Coding Day

Finally I moved, but I have a little problem “no internet connection”.

Let’s agree that we are addicted to online world (at least I am). It has been 2 days I haven’t got the connection. I was using my phone to check mails and than realised to use with my laptop. So I set up a GPRS connection over Bluetooth from my laptop using my phone.

I set the browsers not to download images and e-mail clients to download only the headers of the mails to save some bytes.

Thanks to Windows Vista for making the Bluetooth connection that simple. I remember old days for finding the modem drivers for my phone and dial a *#1 combination to connect to the Internet. Now in a single window, I am on the internet.

First add your device to Bluetooth devices, than connect and handshake with your phone using Bluetooth.

Go to Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections; you will see Personal Area Network.

Open its properties and “Connect”.



Done!.

Windows Vista new features has been started to implement by many hardware manufacturers. One of the features that I want to use mostly is Windows Sideshow.

The Windows Sideshow site points that :

Wouldn’t it be great if you could read an e-mail message, confirm a meeting location, or check a flight reservation without turning on your computer?

I really want to do that without switching on my computer. I don’t want to load the operating system just for checking mails. Windows Sideshow is basically a gadget interface. For the moment some interesting products are using  Windows Sideshow technology like motherboards, notebooks, bags. I mostly liked sideshow enabled notebook. I am sure there will be more interesting products in a wide range later this year.

With the adoption of Windows Sideshow, gadgets will be more important which will make Windows Sidebar more important product  among other gadget engines. Gadgets are small programs for many different purposes. Mostly they are programmed in XHTML and javascript. If you have an idea for a gadget programming them is not a big deal. I mostly found the gadgets I needed and hacked some of them to work much better . Currently there are a few hundred gadgets in the Windows Gadget Gallery and is increasing everyday. I personally like the gadget idea although I prefer to use Yahoo Widget Engine because of the heads up display and the number of widgets. I use gadgets for e-mails, weather, system monitoring, alarms,  TV schedules, and some RSS feeds that I can ignore.  

I just surprised when I see an event from Microsoft about Windows Vista. I was expecting it, but not before the real release of Vista. Anyway, it is a bit late for telling that, but Vista Developer Launch is this weekend at Microsoft Campus in Reading.

This is a 2 day event 19th and 20th January. 19th January will be some sessions about Windows Vista or Office 2007. 20th January will be practice. So they invite us to code in a huge room which sounds really cool. They also claim that they have 1000 of Windows Vista copies.

On Friday, I have to work so I will not join the first day. However if I can wake up, I really want to go on Saturday for coding with people . If you like to join me, just contact me… I was invited for a dinner on Friday night and I just couldn’t make it..

Although Visual Studio 2005 includes a conversion wizard for old projects, this does not work properly with web applications, because Microsoft removed support for web applications at the beginning. We don’t have a web project, we have a web site. The wizard tries to convert all the files to the new framework. This fails at first compilation, so many errors reported and I don’t want to fix all of these errors, since there exist an easier solution.

ASP.NET team stepped back and gave support for web projects through an add-in for Visual Studio 2005. Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Projects is the easiest way to migrate from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0. Because we are able to open our project file, visual studio converts only the project file. So all the files in ASP.NET 1.1 stays and only the project file changes. This is also useful because my code under source control doesn’t have to change.

However in Windows Vista, you don’t have the administrator rights by default and the installation of WAP fails. The solution to that problem is already defined here. The process is simply to write a bat file and run the bat file with administrator rights.

msiexec /i WebApplicationProjectSetup.msi

When you download the PHP installer, it fails to install for Windows Vista. So you have to install it manually. Just download the zip file and extract it somewhere that you can remember.  Then you might want to manual installation instructions, but it won’t be correct for IIS7. Here is the guideline to install PHP to IIS7.

1. Copy the php.ini to windows folder. enable the needed extensions by editing the file. Give rights for the file, to IUSR user, so that IIS can access the file.

2. Run IIS Manager (inetmgr.exe)



3. For the main site, click to ISAPI Filters, right click to add or actions add to php ISAPI handler with the filter name that you want. Just point to php5isapi.dll file which is the isapi filter.



4. Than come back to main site, and click to ISAPI and CGI Restrictions, and click add a restriction. For ISAPI and Cgi path select php5isapi.dll file and give a desired name for description. Also don’t forget to click “Allow extension path to execute”
   
5. Make sure that after adding, php is allowed from the ISAPI and CGI Restrictions window.
   
6. On ISAPI and CGI Restrictions page, right click to php and click to “Edit feature Settings”, from there you need to select both of them to enable php extensions to work, like mysql, mssql or ssl extensions specified in my.ini
   
7. Go to main site again, and click for the “Handler Mappings”. Click to add “Script Map”. For the request path type *.php, executable is php5isapi.dll  Name is Php
   
8. It will ask for the script map to add, just click to yes.
   
9. Our php and extensions should work now, but we might want to add index.php file to look for a folder. From the main window, we click to “Default Document” and add index.php to the end of list.

That’s all for php and extensions to work.

I am a bit surprised when running ASP.NET 1.1 application on IIS7.  You don’t have to install .Net framework 1.1. I also suspected that if .Net 1.1 comes pre-installed, but my GAC (Global Assembly Cache) have only 2.0 libraries.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, according to IIS team this is because of the backward compatibility, but it might not be guaranteed. So if you happen to run your application (like me ) it is because of the backward compatibility of ASP.NET. At the end the application runs on ASP.NET 2.0 worker process.

C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\\VC> gacutil /l System.Data
Microsoft (R) .NET Global Assembly Cache Utility.  Version 2.0.50727.42
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

The Global Assembly Cache contains the following assemblies:
  System.Data, Version= 2.0.0.0, Culture= neutral, PublicKeyToken= b77a5c561934e089
, processorArchitecture=x86

Number of items = 1

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC>

Running Web Application

 All the code without change can work on IIS7. You can migrate your code to ASP.NET 2.0 but this is not a necessity. With a little configuration on IIS server you will be able to run your 1.1 compiled applications.

• After you open the IIS Manager (still inetmgr.exe), you either “Add Application” or  ”Convert to Application” to create your web application. With “Add Application” you will be able to choose any directory in your computer, but with “Convert to Application” you will only be able to choose from the virtual directories which is located under inetpub\wwwroot.

• We see “Add Application” dialog box opened. From there we select Application Pool to change DefaultAppPool.

• We select Classic .Net AppPool from the “Select Application Pool” dialog.

• Then we’re ready to go after setting the application pool to Classic .Net AppPool

• When we click browse, or look directly to the virtual directory, our site is up and running

Debugging

One more thing,  to debug your application you need to switch the application to windows authentication mode. This has also been changed in IIS7.

• In IIS Manager select from left, the web application virtual directory, then from right select authentication under IIS section.

• Then enable windows authentication to be able to debug your application.