Category: VBScript
Discovery of the Day
I'm a big fan of virtual directories. I like sharing assets across sites without having to duplicate a bunch of folders. Angela and I were doing some planning for a site and she asked if you created a Virtual Directory in IIS, what would happen if you also had a physical directory of the same name. Well it turns out that if you have a Virtual Directory defined in IIS, the server will completely ignore the contents of any physical directory in the same location. So if you had this:
assets wwwroot |--myassets (virtual directory pointing to assets above root) |--myassets (physical directory on the disk)
Then all files and folders in the physical myassets folder will be completely ignored.
IISAdmin to the Rescue
I've always gone through the trouble of setting up a separate full-blown Windows 2003 Server here in my office for doing development work. The reason being that I didn't want to test on the production server, deal with FTP lags when uploading constantly changed files, and I like to keep my sites clean. I don't like testing in a base wwwroot directory and either setting up tons of subfolders or constantly clearing the wwwroot directory to get a site in the root.
I mentioned IISAdmin a while back, but never actually got it installed and working. Well I wiped my machine yesterday and got rid of a bad Media Center installation and went back to standard XP. I installed IIS and then installed CF5, CFMX 6.1, and CFMX7. I set up a separate site for each, and I can then use IISAdmin to easily switch sites to test in the right server. Awesome little tool, and the perfect price, free
Basecamp on KISS
Business Week has a great interview with one of the owners of 37Signals on their design philosophy and why it's a good idea to keep things simple.