.NET and Coldfusion and IIS7 and Charting and AJAX and…

ARRGH!

     I am in the process of creating an application that uses the MS Charting controls along with some AJAX.  I was working on my machine of XP with VS 2008.  I didn’t have IIS installed so I was using built in browser functionality from VS to view site. Everything was going great. Was being the key word.  I had to finally move it over to a real development environment for more reasons than one.  When I finally moved the application it broke. It just wouldn’t work.  I got a 500 error.  Then after a few refreshes I found that I had this error: The WebResource.axd handler must be registered in the configurtion to process this request.  What!? What does that mean?  I searched for a few days to find a solution. I came up with a few from restarting the web service to reinstalling the .NET framework (none of which worked by the way).  After 4 days I finally came across the solution, Coldfusion does not play well with AJAX and .NET. For some reason, after looking at the compiled error logs, I saw that my appication was calling a .DLL in the Coldfusion directory.  Why on earth would my Microsoft .NET 3.5 SP1 application even be concerned with anything Coldfusion?  It seems that it is a mapping issue within IIS 7.  Yup, IIS 7. I had to remove (not sure if it was the right thing to do) but I removed all mappings to anything Coldfusion (.cfm, cfml, jsp, etc.).  It it was mapped to anything in the Coldfusion directory, I got rid of it.  Guess what?  It worked.  Application works like a champ now!  I am putting this up here so to be another resource to call upon.  There wasn’t anything I found that said to do what I did.  The closest I came was to have .NET and Coldfusion install on different servers.  Likely scenerio.  Yea right… Hope this helped someone.  Have fun coding and as always, if there are any questions or suggestions, they are welcome.  Thank you.

Standards of Coding

I just gave a presentation to a team of developers about coding standards for .NET.  I was a bit nervous as most of them were/are smarter than I.  I think it went off really well.  Better than I thought it would.  At least that is the feedback I got.  What I covered was that using .NET, there really are not ’standards’ to follow that are better than another.  What needs to be considered is that a set of standards are made and then followed by the development team.  These standards can be something created by a team member or something pre-built by a third party (MVC, nTier, etc.). What I am saying is that standards can be anything the team comes up with.  They only become standards if they are used as such.  If I came and implemented standards for the team for .NET and nobody used them, then what you have in essence is a different way of coding than that of anybody else.  If everyone used the methodology put forth, that’s when standards start to take shape.  I know there are many different methodologies but you only need one to get a team on the same page.  I am interested on any other thoughts on this subject. Have fun coding and as always, if there are any questions or suggestions, they are welcome.  Thank you.