Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

We think WebMatrix is a pretty amazing tool and apparently we’re not alone as there’s about 700,000 mentions of it throughout the web today. We wanted to put together a list of great tutorials, tips and tricks that have been posted on the web and here’s our favorite 7 sites.

7 favorite WebMatrix Tricks & Tips Sites.

1. Bilal Aslam’s Common Errors & Workarounds

Bilal works as a PM at Microsoft and has posted a list of 5 common errors and their solutions on his blog. This ranges from “The application pool that you’re trying to use has the ‘managedRuntimeVersion’ property set to ‘v2.0’ to “Bad gateway: check proxy settings’ which are all pretty common errors today.

2. Charles Nurse’s Creating a DotNetNuke site and deploying it to a hosting account.

Charles actually has two blog posts the first one is WebMatrix and DNN – Using WebMatrix to setup your DotNetNuke Site. and the second is Using WebMatrix to Publish Your DotNetNuke Site. if you’re among the hundreds of thousands of DotNetNuke users you’ll find WebMatrix useful as you’ll be able to build your DNN site locally and test it completely within IIS and then publish it to a hosting account and have WebMatrix migrate the site files and database for you all auto-magically!

3. Ruslan’s Blog on IIS.NET – Installing PHP Applications with WebMatrix

Most PHP development is done on top of a windows desktop machine by PHP developers. However, they’re usually installing some Apache, MySQL and PHP stack on their machine and cluttering it up. With WebMatrix and it’s built in IIS developer express, you’re able to leverage it as a lean and mean PHP development machine and not only build and test PHP apps locally but deploy them and know they’ll work exactly as they did in development because you’re using IIS for both.  Ruslan has a great tutorial using WebMatrix with PHP applications as well as a number of blog articles around PHP on Windows and the work Microsoft has been doing to make PHP run so well on Windows.

4. Mikesdotnetting – WebMatrix and jQuery Forms.

This is a great article that talks about leveraging jQuery and AJAX in ASP.NET WebPages (Razor). Mike’s actually taken WebMatrix and written a series of popular blog articles around Razor and WebMatrix including one on WebGrid.

5. From IIS.NET – Using the Command Line to run a WebMatrix site or manage IIS Developer Express

What I love about this article is that it gives you a glimpse into the inner workings of iisexpress and shows you how to do things like launching a site with a customer applicationhost.config file, running a site from another folder and even over port 80. Oh and if you’re not an avid fan of the command line, fear not.. They have an article on managing sites via the windows system tray too.

6. The ASP.NET Website’s list of video tutorials and articles on WebMatrix and ASP.NET WebPages (Razor)

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the ASP.NET site’s WebMatrix resources. There’s a ton of information here from video tutorials to HTML tutorials.

7. From IIS.NET – Make your Website SEO Friendly

This article gives a great overview of the SEO capabilities of WebMatrix.  It will tell you specific problems with your site that will impact your search engine rankings.  Not only that, but you can run the same reports against your competitors to see how you stack up.

Only 7, Is that it?

So you’re probably thinking, what? 7 sites? that’s it. Well not entirely, but this is a beta offering and still very early in the process. There are some other sites I’d always recommend like ScottGu’s Blog and Scott Hanselman’s Blog.  I’d also recommend checking out James Senior’s video about the OData Helper they’ve released for WebMatrix and how you can leverage OData. In James’s example he pulled a list of Netflix videos and displayed it with just a couple lines of code.

But hey, these are only the sites we found and I’m sure you know of others out there as well. So if want to comment with your favorite we’ll be sure to update the list.

Popularity: 9% [?]

One of the great features of AppliedI-Labs is that we’re able to load new technology onto servers extremely early.  I’m pleased to announce that just a couple days ago the Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server 2.0 were released and are already available on our AppliedI-Labs environment and will soon be made available across all of our production servers.  Included in this release is support for PHP Data Objects (PDO), the ability to leverage SQL Server’s Reporting Services and Business Intelligence capabilities and the ability to connect to SQL Azure.

