ASP.NET

So, you’ve installed a new server with Server 2008 R2 Core – what next? Logging on, you’re presented with a shiny command prompt, you can run notepad or regedit…but aside from that, where do you go from there? In the next few series of posts I’ll hopefully point out the basics, and some not so basics! In this post, I’m covering Installing the IIS web server (and a few useful bits) and managing it from the IIS Management Snap-in.

Recently I wrote a little utility for a client using the excellent Html Agility Pack to read and navigate through a HTML page, selecting the data that was needed and parsing it - basically a screen scrape. I downloaded the source, compiled it, added a reference to the dll in my project and tapped away for a few minutes and et voila, within a few minutes a working screen scrape. A fantastic library.

If you’ve logged onto the properties for your IIS install and found that the ASP.NET tab has mysteriously disappered, you can try a couple of things. Firstly, try re-registering ASP.NET with IIS using the ASPNET_REGIIS.exe located in the .NET installation folder: c:\WINDOWS\MICROSOFT.NET\framework\\aspnet_regiis -i   Chances are though, that it won't work, and that you can try and number of command using aspnet_regiis.exe or even uninstalling and reinstalling .NET and you won't actually fix the problem.

I’ve finally cracked the installation problems with VS 2003 SP1 on Vista. The problem seems to be that the SP must be installed under the same credentials that Visual Studio was installed. I.e. I installed Visual Studio under the domain administrator credentials, but I run my day-to-day under a standard user credential. When installing the SP1 I was elevating my standard user credential rather than running as the domain admin. I don’t know what difference that makes to anything, but it’s worked!

Just a quick post today about trust levels for .NET assemblies that are hosted remotely. My current set up at work means that I am maintaining one version of our web site while working on developing a new one - not uncommon. I have 2 virtual servers running Server 2003, IIS and SQL Server, each an identical copy of our production server. Each solution and it’s projects are stored on each virtual server, with the project folders shared and mapped as drives on my laptop.