Keeping your server up to date

I had a recent support call which came up when  a User upgraded to the latest version of Profess Time Manager.  A weird error was being thrown, and I could not reproduce it here or on any of our test servers, even when running with the user’s data.  I finally tracked it down by following the error message and finding that we were relying on a function only present in ASP.Net Ajax SP2.

Once I found that, the solution was simple.  Download from the following url and apply the latest version for your specific operating system:

 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5b2c0358-915b-4eb5-9b1d-10e506da9d0f&displaylang=en

While the answer was quick, it did take me 30 minutes trawling through a trace log to find the issue, and it made me realise that there are a lot of servers out there that do not get patched automatically, and I wondered why?  If automatic updates had been turned on, this would have been updated immediately.

All of our servers, both live and test, and our hosted server, have automatic updates turned on.  Perhaps people really don’t trust Microsoft to ship reliable patches, but surely the alternative is worse?  Software that doesn’t work and security that is compromised.  I often hear the comment that IT Departments like to have control over what patches they apply, but unless you have a large and very knowledgeable IT Department, I would always prefer to trust the guys in Microsoft to get my server running sweetly – life is too short to have to understand ALL of this techy stuff.

So, just a little plea: Update early and update often.

Configuring Time Manager under Windows Server 2008

Generally, installing Profess Time Manager has been a pretty simple operation under Microsoft’s earlier operating systems (Windows Server 2000/2003/SBS2003).  With the introduction of Windows Server 2008 (and to some extent Windows Vista and Windows 7) this has become more problematic as these are shipped with IIS7 and not IIS6.

To get an ASP.Net 2.0 application, such as Time Manager, operating on these requires some additional configurations.  This is made more complicated by the fact that Windows Server 2008 comes only as a 64 bit operating system, and so needs a couple of extra tweaks.

The process of configuration contains a number of stages, and is more detailed than I would want to include in this blog, so if you want to find out how to configure Time Manager (or indeed any other ASP.Net 2.0 application under Windows Server 2008) click here to download a PDF document explaining the steps you need to take.