You may notice a new template for the Web Design UK Blog. We have now migrated to BlogEngine.NET and when we get chance will customise the template. At the moment there are some very pressing projects though, so a blog design will have to wait I'm afraid! It will also allow us to customise blogs for clients, as well as work out the SEO impact of using BlogEngine.NET as opposed to Wordpress, which when configured correctly is rather good for SEO. The technical issues with Wordpress however far outweighed good SEO on a fairly infant blog. I'm signing out now, but see you for the next post, which will hopefully be an eye opener about my favourite ASP.NET control!

In my last post about our complete move to .NET I mentioned that we would trial BlogEngine.NET. After a fairly short trial we are going to attempt a Wordpress to BlogEngine.NET migration! This, in essence, seems a fairly straight forward transition to make but we will have to see how the URLs turn out. Obviously they will be different to the Wordpress ones, and should still retain the keyword richness, but only time will tell. I will post part 2 when the migration is complete and we can edit Wordpress posts in BlogEngine.NET as well as reference any code we have borrowed. As well as being written in C# (our favourite language), BlogEngine.NET is also remarkably easy to theme, in contrast to Wordpress where you need to change several files and know PHP. With BlogEngine.NET there are 3 code files plus the CSS and you don't even need to know any ASP.NET, though HTML would be advantageous.

As an ASP.NET developer you tend to come across all kinds of weird and wonderful anomalies; file or application permissions and incorrectly structured web.config files seem to be some of the most popular ones. However you see them once or twice and intuitively know how to fix them next time even if you have had to Google the problem originally. The chances are someone else has come across the problem before and fixed it but there are sometimes several fixes for the same problem and you sometimes see some that are a mile from what anyone else has found and wonder if they can really work. My experience shows that often the more out there ideas are the ones that you try last in desperation, more hoping than applying any belief that the solution will work.

One such case of 1000 answers to 1 error is my first attempt at an ASP.NET application in Windows 7. Sure the Microsoft site tells you all the wonderful things that you can do with Windows 7, SQL Server 2008 Express and ASP.NET running on IIS7. What it seems to fail to tell you is that Microsoft have chosen some rather strange  configuration for the IIS7 default setup in Windows 7. I discovered this when I tried to run an ASP.NET application to test a client machine capability. The 1st error I encountered was a 500.19 error stating that my web.config file was incorrectly structured, but it could also be an application permisson error with the <handlers> tag highlighted in red. Incidentally the error code was 0x80070021. I found this post from Anil Ruia on the IIS forums site. It proved very useful. At first I simply followed his instructions but found I didn't have permission, so followed these steps:

1. Ran Command Prompt as Administrator - go to Start, type in cmd in the search and right click cmd.exe that appears. Click Run as Administrator


2. Navigated to the %windir%\\System32\\inetsrv folder - type cd %windir%/System32/inetsrv and press enter


3. Ran the following command in command prompt - type appcmd unlock config -section:system.webServer/handlers and press enter. You should receive a message to say that the section is unlocked.


4. Ran appconfig unlock config -section:system.webServer/modules - after solving the handlers problem I found that modules was locked too.


5. I still faced a problem though in that IIS wasn't handling ASP.NET pages. I discovered that the default options when installing IIS (through Turn Windows Features On or Off in Control Panel --> Programs) didn't allow it to handle ASP.NET! Bizarre. I enabled this option and now everything works.

Here is a screenshot of the options that need to be selected. Now that I know this, the sensible option is to select this when installing IIS:

I can now go back to the client and run this on his machine to test the application performance. What a relief!