I've just managed to get the .NET 3.5 style of WCF Web Programming Model services to work inside an EPiServer 5 R2 site on IIS 7 and Windows 2008.  I had a few difficulties finding out how to integrate the new model into IIS/ASP.NET and then further problems getting it working in EPiServer.  Here, I outline the solution. Context I'm currently designing a site that will be using the Akamai Edge Suite of technologies (www.akamai.com) and so I desire that all client access is through the caching layer.  Additionally, I'm motivated towards a REST model for web services to support a greater degre... [More]

Overview Recently, I began having problems with Virtual Server 2005 R2 on my Windows XP computer.  I was not aware of anything having changed, except suddenly my VPCs couldn't find a network adapter.  Facing the possibility of a complete laptop rebuild, I was scouring the net for a solution... Failed attempts Before finally landing a working solution, I attempted the following: Restarting Virtual Machines (before and after other changes) Restarting Virtual Server (and associated services) Looking for patches (none applicable) Creating new network configurations ... [More]

Overview I've been importing a live EPiServer site into a development environment for further work.  Normally, this works without problem, but this time I've been getting a POST error, but nothing informative.  What's happening? Solution A quick look at the event logs on the IIS server quickly identifies the problem: the file exceeds the upload limit.  Of course this is less likely to happen in a normal development run, but once there is a fair amount of data it fails.  If I hadn't spotted the error in the event log, I might have been stuck for some time. The default ASP.NET upload limit i... [More]

Overview Do you have problems searching for text in files using Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008?  This problem has been affecting us in our development environment, but how can you fix it? Context From Windows XP, Microsoft changed the default behaviour of the Windows Explorer search feature.  They did this for performance reasons, and from Windows XP Service Pack 2 onwards you can choose to revert to the old behaviour, but the effect was that only certain file types are searched by default. Solutions There are two solutions: Register a handler... [More]

Overview Sometimes you have to manually refresh folders in Windows XP to see changes that have taken place on network servers. Context When you create or delete any file in one or more network folders, you have to refresh the display to see the changes.  This can happen with any folder, but most frequently when you are using Microsoft DFS technology. Solution You need to follow the instructions in File list in the Windows Explorer folder is not refreshed after you create, move, or delete files (Microsoft Support).  This requires two things: Install Windows XP Service Pack 2 M... [More]

Overview Sometimes, old code doesn't seem to work with the new Data Execution Prevention feature in Microsoft Windows.  It's easy to turn it off for non-system applications and services, but how do you do it for system components, and why would you? Warning: Data Execution Prevention is a security feature.  Disabling DEP reduces the security of your system. Context On our Microsoft Commerce Server 2002 system, running on Windows Server 2003, we were getting "COM Surrogate" errors, which relate to DEP errors with the dllhost.exe system program.  Adding it to the exception list didn't solve ... [More]

Read the article... Excerpt The above error was occurring on both staging and live environments for a Microsoft Commerce Server 2002 system.  It took us a while to track down the cause, but eventually I fixed it. References Microsoft KB Article 811306 Versions Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Microsoft Commerce Server 2002 Metadata Technorati Tags: IT Management, Windows, Windows 2003, problem, Commerce Server

Overview How can you make your Commerce Server reports easy to maintain, and how can you make it work with long SQL queries?  Did you even know that long SQL queries won't always work?! The problem The query is stored in the Report table in SQL Server as an nvarchar(2000) field.  This means you've only got 2000 characters to work with.  In fact, the limit is smaller than this because of processing that Commerce Server is doing itself.  I noticed problems around 900 characters, which seems a bit small! The solution The best solution I found was to reference a SQL view that was created for ... [More]

Overview The time service is a critical part of any Windows Active Directory infrastructure.  Why?  Because it is part of how Active Directory replicates correctly, because it supports the implementation of Kerberos and because all your networked computers will be synchronised using it, even if you don't configure it. Quite often, a seemingly unrelated error message will be caused by time service configuration errors.  I've written small guidance notes quite often to help administrators sort out these problems, but I wanted to collect my knowledge into a single blog post so that it is availa... [More]