I’ve just come across a strange issue in Visual Studio 2010, when trying to launch and access the ASP.NET Configuration tool (used for configuring security settings).

When I tried to access the site by selecting it from the Project menu, it would start the local web server on whatever port it chose, but wouldn’t open the page in my browser automatically. So I manually opened the link by right-clicking the icon for the web server in the system tray and choosing “Open in Web Browser”.

The result was a URL opened such as http://localhost:53764/asp.netwebadminfiles/ and this would cause an error “An error was encountered. Please return to the previous page and try again.”

The solution:

After testing sites that use both the MySQL Connector/NET provider and the “standard” (?) SQL Server Membership Provider, and suffering the same issue, I tried running the tool from Visual Studio 2008 (on older, pre-upgrade versions of my websites), and found that the issue appears to be related to the full URL not being used when clicking that “Open in Web Browser” link.

The template to use for the URL is:

http://localhost:xxxxxx/asp.netwebadminfiles/default.aspx?applicationPhysicalPath=path-to-project-file&applicationUrl=/

where xxxxxx is the port that has been used by the web server and path-to-project-file is exactly that… for example:

http://localhost:53764/asp.netwebadminfiles/default.aspx?applicationPhysicalPath=C:\Users\youruser\Documents\Visual%20Studio%202010\Projects\SampleApp\SampleApp&applicationUrl=/

I hope this helps anyone else having this same issue – if you found anything else that solved it (particularly a more permanent solution!) please let us all know.

An important question for all website owners: how long since you’ve backed up your website contents? Or even your own computer, for that matter?

It happen too many times, whether it’s a website, a computer, or a business server, backups are too often skipped over when time is short, and the result can be hours, days or weeks of lost business and revenue when hardware or software fails.

If you maintain your own website contents, either by way of static pages or a CMS, make sure you have a latest backup – you never know when things could go pear-shaped!

Where is my inspiration for this coming from, you may be asking? Because I’m helping someone right now to get past issues arising from their website going down unexpectedly and there not being an easy way to retrieve the content for re-deployment – ouch – thank goodness for Google caching.

The lesson learned: even if your site is hosted by your webmaster (even if it’s with us!), it never hurts to get a “latest copy” of the contents – just taking screenshots of the website’s main pages can be sufficient. Unfortunately things can go wrong – even in worst case scenarios, relationships can turn sour, and you don’t want to find yourself dependant on a provider for information that they may choose to withhold from you.

The rule of thumb I like to follow is “always have 3 copies” – that way, if you lose one copy because of some failure (hardware or otherwise), you’ll still have the original and another backup! In other words, unless you’re terribly unlucky, you’ll always have a backup.

Personally I’ve found that for my small business and home purposes, SyncToy works well – it’s a Microsoft product that allows you to syncronise locations, including a non-destructive backup (nothing ever gets deleted from my backup drives, only added or updated). Once it’s setup, it’s quick to plug in my drives one at a time and run the syncronisation.

There are plenty of other great backup tools and methods, though – feel free to share your stories or recommendations, you just might make the different to someone else’s business

Go on, do a backup right now – you know you want to…

As we discussed in our post about backing up your website contents, taking screenshots of major content pages can be one way of ensuring you always have a copy of your content for future needs.

Screenshots can also be a great way of showing others what error message, screen, etc you are seeing on your computer at a given time

If you are running Mac, you have a great mechanism built in for taking screenshots. click here to check out a guide for the Mac keyboard shortcuts.

Microsoft have started to play catchup in this area on Windows 7, with the introduction of the “Snipping Tool”. You’ll find this in your Start menu, under All Programs > Accessories > Snipping Tool, or by typing “snipping tool” into the “Search programs and files” area in the Start Menu.

However, if you’re yet to upgrade to Windows 7, you’ll need to follow a more manual process to take screenshots (without installing third party software). Here is the procedure to follow:

1. Get to the screen you want to take a screenshot of.
2. On your keyboard, locate the “Print Screen” button – usually labelled as “Prt Scr” or similar. It’s usually somewhere to the right of the “F12″ key at the top-right.
3. To take a screenshot of the entire screen (including the taskbar down the bottom and everything else you can see), press “Ptr Scr”.
   Alternatively, to only take a screenshot of the actual window you are focused on, hold down “Alt” and press “Ptr Scr” (ie., press Alt-Prt Scr).
4. Your screenshot will now be in your clipboard (note: the clipboard is the place that things you copy to go when you the menu Edit > Copy or press Ctrl-C).
5. Open Paint (typically found in the Start menu under All Programs > Accessories > Paint
6. Paste the screenshot (using the menu Edit > Paste or by pressing Ctrl-V)
7. Save the screenshot by chosing File > Save.

