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My first (and hopefully last) .asp based project is coming to it's end at last. The web site I was making the system for is a pretty big transportation-related corporation in Japan and the CMS turned out to be pretty big (although not very complicated, but hey…)

Working on the project was extremely difficult due to attitude from the other side (the clients). Due to some security policy I couldn't get any access to internal servers, not even via encrypted connections, not even from one static IP. Not only that - in-house development was also no-go there. We had to set up the server at our side and do all the development without really connecting to the deployment server. I guess this level of security on the other side makes sense, but what doesn't make sense for me is that how they handle their web-side hosting.

Basically, they are going to run public server without admin tools directory, and have admin tools directory running on their intranet, without any access from outside, using this installation as a test server at the same time. Having test server, it is pretty expectable to have it configured the same way as the public one right? But no.. they _can't_ create any subdomains for testing (do they know how to? you can setup a record at intranet DNS server and the reroute the traffic to the virtual server inside the LAN, thus having the same configuration at the public server, down - most importantly - to the links, be them relative or absolute).
But no, they will put testing server in some /ouch/we/dont/do/tests/like/that directory, meaning we had to rework all our absolute paths, including paths inside Flash. And reworking paths inside Flash menus which are getting called from different pages on different levels is not the most exciting job one would like to do.
That's not the only thing. The public server of the company is not configured properly. For example you can connect to Google by typing either "www.google.com" or "google.com" inside your browser. Well.. you will get "domain not found" error if you forget to prepend the company's website address with "www." I dare to say that making entries for both www. and www. is a basic thing every web administrator should know.

I'm not telling the other side is not professional (they are in their own way), but I guess they do have some problems as a web-hosting company.

Anyway, I'm pretty darn happy to almost have the project finished, and will be posting update to my ASP for PHP programmers article as soon as I have some time.

I have started a simple page about problems and solutions to them for PHP programmers who need to move their PHP codebase to ASP. Still a bit too simple, but oh well better something that nothing

ASP for PHP Programmers entry