If you've made the jump to Vista and IIS7, like I recently did, and you've installed asp.net 1.1 for some reason (like trying to use the unsupported VS 2003 as I have), then you may be seeing this message, even when you are opening asp.net 2.0 sites in VS 2005.

You've checked in IIS, and the site is definitely pointed to an asp.net 2.0 application pool, but you get this message every single time you open the site.  Today, I came across this article, which spurred me on to find a slightly better solution.  Instead of deleting the 1.1 handlers, I just moved them down below the 2.0 handlers in the Ordered List view of the Handler Mappings.  Voila, no more error message, plus I don't lose the handlers that I might need at some point when testing an old, unsupported VS2003 app.  For having everything in one place, I'll put all of the linked article's instructions and mine all together here.

1. Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager
2. Select the root node
3. Open Handler Mappings
4. Remove each entry that points to ASP.NET 1.1
5. Click on View Ordered List... in the Actions area.
6. Select each of the handlers that have 1.1 in the name, and move them down below the handlers that have 2.0 in the name.
7. Reopen your VS 2005/asp.net 2.0 project, and no more error message.

I purchased a 19" Samsung 930B monitor tonight just before leaving for church.  I had just enough time to plug it in.  I tried one setting in the display properties to try to get it to come on, but no luck and I was out of time.  When I got back home, I found that it had sorted itself out, and both monitors were on.  All I had to do was swap the primary and secondary monitors so that the new, bigger monitor would be the primary.  I'm really going to enjoy the additional desktop space, but I think the most useful thing for is going to be the fact that I'll be able to use one screen for RDP (remoting into my work machine) and the other for my local machine.  Pretty exciting stuff.

BTW, I signed the contracts for showtimemaps.com last week, so real-time data should be available within days!

Every now and then I hear somebody tell a story about their hard drive crashing, and I'm reminded of my own loss back in college.  While I'm probably glad that I lost the lame songs that I wrote back then, there are a lot of things that I would love to still have around.  All of this reminds me that I need to back up my files.  Important business files and personal photos would be a disaster to lose at this point.  I looked a little bit at online backup storage, but current broadband transfer speeds, plus the cost of online storage, makes that a bit impractical at this point.  Then I read this article from MSNBC this morning, and I discovered exactly the type of solution that I would like to have--a networked external hard drive system.  Here's links to three of the solutions that I found via the article.

Mirra Personal Server - http://www.mirra.com/buy/index.html
$399.99 for 160 GB
At first perusal, this one seems to offer the most in the way of software features.

NetGear Storage Central - http://www.netgear.com/products/details/SC101.php
~$110
The upside is that it's expandable.  The downside is that IDE hard drives are sold separately.

LaCie Ethernet Disk mini - http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10594
$229-$599 for 250GB, 300GB, 400GB, or 500GB

While the Mirra solution looks pretty cool, the sheer affordability of the LaCie solution will probably win out for me.  Does anyone have any experience with Mirra or LaCie worth sharing?

I took the time to upgrade to the latest version of dasBlog 1.7.  Things went quite smoothly.  Some of the directions needed to be read several times to make sense, but everything worked on the first try.  Something new in the comments is the "capcha" image that makes sure that an actual person is commenting.  If this is annoying, tell me, and I'll turn it off.  I'm also excited about the new Publish option, which will allow me to put in entries just for myself, for historical purposes.  Ooh, and it looks like we've got FreeTextBox 3.0 for entries now!

I had to use my computer too much in the first day or so to actually pay much attention to it.  Plus, I was occasionally still having to RDP to my old slow computer, and I was still having to do a lot of waiting.  During that time, I had planned to move my old good hard drive over to my new machine, but when I opened it up, I realized that it was a different kind of hard drive interface.  At least I was able to take advantage of that time to teach Clinton a little bit about the inside of a computer.  I was very impressed with the inside of the computer.  The case is a snap to open, requiring no screwdrivers.  There is a massive, wind-tunnel sized fan that helps keep everything cool.  It looks like it is expecting more hard drives, as access to the power connectors, SATA ports, and drive bays is front-and-center.  Once I finally got my old computer turned off, I also noticed something else...nothing.  My new computer is incredibly quiet, which almost makes working seem peaceful.

Now that I've actually gotten to play around on my computer, I'm really enjoying the speed.  Visual Studio projects open up so much faster.  Also, switching back and forth between HTML and Design view is immediate now; it took way too long on my old machine.  I originally set up the computer with the supplied keyboard.  The feature of being able to open and close my cd drives from buttons on my keyboard was almost enough for me to not switch back to my wireless keyboard...almost.  I figure there's got to be some way to set that up via software.  Anybody know a keyboard shortcut for ejecting a cd?

Setting up my printer was quite simple, as this computer wants to use USB ports.  My old computer wasn't as USB friendly.  Once installed, I shared it and then went over to Jamie's computer, fully expecting to have to install it on her machine as well.  Somehow, as if by magic, when I opened up the Printers folder on her computer, before I could even do anything, the printer attached to my computer appeared before my very eyes, well, in icon-form.  No setup necessary.  Also, and this could be my fault for screwing with permissions, now Jamie can open up our Quicken data file over the network without facing a Windows logon prompt.  Which is great, because now she doesn't need me to relink stuff after her computer is rebooted.

