Το φιτρί αγόρι (colourful life)

Warning, rant ahead!

Today I started to plan the deployment of a ASP.NET web application. For months we have been developing this web application in our development machines, but it was time to prepare an environment as much similar as possible to the production one.

So the production environment has a IIS 6.0 Web server running on a Windows 2003 server installation. Can I put IIS 6.0 on my windows XP? No, I cannot. Microsoft only allows a restricted 5.1 version. I can install the same Apache HTTP server that I can put on a production machine, a PostrgreSQL server, etc. I’m thinking in open source based solutions and I can setup my machine in a very similar the production environment will be. But not if you use Microsoft Windows.

I’m not saying that having another machine for testing is bad. It’s a good idea to have an exact copy of your production environment for final testing. But also being able to test in your machine without many dependences helps a lot when debugging new features.

I didn’t finished whining. We got some more problems on the database side, because the Microsoft SQL Server Express doesn’t want to accept connections with username and password. Till now we used windows based authentication. But the IIS 5.1 web applications don’t play well whith windows authentication (Even if the application was set to run as the same user I use in my computer).

So I see myself replacing my Windows XP by a Windows 2003 server and finding another machine for a real Microsoft SQL server installation.

End of Rant

Post your Windows rant here

Today is my first day in a small internet travel agency in Greece. I left my job in a big ISP saving the world and some manager’s arses. Small company, quiet environment, small PC, and everything is done with windows and Microsoft tools.

Visual Studio, as always, impressed me with new tools that help a lot. But as always too, I could see the the not so good way it has to organize the code. Even I got scared when I saw the code for the automatic templates generated for asp web pages. Nothing is perfect.

Also I started to suffer the first windows problmes. In this case “I couldn’t open a .chm file”. So if you see in your windows a message like the one in the pic when you open a .chm file. Just modiy or create the following registry keys:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000001

All credits for this go to Ken.

So I hope I found a good place to work, and not another ISP chaos place.