Spring is in the Air!

What a great time of the year! We are based in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, so Spring has officially arrived. What has Spring brought to OrcsWeb--read on to find out.

Gold Hosting Certification

OrcsWeb is pleased to announce that we have renewed as a Microsoft Gold Hosting Partner in the Microsoft Partner Network. We achieved that distinction through meeting the newly enhanced competency standards. Only a handful of web hosting providers have attained the Gold Hosting Partner Certification under the new more demanding standards.

Opportunity

Would you be interested in highlighting your OrcsWeb hosted solution by working with us on a case study? If yes, please contact our Marketing Department to chat about what would be involved.

Website Updates Made Easy via Web Deploy

Microsoft's Web Deploy, which can be used standalone or as part of WebMatrix or the Visual Studio tools, makes deploying web applications to your hosted production environment super easy. We will show a few screenshots as going through the process of publishing an Orchard CMS site from WebMatrix to a shared hosting site.

The process to initiate a deployment is very easy and accessed from the Publish icon near the top left-hand corner of the WebMatrix interface.

On the next screen you are prompted to enter your site's deployment settings. Both FTP and Web Deploy are supported, but Web Deploy is advantageous because Web Deploy enables you to package configuration and content of your installed Web applications, including databases, and use the packages for storage or redeployment. Here you also enter the server's publishing URL, your username and password, the name of your site, and the URL that references your site.

(Screenshots available after the jump.)

E-Commerce Platform Support

At OrcsWeb we support many e-commerce platforms and can provide a fully PCI Compliant hosting environment for on-site credit card processing. If you are currently in need of a new e-commerce platform, AspDotNetStorefront is offering a special discount to all OrcsWeb newsletter subscribers. Use promo-code 'ORCS10' (without the quotes) to get a 10% discount on any order.

AspDotNetStorefront, in all its fullness, has everything you will ever need. Platform, partners, plug-ins. With built-in SEO, promotion and marketing tools, and the flexibility and stability of the .NET platform, AspDotNetStorefront is the only shopping cart your business can’t outgrow.

From Our Blog: ASP.NET Routing and IIS 404 Errors

ASP.NET Routing is a powerful feature introduced in .NET 3.5 SP1 and included with .NET 4.0 that allows a developer to route URL's that are not real files. There are several ways you can accomplish this same task, but having it in the ASP.NET pipeline allows the developer great flexibility in how URL's are routed. However, it does not always work "out-of-the-box" for devs. The most common error I've seen is a 404 error - meaning the page cannot be found.

There can be several contributing factors. If you are attempting to utilize extenionless URL's, ensure you have the appropriate IIS hotfix installed. More commonly however, the issue is a result of the module not firing for your request type. The easy fix is to add runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests=”true” to the modules tag in your web.config. However, that could have performance implications as you are now telling IIS to ignore the preCondition setting for all modules.