PeterKellner.net

The problem is that I’m trying to keep track of the exact URL a person selects including the request parameter.  That is, I have a URLs that can be played as follows:

http://video.peterkellner.net/TestPage.html?src=P1_Intro.wmv

http://video.peterkellner.net/TestPage.html?src=P2_BasicRIANoTooling.wmv

I’ve actually got 7 videos that I want people to be able to play.  The problem is that my web statistics tracker is going to count all videos as coming from TestPage.html and I will not be able to tell which video is getting how much traffic.  What I’d really like is have unique landing pages for each one that I can put links to on my blog, and then have those tracked separately.

At MIX09 this year, Scott Guthrie presented the Web Platform Installer which seemed like an easy way to install specific technologies on an IIS server.  At the moment, I need to test an application that uses PHP so I figure this is a good time to try it.  Over the years, I’ve had several spectacular failures trying to install PHP on IIS.  Now, maybe I will get it right.  So, here we go.

Step 1: Read the walk through ( http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/523/web-platform-installer-walkthrough/ )

Step 2:  Click Install now  (Can’t find PHP, starting searching the web now)  {Note: 4/14/2009. Turns out I missed an easy step.  See bottom of article for that step}

Found this link:  Install PHP with Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0

Step 3: Go Here and try again:  http://php.iis.net/

So, I’ve always incorrectly thought that somehow, the cookie stored in asp.net was somehow tied to the Session provider in asp.net.  Turns out I’m wrong.  This came up because I was discussing with another engineer whether we need to bother with a Session provider since we do not use Session in our web application.  That is, we don’t ever store information by saying something like:

Session[“MyKey1”] = “MyShoppingCartInfo1”;

My assumption was that somehow, the Cookie planted on the client’s browser was in lock step with the IIS server through Session and that even if we did not store Session data, we still had to hook up a Session Provider.  Wrong I am.

(Windows 7 Beta, Build 7000 put through the paces)

Background

I don’t seem to have a pile of computers laying around anymore so testing new operating systems can be a bit time consuming.  In general, I don’t like testing OS’s in VM’s because performance on the actual hardware is what I’m trying to measure.  So, luckily, I do seem to have an infinite number of SATA hard drives for my Lenovo Thinkpad W500 ( Lenovo 4062-27U ThinkPad W500 15.4" Notebook ) so I figure the best thing to do is install the OS on one of those.  Microsoft recently sent me two DVD’s (a 32bit and a 64bit).  Since I have a 64bit machine with 4gig of RAM, I figure I should test the 64bit.  So, here we go.

So, I suppose you should just be able to see the fact that Ajax is working by the lack of page flashing.  That may be true on a normal page on a slow connection, but if you are testing locally, it may not be so obvious.  You can certainly crank up your debugging tools like firebug or Fiddler, or you can do the cheap trip about I’m about to explain.

Simply, add a sleep statement to your page_load event (Thread.Sleep(3000);) and run your page.  If you are using IE7 like I am, on the post back (for a full page), you will see the windows icon spinning in the tab control.  If you see that, you are getting a full page post back. If not, chances are you are not.

Hope this helps!

Recently, we’ve moved our hosting for the Silicon Valley Code Camp to MOSSO, which is a hosted web farm.  In order to run modules and handlers, it seems it’s necessary to run in IIS7’s integrated mode.  Once this is set, other small issues creep up like for example you can no longer run HttpHandler’s from the standard HttpHandler’s section in your web.config file (see below)

<httpHandlers>

            <remove verb="*" path="*.asmx"/>

            <add verb="*" path="*.asmx" validate="false" ...

            <add verb="*" path="*_AppService.axd" validate="false" ...

            <add verb="GET,HEAD" path="ScriptResource.axd" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptResourceHandler,..

            <add type="PeterKellner.Utils.CaptchaTypeHandler" verb="GET" path="CaptchaType.ashx"/>

</httpHandlers>