If you want to learn more about the new PHP drivers for SQL Server:

• Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP Team Blog
• SQL Server Reporting Services SDK for PHP
• Official Documentation on MSDN

If you want to test out the new PHP drivers today:

• You can install it locally as part of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (WebPI)
• You can download it directly from Microsoft MSDN Downloads.
• You can signup for a WebMatrix Hosting Beta account with Applied Innovations and try it out in our sandboxed AppliedI-Labs environment.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Applied Innovations is pleased to announce we’re not only fully compatible for WordPress Hosting but we now offer WordPress as a One-Click install through our powerful, yet easy to use control panel. We’ll explore WordPress and demonstrate how easy it is to get WordPress running on our webservers.

Why WordPress, and Why WordPress on Windows?

WordPress is a freely distributed, standards-compliant, fast, light and free personal publishing platform. Based on PHP and MySQL wordpress is very powerful and extensible. WordPress is also one of the most widely adopted and used blogging engines today and powers the very blog you’re reading.

As a Windows hosting provider we support PHP and MySQL on all of our hosting servers and WordPress is just one of the many applications we host that is built around PHP and MySQL and we’ve extended our hosting platform to make your PHP/MySQL hosting as easy and powerful as it is on any hosting platform. One of the additions you’ll find on our hosting platform is helicon-tech.com‘s Isapi-Rewrite. Isapi-Rewrite 3.0 is a mod-rewrite compatible isapi filter that brings full mod-rewrite compatibility to your Windows hosting account. For wordpress this means you’ll be able to make full use of permalinks and search engine friendly URLs without any extra work! In addition we support the latest builds of PHP with Windows optimized binaries for maximum performance and compatibility.

Installing WordPress at AppliedI.net

1. Selecting the WordPress application pack

Within your domain settings of our control panel you’ll find an option for Application Packs.

The Application Packs are a series of common web applications that we support as one-click installable apps. By using the application packs you’ll be able to install some of the most requested and commonly hosted applications without having to upload anything, without having to edit any files and with minimum effort on your part. This makes installing applications like wordpress even easier than they already.

2. Entering basic configuration settings

Once you select the wordpress application pack you’ll need to enter a few settings. You’ll want to decide what folder you’ll install it in and enter that folder, if it’s not the root folder. You’ll want to either select an existing MySQL database or create a new database and if creating a new database you’ll want to enter the database and login credentials you’ll use. By default wordpress prepends wp_ to all of it’s tables so if you already have a MySQL database for another web application you can share that information here.

3. You’re done, almost!

Once you click the install button on the configuration page the control panel copies over the wordpress files and edits the configuration files for you, next step is to execute the web based installer within wordpress. Easiest way to do that is to open the url:

http://YOURDOMAIN/wp-admin/index.php (where YOURDOMAIN is your domain name)

or you can just go directly to http://YOURDOMAIN/ but you may notice the CSS isn’t quite right and some of the images may not display correctly but don’t be alarmed it will still install fine.

Once you open the install page you just need to make a few basic settings and we’re done.

4. Setting WordPress Email & Title

As with any WordPress install, you’ll want to enter your blog’s title, your email address (make sure you use your real email address because it will email you your username and password to this address) and click the install button.

5. Now you just need to log in.

Once you click the install button, you’ll wait a few minutes for a screen like:

That’s it your blog is now installed and you’ll be able to login and finish configuring the blog.

What’s next after it’s installed?

After you’ve installed your blog you’re all set and can begin blogging immediately. You’ll log into the admin interface at:

http://YOURDOMAIN/wp-admin (where YOURDOMAIN is your actual domain)

and begin configuring it. You’ll be able to enable new plug-ins and themes. We’ve taken the liberty to enable a couple extra themes for you (about 6 actually) so you’ll have a few more choices and we’ve installed some of the most common plug-ins for you that you can enable if you like.

Look for a future blog posting on advanced wordpress on windows tips and tricks that will help you extend wordpress even further.

Popularity: 4% [?]