Well, the good news is that I got a new computer.  Starting a couple months ago, I had noticed that there were some strange glitches with certain non-essential files on my hard drive.  It was annoying, so I started moving all of my non-system and non-program files on to my other hard drive.  This seemed to make the problem go away.  But then, last week, I noticed that the computer was getting slower and slower, and I knew it was just a matter of time before the thing blew out.  However, I was just going to wait it out, because I had planned to get a new computer after we moved int our new place in March.  But then that got postponed, and it got to where it took me an hour to do 5 minutes worth of work.  So, Tuesday night at 8:30 I headed to Best Buy to buy me a new computer.  Fortunately, I'd been doing a lot of research on this while helping Clinton look for his new computer.  And fortunately, Best Buy had the computer in stock.  Unfortunately, the number of people asking questions heavily outnumbered those who were there to answer them.  So, it took me 45 minutes to point to the computer I wanted, for them to pull it down off the high shelf right next to me, and to finally check out.

The next day, I had a client meeting in Vista (two hours away), and my computer needed to be up and running with all of my files and programs loaded.  So, I set to to work setting everything up, and finished the essential stuff by 6:00 a.m.  After a quick hour nap, I was up and out the door, and Clinton took me to Enterprise for me to pick up a car.  (Jamie's been working on a project down on Rodeo Drive all week.)  Here's something that I hadn't realized: Rain means no cars at rental car places.  Apparently, the cars that people have been renting, they have been wrecking, so the rental cars are in the shop.  Plus, people have been wrecking their own cars in the rain, so they need to rent one.  Anyway, I had to wait 45 minutes or so for a car, but I was really too tired to care much, and getting upset wouldn't get me a car any faster.  I made the drive, had the meeting, then drove back, except that the drive back took 4 hours because of traffic.  Boy, I slept well that night.

I spent all day Thursday copying over the rest of my files, then stayed up late again Thursday night, cleaning and reorganizing my desk and the area around it, that some might call an 'office'.  My old computer is now turned off, but has power and network attachments, in case I need to power it up and retrieve some file I forgot.  Once we move, it is destined to become a test server.  I'll blog again with my first impressions of my new computer.

Number one on my wish list is that I want someone to start selling PCI CableCARDs.  For those who don't know what CableCARD is, it's a card that you can get from your cable company that slides into various 'digital-cable-ready' devices, and eliminates the need for a separate cable box.  Some TVs have this built in.  There are supposed to be some personal video recorders coming out with it soon.  But for me, I want to have an HTPC, which means that my computer needs to be able to work with this technology.  That's where the PCI part comes in.  Currently, no one is making this.  If they do, I will buy one.

UPDATE:  So I was thinking about this some more, and I realized that since the cable companies are the ones that have to supply the CableCARD, they aren't likely to supply one in PCI form.  So, what I really need is a PCI card that accepts a CableCARD provided by the cable company AND has a coax input that together will allow the computer to capture cable HD.

I've had a couple of computer scares the last couple of days.  Yesterday, I returned home to find my computer rebooting itself, but it seemed stuck in an XP startup progress screen.  I turned it off, waited 10 minutes, as I'm apt to do, then started it back up again.  Unfortunately, it was really noisy on the reboot, and I knew it was time to take a look inside.  I mean, it had been too noisy for awhile, but this was ridiculous.  So, I opened it up, and it was full of dust, so my first attempt was just the basic clean up.  I took it outside with my compressed air duster, and blew out a lot of the dust, especially from areas containing fans, as they were the most likely culprit for the noise-making.  I took it back inside, plugged it back in, and still there was the noise. 

With the cover off, I put my ear near the inside to try to track down the source of the noise.  The power supply!  This was a good thing I thought, because I've replaced power supplies before, and they are failry cheap and easy to replace.  I took the power supply out, and gave it its very own air duster treatment.  I decided I'd take it apart, too, which voided the warranty on it, but like I said, they aren't that expensive.  I wanted to test it now by itself, so I plugged it in and turned on the switch.  Nothing.  This is because, it turns out, it's controlled by the power button on the computer via the motherboard.  So, I decided to plug the power back into the motherboard in order to use said power button.  Doing so also powered the fans on the CPUs, and now with the power supply separated from these fans by more distance, I realized that the noise was coming from one of the CPU fans.  By alternately turning the computer on with each CPU fan plugged in by itself, I discovered which fan was the problem.  I took it off and could tell just by spinning it with my finger that it was not in good working order.  So, I walked down to the neighborhood Radio Shack, bought a $10 fan, and installed it.  Problem solved and a quieter office to boot!

Then, this morning, I came in to my office, and was greeted by a hard disk failure error message.  Yikes.  But I didn't panic, because I know that whenever I get inside my computer and start messing around and moving it around, cables and such are likely to come loose.  Sure enough, I hadn't firmly plugged the power back into that hard drive, so it was just not turning on.  I plugged it back in and now my computer has lived to blog about it.