Newest KB Articles in Third party applications and tools

Preconfiguration of Moodle 2.4.1 and up

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 02:16:08 GMT

Please note that this Knowledge Base article only applies to Moodle version 2.4.1 and up.

When you first try to install Moodle using our App Installer tool in the WinHost Control Panel, it will place the Moodle Files in the directory you specified. Once our App Installer has completed placing the files on the web server, it will give you a URL that you will need to click on to go to the Moodle Installation Wizard.

There are some configurations changes that you need to make in order to install Moodle correctly on our web servers.

Please note the following information:

In the Moodle Installation Wizard, you will be asked to enter the destination of the Data Directory. Moodle may try to place it above your root of the web site. This will not work in our hosting environment because you won't be able to place files above your root directory.

We recommend using the App_Data directory. This is because the App_Data directory is protected by our web server from people being able to view it through a web browser.

Note the following screen shot below as an example of what you will need to enter:

FTPUserName is the root directory of your hosting account. This will need to be changed to your real main FTP Username. The App_Data directory is a subdirectory in the root of the hosting account. If you're installing the web application into a subdirectory. Then you will need to type out your FTPUserName and the subdirectory you're installing Moodle in (e.g. E:\web\FTPUserName\sub-directoryName\App_Data).

We would recommend using a MS SQL Database to work with your Moodle web application.

If you choose to use a MySQL database with your Moodle web application, you will need to change the collation of the MySQL database in order for the wizard to complete the installation.

The Collation will need to be changed to: uf8 – itf8_general_ci

To do this, connect to the MySQL database using MySQL Workbench. If you don't know how to connect to your MySQL database using MySQL Workbench, please read our Knowledge Base article "Connect to MySQL with MySQL Workbench".

Once connected to your MySQL database using MySQL Workbench, right click on the MySQL database and click on "Alter Schema..."

Next to "Collation:", click on the drop down menu and select "uf8 – itf8_general_ci".

Now click on "Apply".

Click "Apply" on the next window popup.

Click "Finish".

Now continue with your installation of Moodle.

If you use a MS SQL database, you won't need to change the Collation of the database.

How to troubleshoot Silverlight RIA Applications using Fiddler

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:52:58 GMT

It’s difficult to troubleshoot Silverlight applications built with WCF RIA services n a production environment because:

RIA Domain services is a virtual file and you will not find it in the directory structure.
Any exception thrown by the domain service will NOT be shown on the Silverlight client. It will only show up as a 404 Not found error. Without the real error, it’s very difficult to troubleshoot the problem.

In this article we are going to show you how to get the real error returned by the RIA domain service.

With a Silverlight application, all you will see is something similar to below which is not very helpful when troubleshooting your application.

To get the real error message returned by the domain service, you will need to install the Web Debugging Proxy tool, Fiddler.

Once you have Fiddler installed, you can fire up a Fiddler and start capturing the HTTP requests.

In the Fiddler trace below, you can see that the request made to the domain service, /riarc2test/ClientBin/HRApp-Web-AuthenticationService.svc/binary/GetUser, returned a 500 error. In the web view on the right hand pane, Fiddler will display the real error returned by the domain service.

Also note that /riarc2test/ClientBin/HRApp-Web-AuthenticationService.svc does not exist on the server but you’ll get the same error if you browse to this URL.

If you run in to problems troubleshooting your Silverlight RIA application, please post in our Community Forum. Technical support cannot assist with specific application troubleshooting and developmental issues.

Application Installer

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 23:33:55 GMT

We provide access to "one-click" installation of many popular applications in Control Panel. The applications are part of Microsoft's Web Application Gallery and are fully tested for compatibility with our platform before they are made available to you.

The Application Installer is a convenient and powerful tool, but there are some important issues to keep in mind when using it. Most notably, when you install an application with this tool, it deletes everything in the target directory. This is done to insure that no old or conflicting files or assemblies are present alongside the new installation.

Another important issue is maintenance. Most popular applications are updated periodically, and those updates will have to be applied manually. The Application Installer is an installer only. It cannot update your applications.

Also, some applications may specify; WinHost Max or Ultimate recommended. Those are applications that typically require more memory than is available in our other plans. They will not work properly unless they are installed in a Max or Ultimate site.

Finally, while we have tested the available applications, we cannot provide support for the applications or the installation with Application Installer. The vendors maintain and package the applications for use in Application Installer, so the vendors should be contacted if the need for support arises.

