Problems with Visual Studio Conversion Wizard in 2008

Converting projects to Visual Studio 2008 doesn't always go smoothly.

You might see it blow up with a COMException error

If your ASP.NET web application project is configured to use IIS (instead of the built-in web server), then you'll need to run VS as Administrator (thanks to Mikhail posting that workaround) This is because VS needs to look in IIS's metabase and it requires admin privileges to do that.

I'm also getting a very helpful "The operation could not be completed"

Trying to dig deeper, I ran a debug instance of VS (eg. opened up VS and then ran another instance of VS inside that) to see if there were any exceptions that might give a clue as to what was going wrong.

I now get a little bit more info: COMException 0x80020009 "Function evaluation disabled because a previous function evaluation timed out. You must continue execution to reenable function evaluation."

I spent some time trying to figure this out, but in the end gave up and just created a new project in 2008 and copied in the old files.

Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects - Dec07 CTP

This is one thing that we were missing from our requirements to fully make use of VS 2008.

Web Deployment Projects pre-compile your web application projects, can remove files that aren't needed on the production web server, and as a side-effect of compiling the .aspx pages too, can find some syntax errors that don't get noticed by the normal VS compiler.

Watch out for this bug though.

Tour Down Under payments are not secure

I went to register for the Challenge Tour (the 134km ride on 25 January 2008) today.

I clicked on a link from an email from the South Australian Tourism Commission that goes to this site - http://www.bizgate.sa.gov.au/shop/tdu/site/page.cfm?CONTENT=shop%5Ffront.

Fine.

I pick the correct event to pay for, add it to my cart, enter my details, then go to checkout. I then get a popup window asking for my contact details again (didn't they already know that?), and then the next page asks for my credit card info.

Whoa!

Hang on!

We're still on a HTTP page - no lock icon, no coloured address/location bar, nothing, just plain text sailing off into the Internet for anyone to snoop!

So I rang up the SA Tourism people, and the lady tried to reassure me - "yes, our online payment system is secure".

I was not reassured.

"Funny, we had someone else contact us with a similar query 10 minutes ago" - what a surprise.

I finally got her to find someone else who looks after the Tour down under website - a guy by the name of Darrenn. I spoke to him and explained the problem. I don't think he quite understood my concerns (not being an IT person apparently). Anyway, he gave me his email address and promised to look into it. I fired off an email to him.

Not content with that, I then thought I'd try and find someone who actually runs the BizGate site. Their top-level web page says they're run by the Department for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure. Fine. I rang DTEI and was given another phone number. I rang that and left a message.

Why do I feel a bit pessimistic that anything will get done :-(

The solution by the way, is to use this link instead:

https://www.bizgate.sa.gov.au/shop/tdu/site/page.cfm?content=search_results.cfm&mode=browse

Marvelous what a difference an 's' makes.

Update late Friday afternoon: The link has been fixed now