I was setting up the XAMPP package on a Windows 7 box and wanted to configure some virtual hosts. This is fairly easy – there is a dedicated configuration file for virtual hosts and in my case they needed to be virtual virtual hosts – so I added them to the local Windows hosts file and to the Apache configuration file and saved.

Restarting the server gave the error code “-1 server not started”. One really frustrating fact about XAMPP on Windows (7) is that the errors in the configuration which prevent the server from starting is not written to the error log. Instead (and this might be the preferred behavior of others) it is logged using the Windows logging mechanism which is stored/found gods-knows-where?!! What is up with that?!

After finding the (right) log which actually showed the error nicely – I found that it was my “Order” setting that caused the trouble. It turns out that it has three valid values “allow,deny”, “deny,allow” and… some other setting I don’t care about… I had happily typed “allow, deny” and this simple mistake prevented the whole server from running! A tiny whitespace. One tiny whitespace!!

When going over the configuration to spot errors I never even thought of this as being an option – I am now much wiser.

Lately the releases has contained data and presentation oriented additions to the framework which would allow us to save many lines of code if used properly. The only problem is – our users need the framework!

It is safe to say that 95% of our users have .NET version 1.0 and 1.1 installed. When it comes to version 2.0 (which our program is linked upon) the number drops to about 85-90% and framework versions 3.0 and 3.5 is installed on under 5% of the user systems. The 10-15% of our users that lack the required framework version 2.0 is bad enough! For various reasons I won’t go into detail with here – we can’t use the usual approach and bundle the installer in an MSI-pack that automatically installs the needed framework – we have to do this manually! This means that two developers spent most of a day writing some script for our installation script that checked for the proper .NET version and downloads + installs version 2.0 if needed.

I really think that Microsoft could help us out a lot on this by simply making all the versions of the .NET Framework mandatory updates through Windows Update. This would help the installation rate among our users to around 95% or even higher – they simply do as told.

This problem is actually one of the main reasons that the Java platform was discarded during the planning phase of the project. With Java the install base drops below the 5% marker which means that every install would have a bundled framework install. The impact on the users would be enormous. They would see a 150+ MB disk space used and have highly increased download times. Not acceptable.