To access the Application Installer, go to the Application Installer page of Control Panel.

Persits ASPEmail Information

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:25:16 GMT

Persists AspEmail component is an active server component for sending e-mail messages using an external SMTP server in an ASP or ASP.NET application (through a wrapper object).

AspEmail 5.0 supports multiple recipients, multiple file attachments, HTML format, embedded images and sounds, non-US ASCII character sets and secure mail.

More information:

User manual: http://www.aspemail.com/manual_01.html
Main Web site: http://www.aspemail.com

Persits ASPEmail sample code

    
            <html> 
        
            <head> 
        
            </head> 
        
            <body> 
        
            <% 
        
            Set Mailer = Server.CreateObject("Persits.MailSender") 
        
            Mailer.Host = "mail.mydomain.com" 
        
            Mailer.Username = "postmaster@mydomain.com" 
        
            Mailer.Password = "password" 
        
            Mailer.FromName   = "postmaster@mydomain.com" 
        
            Mailer.From= "postmaster@mydomain.com" 
        
            Mailer.AddAddress "postmaster@mydomain.com" 
        
            Mailer.Subject    = "This is a sample email sent from Persits ASPEMail" 
        
            Mailer.Body   = "Congratulation" & VbCrLf & "If you receive this is, your mail component works" 
        
            ' catch errors 
        
            On Error Resume Next 
        
            Mailer.Send 
        
            If Err <> 0 Then ' error occurred 
        
                  Response.Write "Mail send failure. Error was " & Err.Description 
        
            else 
        
                 Response.Write "Mail sent..." 
        
            End If 
        
            %> 
        
            </body> 
        
            </html>

Do you support Persits ASPEmail Message Queuing feature?

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:23:10 GMT

We do not support message queuing for Persits AspEmail.

If you enable message queuing in your application, you will see this error message “No path specified and no default value found in the registry.”

More information:

User manual: http://www.aspemail.com/manual_01.html
Main web site: http://www.aspemail.com

Persits ASPJpeg Information

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:21:42 GMT

AspJpeg is a high-quality image thumbnail component that can resize images on-the-fly. Features include:

    * Supports JPEG, GIF, BMP, TIFF and PNG formats. Output format is always JPEG.
    * Source images can be opened from disk, memory, or a recordset.
    * Resized images can be saved to disk, memory or an HTTP stream.
    * Supports three resizing algorithms: nearest-neighbor, bilinear, and bicubic.
    * Drawing and typing on top of an image. Support for TrueType and Type 1 fonts.
    * Automatic word wrapping, text alignment to the left, right, center and justified, rotation.
    * Picture-in-picture support.
    * Cropping, flipping, rotation, sharpening, grayscale conversion.
    * Compression rate of output images can be adjusted for optimal quality/file size ratio.
    * EXIF and IPTC metadata extraction from JPEG images.
    * CMYK-to-RGB conversion.
    * Sepia filter.
    * Read/write access to individual pixels of an image.
    * PNG alpha channel support.
    * GIF transparency support.
    * Brightness, contrast and saturation adjustment.

More information:

For more information: http://www.aspjpeg.com
For Live Demo: http://www.aspjpeg.com/livedemo.html

Sample code to resize an image with ASPJpeg 1.8.

You will need to customize the imagePath and image_name variables. See comments in code.

    
            <HTML> 
        
            <HEAD> 
        
            <TITLE>AspJpeg - Simple.asp</TITLE> 
        
            </HEAD> 
        
            <BODY> 
        
            <% 
        
             ' Path and name to the location of the image file 
        
             imagePath = "/images" 
        
             image_name = "images.jpg" 
        
             ' Name of the resized image file 
        
             new_image_filename = "clock_small.jpg" 
        
             ' Create instance of AspJpeg 
        
             Set Jpeg = Server.CreateObject("Persits.Jpeg") 
        
             ' Compute path to source image 
        
             Path = Server.MapPath(imagePath & "/" & image_name) 
        
             ' Open source image 
        
             Jpeg.Open Path 
        
             ' Decrease image size by 50% 
        
             JpegJpeg.Width = Jpeg.OriginalWidth / 2 
        
             JpegJpeg.Height = Jpeg.OriginalHeight / 2 
        
             ' Apply sharpening if necessary 
        
             Jpeg.Sharpen 1, 130 
        
             ' create thumbnail and save it to disk 
        
             Jpeg.Save Server.MapPath(imagePath & "/" & new_image_filename) 
        
