DLBATES.COM

Today I set out to figure out why I couldn’t get IIS under windows server to serve up .ASPX pages.
I had asked for a .net setup from IT and when I placed my files in the site I could not get it to serve up ASPX pages. It would serve .HTML and .ASP but not .ASPX so I decided to investigate myself. Hopefully my investigation and solution will help you troubleshoot this issue without wasting as much time as I had to. All of the steps below refer to IIS 6.0 and Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition.

Step one: Figure out if ASP.net is installed. You can do this several ways the quickest is to see if there is a ASP.net tab within your sites properties in the IIS Manager. Another way (and the way I chose to pursue) is to open the Control Panel and then Add/Remove Programs, and then click the Add/Remove Windows Components. Once Windows searches for installed components you will see a list. Click on Application Server and select details, this is where you should see ASP.net checked. If you don’t see ASP.net checked or if it isn’t there at all you will need to go to step two. If ASP.net is installed then skip ahead to step three.

Step two: Install ASP.net There are two ways to install ASP.net the easy way and then the way that you only do if you can’t see ASP.net in the Control Panel’s Add/Remove Windows Components section. The easy way is to check the checkbox in the Add/Remove Windows Components section and then follow the on-screen instructions. The hard way is to download the .net redistributable from Microsoft(the package linked is the 32 bit see bottom of page for X64).Install the package and then perform windows updates. This process will take 1-3 hours depending on connection speed and amount of updates needed. You will need to reboot when finished.

Step 3: ASP.net is installed but I still can’t see .ASPX pages: This can happen for several reasons and I could make you sift through thousands of google pages to figure out why, but that wouldn’t be very good of me I was getting 404 errors when trying to view an .ASPX page and this was because Active Server Pages where prohibited in Web Service Extensions. This KB Article explains why but you basically go into Web Service Extensions in the IIS manager and change Active Server Pages from Prohibit to Allow.

There we go I hope that helps you if you have a similar problem.

Thanks
David Bates

Today my post will be a bit different. I normally don’t talk much about work on my personal blog for various reasons. One of which being that I live in a right to hire state and include a link to my blog in my email signature. I also link to this blog’s RSS feed from several locations within our companies intranet. So you can see why I am leery to post about anything work related. I must apologize for its length and lack of direction but I felt that it needed to be documented since I use this blog as a journal of sorts. With that out of the way I would like to give you a taste of my work life.

I start my days around 5:00 each morning the first thing I reach for is my Iphone to check on emails and tweets that may have happened throughout the night. I then head downstairs and get ready for the workday so I don’t wake the wife and Daniel (They are not morning people). Once ready I check my phone again as I am about to leave Wi-Fi access for at least a 30 minute drive. I live in Madison, NC and work in Greensboro. My drive depends heavily on traffic and weather, leaving at 5:30 or 6:00AM normally get’s me to work in about 30 minutes.

Once I arrive at work I grab for a MT. Dew and unlock my machine… I never reboot my machine unless there are windows updates so it is always ready to go and set to where I left off the day before. My programs that are running upon startup normally consist of Chrome, Tweetdeck, Outlook, Flash, and Visual Studio… depending on my work the day before I may have SQL or a spreadsheet open.

Again I check email and twitter to see if anything has gone on during my drive that I need to react to. I then check my task list which is a SharePoint calendar with some extra columns for priority, comments, and requestor to see what task I need to work on next. I switch between my task list and my dry-erase board depending on my workload as I have found under heavy loads the dry-erase board made me more productive. I normally use my task list however. Having just checked my task list I can see that I have 11 High’s for both external and internal development so I jump on one and start coding.

Since I work in MarComm and not IT I find that sometimes respect as a true developer is hard to come by and I am new to the group so I still have yet to earn some of the respect. However this affects how I have to approach certain tasks and can sometimes either help or hinder a situation. I have to be very careful to put on the bully face when needed but also have to be uber-friendly which I inherently am anyway.

So while coding I will normally have to attend around 2 meetings per day sometimes this is a waste and I continue to code on my Ipone but other times I find the meetings enlightening especially the ones that decide who owns what or who controls what process.

So enough of the ambiguitis stuff and onto the meat. When I say coding I normally am required to design, build, or correct errors in XSLT/XML, SQL/VB, SQL/C#, Flash, or Java. The changes can range from making a color change to full-blown design of new collections of data. I find myself working most in SQL/VB and XML/XSLT as that is what my predecessor chose to use. I am a C# guy myself as I started programming in C and then moved into Cocoa on the Mac before becoming a web-dev.

My current biggest project is the addition of video at work both internal and external. So my Flash skills have come into play there. I hope to write up so good material for deployment in an enterprise and even develop some best practices for video.

However what gets me the most praise at work is my ability to solve problems, not always solving coding problems but by taking a look at the whole picture and be able to develop a system that works for the environment it is in. I find it odd when I solve a problem and they say no one else has thought of that… it’s so simple. I love it.

I leave my work around 4 each day but most times I don’t actually get to leave until about 5 as I get caught up in a project and don’t know when to quite or something breaks last minute in the day. Either way I reverse my morning routing where I check my Iphone when I leave and when I get home. I then try and spend time with Daniel and wife until around 9 when it is time for me and Daniel to watch some youtube and go to sleep.

