- Microsoft Web Platform Installer
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Posted by oVan on Wednesday, October 08, 2008 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Microsoft has released a new tool aimed at web developers: Microsoft Web Platform Installer. Although it’s still a beta, it’s already a one-stop shop to install all necessary tools, service packs and extensions, including IIS, ASP.NET, SQL Server 2008, Visual Web Developer 2008, all of the current IIS Extensions and more!
Once installed, this tool automatically discovers new additions and updates to the platform, keeping you up to date.Additionally, Microsoft has launched a new website for web professionals (designers and developers): microsoft.com/web
Go to: Microsoft Web Platform Installer site, or download wpilauncher.exe immediately.
Labels: .NET, 2008, asp.net, C#, developer, download, Express, install, installation, installer, Microsoft, Vista, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studion 2008, vs2005, vs2008, web development, webdev, Windows, Windows Vista
- FIX: GoogleBot produces "Cannot use a leading .. to exit above the top directory" in ASP.NET
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Posted by oVan on Sunday, April 06, 2008 | PermaLink | 0 comments
I found numerous "Cannot use a leading .. to exit above the top directory" errors in my Elmah-logs lately, all of them generated by the ASP.NET engine after a visit from GoogleBot. It is caused by using URL rewriting in your aspx-pages in order to have more readable URL's and better search engine rankings.
Funnily, this only started after I submitted dynamically generated sitemaps to the Google Webmaster Tools for my clients websites. Instead of improved ranking and indexing, however it resulted in exclusion of all failing URL's.
For more background information about this error, which is generated only for certain user agents including GoogleBot and Yahoo! Slurp, you can do a simple Google search. There are a few solutions to fix this, but most involve using a custom base page class or creating different .browser files for each problematic user-agent in the App_Browser directory. Having done custom browser.ini solutions with Browserhawk years ago, I did not feel like starting all over again with googlebot.browser, yahooslurp.browser etc.
By far the easiest solution is a simple change in your web.config:
Find the <authentication> section, then change the <forms> line by adding:cookieless="UseCookies"
Voila, the problem is fixed. Note that this disables cookieless functionality for forms, so if you really need that you should use a different solution.
Labels: .NET, asp.net, browser, bug, Google, Microsoft, problem, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studion 2008, vs2005, vs2008
- Fix: Localhost unavailable with ESET NOD32
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Posted by oVan on Friday, March 21, 2008 | PermaLink | 2 comments
Developers using Visual Studio will probably encounter this problem after installing ESET NOD32 antivirus or ESET Smart Security Antivirus+Firewall: browsing the web with Internet Explorer works fine except for websites you develop yourself (localhost).
Disabling the firewall or antivirus features doesn't solve this problem, however replacing localhost with 127.0.0.1 (or using FireFox) does solve it.
The real problem is easily fixed though.
Windows Vista:
In the start menu, type "notepad %system%\drivers\etc\hosts" and instead of pressing enter, right-click on the notepad icon in the top of the list (see screenshot). In the context menu you must click on "Run as administrator".
Windows XP and 2000:
Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) and type these commands:
cd %system%\drivers\etc
attrib -r -h -s hosts
notepad hosts
You will then see the following file in notepad:
The last line contains the problem. It reads:
::1 localhost
You can either remove this line and save the file, or comment it out with a pound/hash character #. Voila, fixed!
Labels: Administrator, fix, IE, IE6, IE7, Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft, problem, Vista, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studion 2008, vs2005, vs2008, web develoment, Windows, Windows Vista
