Repeated conversion of Web project file

I had the dubious honour of converting a VB Web app from Visual Studio 1.1 to VS 2008.

Every time I opened the converted (or so I thought) project, it gave the following message:

The following Web projects must be converted to the new Web Site format. The conversion process will remove all source control bindings and the project will not be under source control after migration.

After the 3rd attempt it was not funny, so I googled it and found this fix:

1. For the project that's causing you the issue, backup your solution file, your project file, and the "hint" file associated with your project file (the .vspscc file sitting in the same directory as your project) to some other location.
2. Check out your solution file and the project file and close VS
3. Open the project hint file (.vspscc) in notepad, change the ENLISTMENT_CHOICE from COMPULSORY to "ENLISTMENT_CHOICE" = "NEVER"
4. Open your solution file in notepad, remove that line SccProjectEnlistmentChoiceX = 2 (X is the number that corresponds to your project that is causing you the problem). Also, if you see the line "SccWebProjectX=true" (x is again the number of the project in your solution), remove that as well.
5. Open everything in VS again, and assuming everything works now, check in your files.

Link to original article here.

IIS App pools and process ids

Have you ever needed to know which application pool is which process id? It turns out there is a script installed with Windows Server 2003 that can give you that information.

Just execute iisapp.vbs to list the app pools and the process id of the worker process.

More information here

OpenDNS for web filtering

If you have kids, or you manage the company firewall/proxy server, this service can be of great assistance to block unwanted sites. It is DNS based, and managed from a browser, so you have little (possibly in the case of dynamic ip) or no software to install to start using the service. All you have to do is change the DNS servers on your firewall/proxy.

For more info, go to to their site.

mythtv and cifs (samba)

Due to some error in the linux NFS client, I had to use CIFS to mount the storage from FreeNAS on my mythbuntu box. This seems to have created a new issue, whereby recordings do not get deleted by the backend due to "Text file busy" errors.

Because my storage was eventually going to fill up, I wrote a script to delete the recordings from the database and filesystem, and scheduled it in cron. It only deletes recordings that have been watched and with autoexpire on older than 14 days, plus LiveTV recordings with autoexpire on older than 7 days.

The myth.find_orphans.pl script was in a .gz in the referenced directory, so I had to uncompress and chmod it.

mysql -u mythtv -ppassword mythconverg -e "delete from recorded where autoexpire=1 and watched=1 and endtime < curdate() - 14;"
mysql -u mythtv -ppassword mythconverg -e "delete from recorded where storagegroup='LiveTV' and autoexpire > 0 and endtime < curdate() - 7;"
/usr/share/doc/mythtv-backend/contrib/myth.find_orphans.pl --dodelete

Add CAPTCHA to your site, free

Google announced today that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, so I had a look at what reCAPTCHA offers. Turns out they have an API that lets you add CAPTCHA to your site. They have plugins for ASP.Net, PHP, Java, etc.

Have a look here.

ASP.Net AJAX Toolkit and 'AjaxControlToolkit' is undefined

If your site uses AJAX, and you receive the dreaded 'AjaxControlToolkit' is undefined error, this might help you.

After some troubleshooting with Fiddler, I found out that I installed the FlatCompress ISAPI filter a while ago to test HTTP compression. It turns out this causes some problems with the ASP.Net AJAX toolkit. After I disabled it and restarted IIS, the error went away. Great. Now I can continue testing BugNET...

MyTechEd #Closing and final impressions

The closing presentation was informational as to what is coming down the line in terms of next generation user interfaces, etc. The insert by Arthur Goldstuck on broadband was very interesting.

Unfortunately I did not win the MVix PVR, or any other goodies for that matter.

http://www.worldwideworx.com