Note: if you are using Windows 7 and still following this manual method, the “lovely” (??) new ribbon bar will have replaced the old menu system, so rather than “File > Save”, it would be “that funny icon to the left of the “Home” ribbon bar button” and then Save. Good on you, Microsoft!

Happy “screenshooting”!

This week I made the leap away from Apple for my phone, thus ending my romance with Apple of the last year.   This time last year I bought my first piece of Apple hardware – the iPhone 3G.  At the time I had the choice to either wait, for potentially weeks, for the new iPhone 3GS, or take a 3G home with me on that day.  Being me (an impatient, “want it now” kinda girl — OK a little bit Veruca Salt-ish!), I went for the 3G.

My experience was top-notch from day one, I loved the phone and thought that Apple had solved every issue I had ever had with previous “smart” or “PDA-style” phones.  It ran smoothly, emails displayed beautifully on it (a vast improvement on my Nokia E71, which was text-only email and so fairly useless for me on the go), and best of all there was a plentitude on apps, all at very reasonable prices, if not for free.

Then on July 21, 2010, my Apple-loving life (or year, at least) changed forever.

A bad experience during upgrade didn’t help.  Ironically, this was caused by my other “want it now” fit earlier this year, when I bought an iMac 24″ at a very good sale price (since it was superseeded by then), which I tried (and tried, and tried, and tried) to run Windows 7 on using Parallels Desktop.  Unfortunately, a “Blue Screen of Death” half way through the iPhone upgrade caused the upgrade to fail miserably and effectively bricked my phone.  Thankfully, I was able to do a refresh, and then restore the phone contents from my backup prior to commencing the upgrade (lesson cemented in my brain forever:  backup, backup, backup – if you only need to use it once, it’s worth all the times you’ve had to wait for it).

(Aside: it was after this experience that I also decided to buy a “real PC” again and now the iMac sits next to me as a constant reminder of my $1,700 six month affair.  In the end it’s just become a very expensive solution for handling files from designers that I work with who use Mac-only fonts!).

So once my iPhone was up and running again, I was quickly disappointed with the results.  It turned out that most of the “cool” parts of the new OS version were not turned on for the 3G – because apparently they were too resource-hungry for it to handle.  Well I can understand that, and agree to it – of course I’d prefer a useable phone over multitasking.  However, unfortunately they must have still missed something along the way, as the phone still started to run like a dog.

Over the next week or two, I noticed a progressive decrease in the performance of the phone.  I found a few people on forums suggesting that a full rebuild of the phone, with a complete fresh start, made a big difference.  So I did that, and in the process had to setup the entire phone again (nothing lost, though, just synced contacts from Outlook, all ran really well, actually!).  The result seemed promising – it was so much quicker again!

Then it all started going pear-shaped again, and over the next few weeks, the performance again decreased more and more (even with restarts), until I was so close to throwing the phone out of the window that it wasn’t healthy!

I’m talking the “Messages” section taking upwards of 15 seconds to open, tasks that use the keyboard taking up to 20 seconds to prepare for typing, checking emails became a nightmare task that I’d have to allow at least a minute for, just to purely get the latest 3 brief emails off the server and view them (if I saw that “loading” message while it was still downloading the message one more time……).

At the end of the day, I felt ripped off by Apple.  The response most people suggested to these performance issues was that Apple expected people with the 3G phone to now start upgrading to the iPhone 4.  That’s all well and good for people who bought the 3G phones at release, but for people like me, who bought it towards the end of their life on the shelves, we’re still on contract for another year!

If you want to build loyalty in customers, look after them even after the sale, and don’t just assume that they will want to upgrade to the “latest and greatest” when you release it.  The same applies in all business, really.

So, I now have a non-Apple phone (a HTC Desire – yep, Android, the exact competition of Apple, it was always going to be either that or a Windows Mobile phone), which syncs perfectly with my non-Apple computer, in my non-Apple office.

Nice try, Apple, you almost had me with your shiny computers and gadgets, but you know what they say…. you can take the girl away from the PC, but you can’t take the PC out of the girl (especially not if she’s a robot)…

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