Date Published: August 2007.
Author: Claudio Vacalebre.
Soundtrack: Solo tu, Author: Claudio Vacalebre.
Ok. Let's start from scratch. Let's assume you do not have a site but you would love having one. Now, there are so many offering around web hosting services that it is not easy to make the right choice. Indeed you started your search using the keyword "web hosting"... and guess what happened?...
You felt simply embarassed by the number of results returned by two the most popular search engines; Google.com has returned around 293 Million results while Live.com "only" 70.241.847... You could feel lost!...
Now you need to work around this "issue". you need to refine the search to collect less results to start looking at them. To be effective in this rerfinenement task you need to understand which kind of web hosting services you are looking to buy. Not easy.
So, trying to understand which kind of hosted web services you need you draw your desiderata list; the first point you write down is "Web 2.0" as you have read a lot about it and you feel excited about the potential this concept bring to you; it seems to be THE WAY to go, right?...You also know that a core component of Web 2.0 is AJAX, so why not try to replace in your search string the word "Web" with the word "Ajax"?...
You feel so good when looking at search results as you have dramatically reduced the results (Google "only" 43 Million and Live and "astonishing" 1.4 Million!... You are on the right track.
You are also an ASP.NET developer so you would love to continue to leverage your experience on such framework... Why not adding to your search string the word "ASP.NET"?... Incredibly the number of results are now more approachable: Google only 2.3 Million while Live are less than 400.000! You are closer to the target!
Continuing with this approach you have added more keywords reflecting your development environment, so you added "MS SQL" and "Visual Studio" keywords to your search string; as a result your Live search output counts 40.000 results and Google almost 1.7 million. But you want more.
You also read a lot around the improvements Windows Server 2008 will bring with the Web Server (IIS 7) and it is just few months away from being released. Why not try to see if is there any Hoster out there offering a beta program on it?... You then add the "IIS7" keyword to your search string which looks like the following : "ASP.NET ajax hosting MS SQL visual studio IIS7".
Wow! You have now 4.000 results from Live and 211.000 on Google. You feel smart and very, very close to the target.
Like a cherry on the pie then you add the keyword "Silverlight" and run the search again. Now with a reasonable 3.100 results from Live and 128.000 on Google you can start analyzing and comparing results.
After having spent not less than 1 hour comparing results you realize that there are very few hosters offering the services you need; one of this is discountasp.net which meets all your "requirements".
To give them a try you have successfully subscribed their services and promptly start working on your site. Indeed the registration process is so effective that you can be up and running with your new site in a matter of minutes. Forget the old times when you had to wait 24/48 hours before starting putting your hands on it!...
First, you want to test the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions support, to do so you build your test site leveraging the Ajax Control Toolkit, a great resource that explains how to use those nice controls and their extenders. It includes also the Visual Studio Solution file which makes so easy to start working with it using Visual Studio!
What you have done has been just downloading the Ajax Control Toolkit, which is a compressed file, and extracted the content in a local directory, the extraction includes also a folder called SampleWebSite which can be easily opened as a web site from Visual Studio 2005.
On the testing environment and thanks to Visual Studio, the test site has worked at first shoot and you haven't even touched IIS. As a next step you simply upload the entire test site into your new web site.
Ready to access your default.aspx page? Yes, you carefully type the URL and...aargh!...the page has returned an error!...
Reading the parser error description it seems that "it can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS".
Next step then will be to open the Control panel and see where this kind of configuration change can be applied. Your Control Panel indeed provide an interesting tool called IIS Application Manager... You can start having a look at it.
Notes that this is the Control Panel offered by YOUR Service Provider therefore the interface can be completely different, is up to you to explore your Control Panel to find it.
Indeed looking at the IIS Application Manager it is clear that the SampleWebSite folder (the Sample web site from the Ajax Control Toolkit) is not configured as a web application hence the parser error.
To solve the issue the sampleWebSite folder should then be converted to web application through a single click on the Web Application tool; just select the folder to be converted and click on the "Install Application" button like shown here:
After clicking on the "Install Application" button you will notice the new folder icon representing the status of Web Application. Here the snapshot:
It is now time to re-run the test; open your browser, type the test URL and see what happens: now it works!
You have seen how simple could be to build your first Ajax-enabled site; there is so much code out there there you do not need to reinvent the wheel; you just need to leverage the knowledge available around it and develop your ideas.
Be also aware when you buy your hosted services to double check Ajax support and also that the provider is giving you the freedom to convert every single folder within your site to web application.
I struggled for weeks with a provider trying to convince me that the only web application folder would be the root hence no way to convert any other folder to web application! Guess what happened?... I felt so frustrated that I decided to change the hosting provider (n.d.r. but I have also left him the money spent for the subscription...).
With the new provider it has been just a matter of hours, subscribing the service, test the application and go live!
That's the way!