            %> 
        
            Original Image:<BR> 
        
            <IMG SRC="<%=imagePath & "/" & image_name%>"><P> 
        
            Thumbnail (50% reduction):<BR> 
        
            <IMG SRC="<%=imagePath & "/" & new_image_filename%>"><P> 
        
            <% 
        
             Response.Write "<HR>AspJpeg expires on " & Jpeg.Expires 
        
            %> 
        
            </BODY> 
        
            </HTML>

Persits ASPUpload Information and sample code

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:16:36 GMT

Sample code for Persits ASPUpload.

How to generate a Google Sitemap

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:10:55 GMT

The "Sitemap Generator" provided by Google is a console script written in Python and is intended to be executed on the console to generate the sitemap.

Unfortunately, this is not supported with our service because:

Python is not installed on our servers
Unlike a UNIX host, it is not possible for customers to execute shell commands on our servers
The Sitemap file is just a simple text file that follows several formats (OAI-PMH v2.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3)

According to Google, it is possible to write your own program to generate the needed sitemap file. See Webmaster Tools › Help articles › Sitemaps.

Alternatively, there are a number of freely available services/tools to generate a Sitemap file. For example:
http://www.sitemapspal.com
http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp
http://www.dmxzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=10538

How to install DotNetNuke 5.x on WinHost servers

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:38:22 GMT

Below is a step by step installation procedure to install DotNetNuke portal version 5.x on WinHost servers.

We do not provide technical support for the DotNetNuke Portal software issues. If you run into installation problems, you are welcome to use our forum or the ASP.net forums for peer support. DotNetNuke is very resource intensive in its default installation! We recommend disabling any modules or features that you do not intend to use.

Note: The following instructions are written for DNN 5.0.0. Other versions may have some slight differences.

A) Get DotNetNuke 5.x and upload to web server

Download DotNetNuke 5.x "Install" Version from DotNetNuke.com
Extract the content to your local machine

B) Customizing the web.config file

Open the Web.config file with any text editor.
Update the database connection information

1) In the <connectionStrings> section

Replace:

    
            <connectionStrings> 
        
              <!-- Connection String for SQL Server 2005 Express --> 
        
              <add name="SiteSqlServer" connectionString="Data Source=.\SQLExpress;Integrated Security=True;User Instance=True;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|Database.mdf;" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> 
        
              <!-- Connection String for SQL Server 2000/2005 
        
              <add name="SiteSqlServer" connectionString="Server=(local);Database=DotNetNuke;uid=;pwd=;" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> 
        
              --> 
        
            </connectionStrings>

with:

    
            <!-- Connection String for SQL Server --> 
        
              <add name="SiteSqlServer" connectionString="THE ENTIRE CONNECTION STRING LOCATED IN THE SQL SECTION OF YOUR CONTROL PANEL" /> 
        
            </connectionStrings>

2) In the <appSettings> section

Replace:

    
            <appSettings> 
        
              <!-- Connection String for SQL Server 2005 Express - kept for backwards compatability - legacy modules   --> 
        
              <add key="SiteSqlServer" value="Data Source=.\SQLExpress;Integrated Security=True;User Instance=True;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|Database.mdf;" />

with:

    
            <add key="SiteSqlServer" value="Data Source=tcp:YOUR SQL SERVER NAME;Initial Catalog=YOUR SQL DABASE NAME;User ID=YOUR SQL USERNAME;Password=YOUR SQL DABASE PASSWORD" />

To avoid any conflicts, we recommend using a fresh database for the application install.

C) Upload all the files to your web site account. We recommend uploading DotNetNuke into a subdirectory. We DO NOT recommend uploading DotNetNuke to your document root directory.

D) Create an Application Starting Point

Log into your Control Panel
Navigate to the Application Starting Point tool (under Site Tools)
Create the Application Starting Point

E) DotNetNuke Setup

Open your browser and navigate to http://www.HostingAccountDomain.com/DotNetNuke_subdirectory

DotNetNuke will setup all the database objects when it first loads. This process MAY run for several minutes. DO NOT hit the stop button on the browser

Warning: If you install DotNetNuke in your document root directory, your other .NET applications under the root may fail.

For more information on DotNetNuke, you can review the documentation under the /documentation directory/. For DotNetNuke support, please visit ASP.NET Forums.