Debugging Connection Leaks

We recently had an issue with a web service we built to be the gateway for data entry to a client application. The issue was inconsistent (the worst kind). The errors seemed to occur in relatively short but frequent waves.

A review of the error logs showed the following error:

Description:
Failure to Open Database Connection

Error Stack Trace:
  at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.GetConnection(DbConnection owningConnection)
  at System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionClosed.OpenConnection(DbConnection outerConnection, DbConnectionFactory connectionFactory)
  at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.Open()
  at LeadManager.Data.DataAccessBase.openCNX()

This indicated a connection leak issue. There are a…

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Making an ASP.NET 4.0 Website work with 3.5 Virtual Directories Under It

One might assume that a parent website application set to ASP.NET 4.0 in IIS 6 would have no issue running backward compatibility for its virtual directories (VirDirs) that are still written in ASP.NET 3.5 or even 2.0… But you’d be wrong.

Here’s an example structure:

 
• MyWebsite (.NET 4.0)
• MyInsetApp1 (.NET 3.5)
• MyInsetApp2 (.NET 3.5)

Which could create URLs like this:

• MyWebsite.com
• MyWebsite.com/MyInsetApp1/
• MyWebsite.com/MyInsetApp2/

(they appear to be on the same website, but actually run as separate distinct applications)

You actually have to jump through some hoops with the web.configs for both the parent website application and the child…

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ASP.NET 4.0, Extensionless Urls, and the eurl.axd errors

Apparently ASP.NET 4.0 has something special for “extensionless URLs”—which is what we get from using ISAPI_Rewrite on our Windows Server 2003 machines. The symptom we were seeing was that the URL Rewriting kept unexpectedly returning something similar to this:

eurl.axd/ADkfjsFiSofmaWOeiejrlErF

so rewriting something like:

/myrewrite/articleID/articleName/

would end up rewriting to:

/myrewrite.aspx?id=eurl.axd/ADkfjsFi…..

On the server’s Registry Editor (regedit) I followed this article’s “option 3” and turned off the EnableExtensionlessUrls, which is a DWORD set to 0 (zero) within HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ASP.NET\4.0.30319.0 —then you must run theh iisreset command-line tool.

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ISAPI_Rewrite for Wordpress permalinks on IIS

We’re setting up a WordPress installation on a Microsoft IIS server that already had Helicon’s ISAPI_Rewrite installed on it.

WordPress is built on PHP and by default expects to use mod_rewrite on Apache, but there are several options that allow “pretty URLs” on IIS as well. ISAPI_Rewrite is one of those options (must be purchased).

We opted for using WordPress’s documented “custom structure” for it’s permalinks and just entered “/%postname%” as the custom structure. This allows a page that would normally look like this:

  http://mysite.com/index.php?id=325

And then changes it to a more SEO- and human-friendly URL:

  http://mysite.com/about/

Now a lot of what we found online was…

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