application is in the Stage environment everything works fine. However, when the application is in the Production environment pdf does not load or partially loads and stops. There is no difference between the two environments except production environment uses load balancer. The even weirder thing is that Production work and PDF loads when we hit a specific server URL instead of the load balancer URL. Why is it not loading. Why is this happening and better yet, how do I fix it?

Answer 1

Remember that Silverlight is a client technology. While you downloaded the initial site through the load balancer you live then on the client. So the question is how do you load the pdf within silverlight? If this is a direct url not through the load balancer the pdf file will not see the load balancer.

If the acrobat reader opens or not depends on the response mime-type and with pdf's this is a disscussion on its own.

Here you find a good stackoverflow question with an answer:

Proper MIME media type for PDF files

HTH