Starting IIS Express from a right click in explorer

After publishing this for Starting ASP.NET Development Server from a right click in explorer it is time to do it for IIS Express.

Tonight trying out Orchard 1.1 I just wanted to start by right clicking and getting IIS Express fired so that I can test the 1.1 version.

So I just modified my old Windows Registry .reg file and adapted it to IIS Express:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\VS2005 WebServer]
@="IIS Express Here"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\VS2005 WebServer\command]
@="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\IIS Express\\iisexpress.exe /path:\"%1\""

Take care that this is a file for 64 bits Windows OS, adapt to your path. Then you can double click on the .reg file to save the settings in the registry.

Now you will have access to the IIS Express Here right click menu in explorer and you can browse your site without running Visual Studio!

You might also read more for example on the other start param on Running a Site using IIS Express from the Command Line

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An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

“Unable to evaluate the expression” error in Visual Studio 2010 debugger

Last week I had an issue in Visual Studio 2010 debugger in some projects only! When I was looking at the value of variables I was getting an error message saying “Unable to evaluate the expression”!

Searching on Connect I have found that someone else had the same issue! Not really a good sign, “Debuging (Evalutation) stops working at times - Unable to evaluate the expression”. I have the same configuration, same issue and can reproduce what is described:

I'm on Windows 7 64bit and am using VS.NET 2010 Ultimate
Never had a problem with VS.NET 2010 until recently. And the problem I am having is that when I create a new console app and am not able to:
1. Evalutate any variable values
2. Hover over any variables and see their values
3. Use the immidiate window to get any values. I see a message -"Unable to evaluate the expression"
The debugger stops and the break points as expected but the above does not work.
If I switch the Project Build platofrm target property from x86 to Any CPU, then everything works as expected. Switching it back to x86 gives to the same behavior as explained above.
Other project types exhibit the same behavior sometimes. I have a new ASP.NET MVC project that are created and it exhibits the same behaviour. In fact with this project I am unable ot debug no matter what the build settings are.
Older console app projects have this problem as well (they used ot work just fine earlier).

On last Friday, I re-installed two times Visual Studio 2010 without any success, uninstalled all tooling… Still the same issue. I tried several other things over the weekend which didn’t helped.

I finally found that I had installed ASP.NET MVC 3 RC and I remember reading the documentation saying that it had an issue with Async CTP, which cannot be installed together on the same machine.

So I un-installed ASP.NET MVC 3 RC and searched Async CTP which wasn’t listed. Something I did already when installing ASP.NET MVC 3 RC.

This morning I realized why I didn’t found the Async CTP when I installed ASP.NET MVC 3 RC! It is installed as an update! What’s the hell!

So from Control Panel you have to click on “View installed updates” to see it

And now you can see it and un-install the Async CTP

Then I followed the instruction of Drew Miller of the ASP.NET Team to uninstall all pieces of ASP.NET MVC 3 RC, “How to Uninstall Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 3 RC”

Now my Visual Studio 2010 debugger is working like before!

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An article by Laurent Kempé 1 Comment

Jobping announcing StickyBeak

As said when we launched Jobping Open Source Short Urls Service, we at Jobping are committed to open source.

So last week we announced  StickyBeak, you might read more on the blog of Mark - Introduction to StickyBeak

StickyBeak is a logging tool for asp.net websites which logs information such as date, http method, url, User.Identity.Name, IP Address, unique session Id, unique browser Id, header values, querystring values, posted form values and cookie values for every request.

Here is a screenshot of the administration page,which lets you see the logged activity on your site.

StickyBeak is a complementary tool to the excellent elmah from Atif Aziz

We are using elmah on Jobping to log exceptions that might happen on the site, but we also wanted a raw record of each request made to our site, to make our troubleshooting life easier.

You can download the source and binaries from StickyBeak on CodePlex.

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An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

Book review - ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

I had the pleasure to read ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly from another ASP.NET MVP and blogger, Maarten Balliauw published by Packt Publishing.

The book is a quick overview of 191 pages covering all the different aspects of ASP.NET MVC 1.0. It ends with three appendix, a sample application CarTrackr, ASP.NET MVC Mock Helpers and Useful links and Open Source Projects, for a total of 231 pages.

Maarten starts with an introduction about Model-View-Controller and the drivers of the new framework. Then it moves to the real overview in details of the different parts of the framework: Form, ModelBinder, Request Life Cycle, Extensibility, Model, Controller, View, Action filters, Routing, Extension, Ajax, Testing and Hosting, mixing ASP.NET with ASP.NET MVC. So all the different parts are covered.

The different code samples are straight and perfectly demonstrates each points explained.

I particularly liked the parts about the Request Life Cycle and Customizing and Extending the ASP.NET MVC framework, one of the main reason I like this framework.

Finally I appreciated that the book is short, you might read it in 2-3 evening, and goes to the essential about ASP.NET MVC.

You might read the Chapter 2 in pdf.

Well done Maarten.

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An article by Laurent Kempé 1 Comment

And now ASP.NET MVC Beta is here!

What a week just before Microsoft PDC 2008! After Silverlight 2 release it is the turn of ASP.NET Framework to be released in Beta.

The ASP.NET MVC Beta release provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime. This means that developers can take advantage of the MVC design patterns to create their Web Applications which includes the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns (the UI or view from the business and application logic and backend data), as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD). The ASP.NET MVC framework defines a specific pattern to the Web Application folder structure and provides a controller base-class to handle and process requests for “actions”. Developers can take advantage of the specific Visual Studio 2008 MVC templates within this release to create their Web applications, which includes the ability to select a specific Unit Test structure to accompany their Web Application development.

The MVC framework is fully extensible at all points, allowing developers to create sophisticated structures that meet their needs, including for example Dependency Injection (DI) techniques, new view rendering engines or specialized controllers.

As the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5, developers can take advantage of many existing ASP.NET 3.5 features, such as localization, authorization, Profile etc.

You can download this new version on the following page, and I recommend you to visit the ASP.NET MVC website.

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