Issues with Sitecore CMS 6 admin pages related to the application pool managed pipline mode

Spent the morning debugging a Sitecore CMS 6.2.0 (rev. 091012) install on my local machine. Most of the site worked fine, but things started to fall apart under the admin screens.

The Content Editor UI would come up, but the Presentation > Preview resulted in a 404.0 exception where it was trying to resolve the Request URL using the StaticFile handler to files that didn't exist.

The admin Desktop interface was similarly out of order. In this case bringing up any of the UR elements would result in a 404 using the StaticFile handler again.

The resolution I found was to change the Application Pool from Classic Managed pipeline mode to integrated. The exact cause still eludes me but I suspect there may have been a custom URL rewriter involved that wasn't intercepting requests with the classic mode.

MCP Virtual Business Cards

https://www.mcpvirtualbusinesscard.com

Some notes from the Visual Studio 2010 & Windows Azure Launch Event

TechEd 2010 New Zealand dates

August 30th to September 1st

Visual Studio 2010

• There is a TFS plugin for Ecllipse
• Team build now runs on Windows Workflow
• Generate assembly dependency and sequence diagrams
• IntelliTrace
  • A Time sequence capture of server execution
  • Full debug environment when opened.
• IDE will perform variable highlighting
• ~97% of customers have a trouble free upgrade from VS2008 solutions and projects.

Azure

• Doesn't currently allow admin access to the VMs (web and worker role)
• Disadvantage in that it prevents installing certain applications
• Advantage in that the Azure fabric will manage the VMs for you. E.g. Installing windows update.
• Windows Azure Storage
  • Blobs
  • Tables (not to be confused with SQL tables). Provide scalable storage.
  • Queues
• SQL Azure Database (currently limited to 10 GB)
• Windows Azure Platform AppFabric
• Service Bus
• Access Control
• Potential applications characteristics that would benefit from the Azure platform:
  • Massive scalibitliy
  • High Reliability
  • Apps with variable load
  • Short or unknown lifetime
  • Parallel processing
  • Start Ups - Fail fast or scale fast
  • Orgs data centre doesn't easily support the installation of an Azure supported application locally.
  • Need to be able to calculate costs to a degree of certainty.
  • Provide a remote storage solution.

Sample by Green Button

Unexpected Captcha

This isn't the sort of captcha I'd expect from a ASP.NET website.

Visual Studio 2008 excessive disk usage in AppData ReflectedSchemas

I didn't have enough disk space in install Visual Studio 2010 so went searching for the folders with the biggest usage. In my case the folder

c:\Users\...\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ReflectedSchemas

was using just under 18 GB for 22,356 files.

See Also:

• Stack Overflow: ReflectedSchemas folder in the user’s AppData folder (Visual Studio)

PS3 TVNZ OnDemand in a web browser - underlying website

The PlayStation 3 TVNZ OnDemand function seems like it is a locked down browser session pointing to a flash page: http://tvnz.co.nz/ps3/video.
Cursor keys and enter seem to work for the controls.

See also:

• PlayStation 3 News Articles: - PlayStation® tunes into TVNZ Ondemand
• TVNZ Ondemand on PS3

Escaping braces when using string.Format() to output a literal brace

Typically a backslash will be used to escape characters in a C# string. However, with the string.Format() method you double up the braces ("{{", "}}") to produce a literal.

E.g. The following will result in a FormatException.

string.Format("function JavaScriptFunction() { return {0}; }", variableToReturn);

Escaping the required braces to output literals produces the correct output.

string.Format("function JavaScriptFunction() {{ return {0}; }}", variableToReturn);

From MSDN:

To specify a single literal brace character in format, specify two leading or trailing brace characters; that is, "{{" or "}}".