Ryan’s Tech Blog

A perplexing error while setting up my new system:

Server Application Unavailable

The web application you are attempting to access on this web server is currently unavailable.

Please hit the “Refresh” button in your web browser to retry your request.

Administrator Note: An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the system event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur.

The web leads me far astray. I did not have anything in the event log.

The solution? Give MACHINE/ASPNET permission to my project. I found this a LOT faster by switching to .NET 1.1 in IIS, and that gave a much more useful error message. I guess “Server Application Unavailable” is .NET 2′s way of crapping its pants.

Yet another example of why I believe this:

Microsoft told me to update to IE7, so I did. To test something in IE6, I’m installing MS Virtual PC 2004 (provided free by MS), and running an image of Windows XP that has IE6 (also provided free by MS). I am following this article from the IEBlog: IE6 and IE7 Running on a Single Machine.

I downloaded both files, and now all I have to do is debug the installation of both. MS Virtual PC thinks I don’t have a checkbox checked, but my network settings disagree. Windows doesn’t think the compressed OS image I downloaded from Microsoft is a valid exe file.

I appreciate that Microsoft is trying to help me out, but making IE7 a separate program from IE6 would be much more helpful.

I guess I’ll try rebooting.

Once constant annoyance I’ve had with C# has been parsing a string into an enum.

Original C#:

MyEnum e = (MyEnum) Enum.Parse(typeof(MyEnum), "myvalue");

Using generics let you write a function to help:

public static T ParseEnum<T>(string name) {
  return (T)Enum.Parse(typeof(T), name);
}

So then you can simply* say:

MyEnum e = ParseEnum<MyEnum>("myvalue");

A little nicer, but still annoying.
*: simply for C#