ASP.net mystery of the day

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

A Day in a Web-Devs Life-2010

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