Delta Engine Blog

Hi Guys, sorry for not updating much here last week. I have been quite busy with all the iPhone projects going on (at mobile-bits.de) and of course our big game project at exDream (btw: we made a new cool team photo today with 15 people from exDream, it will be up soon at http://www.exdream.com/company.html). I also worked a lot on the DLR language I started a month ago and I'm quite happy with the current state, everything works very well right now and the very basic language functionality (only some very simple commands) is already there and very fast and easy to use. I will improve the language hopefully this month to a useable state, but it will probably take a long time (maybe a year) until everything is done for this language. More on that in a few weeks maybe ..

Because we also lost one of our main website servers at exDream last week because the old publisher didn't want to pay for it anymore, I had to move a lot of websites to a much slower server today (sites for ArenaWars, Rocket Commander, Mods, EuroVernichter, Xna Racing Game, other Xna Projects, some internal sites, etc.). We will get a better internet connection in the next few weeks for that, but for now it is very slow and not very enjoyable to surf on there. The most annoying thing while moving all the wwwroot directories to the new slow server was the fact that the ACL permissions were totally screwed up. I had this happen to me before, but today it was very annoying. Dunno exactly why this happens, but it seems when you extract files into wwwroot your existing directory permissions are more or less ignored. This only happend to me on that Win2003 server, I tried reproducing the same thing with Windows 7 at home, but directory permissions are correctly set when extracting more sub directories there. I could just set those permissions again for some folders, which is kinda strange because the base directory already had the permissions for the exact same user. But for other directories I could just see that the web user permissions are set (so I could not add them again), but still once accessing the website I would just get:

HTTP Error 401 401.3 Unauthorized: Unauthorized due to ACL on resource

or this other error once I allowed my user to access the aspx files, which is pretty confusing too:

Parser Error Message: An error occurred loading a configuration file: Failed to start monitoring changes to 'C:\inetpub\wwwroot\dummywebapp\web.config' because access is denied.

Since I had set the ACL permissions and they looked correctly I was very confused and tried a lot of other stuff like changing the Web Application Pool, recreating the web apps, using all kinds of different users for those web apps, etc. But all that did not really help. Only after I just made sure all permissions for all files plus all directories for this web app were set correctly, it finally worked. I would say this problem should be fixed and the error messages should be better, but in Windows 2008 and Windows 7 it is already so much better, I was easily able to extract the exact same .rar file on my Windows 7 and everything just worked as expected as opposed to the Win2003 server ..