And now for something …

… suddenly you can’t open any more Windows in Windows XP!

There appears to be a limit of about 30 or 40 open windows (including tabs in Firefox / IE7) in Windows XP, which can get pretty irritating if you have two monitors like I do, and often have many tasks going on at the same time (or many webpages open). When this happens, other weird things start to occur, like the inability to use the right-click function, or strange errors when attempting to open a submenu from some app or even an email in Outlook.

Fortunately, there is a solution, courtesy Tony Schreiner’s Blog — increase the size of the Windows Desktop heap via the registry.

The registry key is:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\SubSystems]

Look for the value
Windows=”%SystemRoot%\system32\csrss.exe

and edit it. You’ll see a long string like this:

ObjectDirectory=\Windows SharedSection=1024,3072,512 Windows=On SubSystemType=Windows ServerDll=basesrv,1 ServerDll=winsrv:UserServerDllInitialization,3 ServerDll=winsrv:ConServerDllInitialization,2 ProfileControl=Off MaxRequestThreads=16″

Just change the 3072 to a larger value such as 8192.

I’ve been playing around with various wikis at work lately, and thus far have been very happy with MediaWiki. I’ve been running MediaWiki for about a month using Devside’s Web-Developer suite installed on a Windows 2003 Standard server. The nice thing about the Devside suite is that it allows you to easily install Apache, MySQL, and PHP on a Windows server with very little work and none of the headaches usually associated with Apache on Windows. It runs pretty well, and I’ve been happy with the customization and ease of use of MediaWiki.

However, I’ve found that a lot of the nice extensions that I’d like to use — namely better search and the ability to import from RoboHelp (RoboHelp is our main documentation source for customer facing in-program help) — require a Linux server. Not that I have a big problem with this, in fact it’s quite easily to install and run on a VM with VMware’s free server tool. You can even get a pre-built VM appliance with MediaWiki already installed and ready to go.

The main issue with all of this is that our development environment is 100% Microsoft, and my task at the moment is to set up a wiki for our development team (they’ve heard good things about the wiki I’ve built for our customer support team, and are getting jealous). Not wanting to create any maintenance headaches for them, I naturally started looking for a .NET based ASP solution. It was surprisingly hard to find, actually.

Eventually I came across ScrewTurn Wiki, which is a fairly new wiki app that has been getting some good feedback, and which is also open source. It claimed to be very easy to install, which is always nice. I like learning new things, but if I can keep the frustration level down that’s a plus.

So much for the install being easy! The first time I tried to install, I loaded the “one-click installer” on my Windows XP laptop running IIS 5, and couldn’t get the darn thing to run. I went through all the troubleshooting steps, but no dice. I kept hitting an error “Active Server Pages error ‘ASP 0201′
Invalid Default Script The default script language specified for this application is invalid.” After some searching I found this article from Classic ASP and tried all suggestions including resetting all permissions based on Microsoft’s guidelines. A few more hours of playing around later and I was still nowhere. I really didn’t need to reinstall Windows on my laptop just for a wiki!

I gave up on the laptop, and loaded up a brand spanking new VM running Windows XP SP2. I got further than before, but still received an error message. This time the problem was very possibly my rush to get this done quickly, and I decided to RTFM and even go through the video tutorial. Hmm, still not working. Turns out that there are a few gotchas to the install that the one-click WebSetup installer couldn’t handle (even though the documentation indicated that these steps were only required for a manual install):

1. Specify that you want to use the ASP.NET 2.0: right-click on the Virtual Directory you just created and select Properties in the context menu. Select the ASP.NET tab. If it’s not available, make sure you have .NET Framework 2.0 installed and retry this step. If it’s available, select in the ASP.NET version drop-down list the 2.0.50727 item.

2. Setup the Public directory: go to the physical path of the Virtual Directory that you have just created, and create a new directory inside it, for example C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\MyWiki\public. Right-click on it and select Properties from the context menu. Go to the Security tab, and select from the list of the accounts IIS_WPG (Windows 2003) or ASPNET (Windows XP); check the Modify option in the list below (in the Allow column) and click on OK. You have to specify the name of this directory in the PublicDirectory setting in the Web.config file (see the previous section).

3. Register the ASP.NET engine. To do that, open a command prompt and type %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -i then press enter.

4. Make  sure that the default page in IIS is set to default.aspx.  To do this, edit the virtual directory properties in IIS, click the Documents tab, and confirm that default.aspx is listed.  If not, add it.
After that, all was well and the wiki fired right up. More comments soon on how well this thing works!