So that is what I do as a web-dev, I code, I listen, and I fix problems. What a better way to work than that. I really feal that I am doing what makes me happy as I can’t get enough of it. Right now I am at home on a friday night writing this post about work when I should be asleep… What can I say I am a true G33K and there is no place like 127.0.0.1

Goodnight
David Bates

So the title of my post may be a little misleading. I love Christmas and all of the memories you make during it. This Christmas however has been off to a rough start. Monday I decided to work from home for two reasons one was the snow and the second was I was feeling pretty sickly. I was happily typing away on code to attribute to my latest project when I got a call from my frantic wife where she informed me that my mother had slipped on ice on her steps, that I had just scrapped, and she believed broke her leg. I quickly informed my Boss I was not going to be able to be reached for awhile and headed to her aid. It took about 2 hours to get an ambulance to the house because of the snow and the holidays but when they got there she had been in pain for some time and had what looked like a bone pushing on her skin but not broke through. They with my help then loaded her onto a backboard and then the stretcher. The driver asked how much my mom weighed (as my family is hefty) and then called in for backup. I guess she scared him Soon the entire Bethany fire department was there to help. My Mom was in so much pain she didn’t catch any jokes I tried to crack to cheer her up. We got to the hospital and here is what the break looks like:

After that you may have guessed that my days have been filled trying to get her here and there but that is not it. Monday night after we got back from the Hospital my wife and son got a stomach virus… very bad so now I had three to take care of and I made until Tuesday morning when I myself got it. Now when I get sick I react a little differently than most people I know I simply goto sleep and continue to sleep until I get better. I don’t know why I do this and my wife hates it but it all works out. So after being in a dead-like sleep and missing Tuesday altogether I was able to get mom back to the doctor starting at 7:30 on Wednesday.

Now I must say that the previous paragraphs make it seem like I did all the work. I don’t want that to be the case as my wife and my sister has helped equally if not more than I. I also don’t want it to sound like I haven’t had a good Christmas I have. Spending time with my family is always good no matter what the circumstance and my mom is pretty funny when she is drugged

Now as for today I went to Lowes to do a little last minute Christmas shopping. I got my mom a safety rail for her bathroom so she can get around on her peg leg and got my father-in-law a little something too. I got to eat a nice smoked pork shoulder with the family and now I have to go downstairs and play Santa for my little boy. He is fast asleep with vision of trains and cars in his head.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!
David Bates

The title of my post comes from a twitter saying I started because of all of the news and buzz going around the storm that we received yesterday. Every newscaster was making it seem as though this storm would be the end of the world. So I lovingly dubbed it Snowpocolipse09.

All in all we got about 5-6″ of snow with some ice mixed in. I have a lot of work to do scraping the driveway while my son and wife take an afternoon nap…

Enjoy the pictures below, I hope to take some more this afternoon.

Hi,

I know it has been awhile since my last post and there has been a lot of time between my post. Truth is Since early this year I had lost interest in posting as what I had to post was not at all pleasant and was very hard for me just to talk about it to my own family much less blog about it. My wife wrote a beautiful post about what happened but to re-iterate we lost a baby that my wife had carried past the second trimester and worst of all she barely made it through the ordeal alive. She developed something called DIC which is very rare but basically caused her blood to not be able to clot. Luckily her doctor had seen one case of it before and immediately knew what to do. If it was not for his quick action I would have lost both of them. So you can see why I did not wish to write about this, heck I don’t even know why I am now other than to to let you know that I have not disappeared. In fact I am more into web developing, blogging, and social media more than ever. I accepted the role as the Web Developer for RFMD.com in June and have been overseeing the website since then. I am also trying to convince RFMD as a company to utilize social media.

When all of the trouble happened at the first of the year it was easier for me to use twitter than it was to blog. I added my twitter feed to this site so that you could look along. I know it is not the same as post but it helped me stay in touch and let people know how I was doing without actually blogging about it. I choose twitter as it was the best option for what I needed. You can locate my twitter feed and follow me from the list on the left.

We also found out at the first of October that we are pregnant AGAIN! we have both been scared to death given the outcome of the last one and happy all at the same time. But fortunately this time around has been completely different from the last but we are getting close to the same time in the pregnancy so we will be on edge for at least the next two weeks. We love the fact that we have another little one on the way. Daniel and our lives will be totally different. We will move from a family of three to four.

Earlier this year I bought a house for us. We have rented in the past so this is our first home. I say I bought it as it happened along the same time as the loss and Jess was very reluctant to commit to anything at the time. I had been looking for a new home as our family was about to grow and the place we was renting was way to small for another little one. The market in housing at the time was also a proponent as we found an awesome house and saved a ton of money on it. Jess loves the house and has told me many times since that I was right to go ahead and purchase it.

That being said the house was in need of repairs since we moved in we have completely redone the downstairs bathroom going all the way to the floor joist and jacking up the house. We have also replaced the water heater, every faucet in the house, and the downstairs heating system. All I can say is thank GOD that Obama saw fit to give us some tax money to help when we replaced the heating unit downstairs we made sure to get an energy efficient one so that we can qualify for the tax credit next year as well.

I love our house and how it is becoming our home. I always find it amazing how my wife can turn a boring room into something that looks like a piece of art. She is truly a master of design and of decorating. I cannot believe she allowed me to propose to her so long ago.

Current:
Daniel has a pretty bad cold and has been real clingy to his mommy recently I love the little guy. He has started to talk plainly and we can communicate very well together. This is a huge achievement. He also knows his shapes and colors and can even draw circles now. He makes me the happiest dad every time I come home. I can also see that he is going to be a good hearted boy as he is so sweet to everybody. He says please and thank you that which I must attribute to his mom’s teaching. She is doing a great job with him.

Well that is all my pregnant wife would like a bit of the cheeseball she has made and it is 10:00PM so after that I will probably go to bed exhausted from rough-housing my playtoy (Daniel)

Happy Holidays, let me know how your year has been below:
David Bates