Tag: Classic ASP

How to Set MS Edge for IE Compatibility Mode

If you need to access legacy websites designed for earlier versions of Internet Explorer, such as those using VBScript client (as opposed to JavaScript), you may encounter issues with the website rendering or functionality in modern browsers, including Microsoft Edge.

However, there is a solution in Microsoft Edge that can help resolve these issues. By using Internet Explorer compatibility mode, you can ensure that these legacy websites will display and function properly in Microsoft Edge.

Here are the steps to set Microsoft Edge to Internet Explorer compatibility mode:

Method 1

Open Microsoft Edge and click on the three dots (…) in the upper-right corner to access the settings menu.
Select the Settings option from the drop-down menu.
Under Settings on the left pane, scroll down to the Default browser section.
Click on the Add button under Internet Explorer mode pages and an Add a page window will open.
Enter the full URL (or IP address) of the legacy site and click the Add button, it will bring you back to the Settings window with the newly added site.
Close the Settings page and restart Microsoft Edge.

Here’s a summary of the steps in a screenshot:

After restarting Microsoft Edge, it will be set to use Internet Explorer compatibility mode and you should be able to access websites and web applications that require Internet Explorer.

Method 2

If you have Enterprise Mode turned on, you can just add the website URL to the file sites.xml:

Go to C:\IEEnterpriseMode folder and look for a file called sites.xml.

Open sites.xml with a text editor and you should see something similar to this:

<site-list version="1">
  <created-by>
    <tool>EMIESiteListManager</tool>
    <version>12.0.0.0</version>
    <date-created>01/01/2023 00:24:49</date-created>
  </created-by>
  <site url="www.itnota.com">
    <compat-mode>IE11</compat-mode>
    <open-in>IE11</open-in>
  </site>
</site-list>

Just add all the sites you want to access with IE compatibility mode to the XML file like so:

<site-list version="1">
  <created-by>
    <tool>EMIESiteListManager</tool>
    <version>12.0.0.0</version>
    <date-created>01/01/2023 00:24:49</date-created>
  </created-by>
  <site url="www.itnota.com">
    <compat-mode>IE11</compat-mode>
    <open-in>IE11</open-in>
  </site>
  <site url="www.mysite.com">
    <compat-mode>IE11</compat-mode>
    <open-in>IE11</open-in>
  </site>
</site-list>

Once completed, just save the file and exit.

You can try each method or both in conjunction. It shouldn’t affect one or the other. That’s all there is to it.

How to Troubleshoot IIS 500 Error for ASP Websites

You try to load your classic ASP (Active Server Pages) website and all you can see in your browser is the all too familiar display of 500 Internal Server Error.

This page isn't working

WEBSITE is currently unable to handle this request

HTTP ERROR 500

What is 500 Internal Server Error

First of all, the 500 Internal Server Error is a very general HTTP status code that indicates something has gone wrong on the web server without any specifics on the exact problem.

This instruction is limited to solving a 500 error on IIS server for classic ASP websites, however some other instructions that’s related to IIS in general will help for troubleshooting IIS server for .NET applications as well.

As 500 Server Error message is very often vague, the task now is to find a more specific error message that will help us further analyze and troubleshoot the issue.

Enable Debugging and Send Errors to Browser

If the website is not in a production environment, the easiest way to do it is to enable the ASP Debugging Properties and send the errors to the browser by following these steps:

Launch Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager and on the left pane, select your ASP website and click on the ASP icon (Configure properties for ASP applications).
Under the ASP window, expand the Debugging Properties and set Enable Client-side Debugging, Enable Server-side Debugging, and Send Errors To Browser to True and click Apply.

Now, when you refresh your ASP website, you will see a more descriptive error message on your browser such as the following example:

System.Xml error '80131509'

There is an error in the XML document.

/itnota/failed-page.asp, line 289

With this information, you can right away open the file (e.g., itnota/failed-page.asp) and check line number 289. Again, this option is not recommended for a production website that’s still actively used and available for public since it exposes too much information publicly. The ideal way to do it is to replicate your production environment on a staging and try to reproduce the error on a lower environment.

Check IIS Log

Another way to check 500 Internal Server Error for your ASP website is by viewing IIS error logs. This is especially true if your ASP website is a public website.

Where to find the IIS Logs?

By default, the log for your website is stored on %SystemDrive%\inetpub\logs\LogFile, but you should not use this settings for a production environment. Always set a custom path for your logs so your websites are easier to maintain in the long run. If you have a different physical hard drive for logs, even better. Make sure it’s set to Enabled.

For the sake of example, the log files are located in folder D:\Logs\ITNota.com:

From the IIS log example below, the easiest way is to look for a pipe character (“|”) on the date and time when the error happens.

The error message can be broken down into two parts:

/itnota/failed-page.asp id=2087216&catId=749272
|289|80131509|There_is_an_error_in_the_XML_document.

The first part indicates the problematic file with its parameters which can be reconstructed by replacing the white space with a question mark (“?”) like so:

  /itnota/failed-page.asp?id=2087216&catId=749272

The second part which starts with a pipe character (“|”) is the line number that caused the error, the error code, and the error description:

  |289|80131509|There_is_an_error_in_the_XML_document.

From the above information, we are looking at the following information:

Item	Description
Filename	/itnota/failed-page.asp
Line number	289
Error code	80131509
Error description	There_is_an_error_in_the_XML_document.

Check the affected file by opening it in Visual Studio Code or any IDE.

If you use Visual Studio Code to read and write ASP or VBScript, click here for a way how to colorize your ASP code.

How to Troubleshoot Response Buffer Limit Exceeded Error in Classic ASP

How do you troubleshoot a classic ASP website when it crashes with the following error message?

Response object error 'ASP 0251 : 80004005'
 
Response Buffer Limit Exceeded
 
/itnota/test.asp, line 0
 
Execution of the ASP page caused the Response Buffer to exceed its configured limit.

Turn Off Page Buffering

By default, page buffering in ASP is set to On so one way to do it is just to turn off the page buffering.

At the top of your ASP page, add the following line after the VBScript declaration (Line 2 – highlighted):

<% @Language="VBScript" %>
<% Response.Buffer = False %>

In general though, you do want to pose a limit so your data stream does not clog up your resources especially if you’re sharing the web server with other applications. That’s why the next solution would be a better one especially for production environment.

Modify Response Buffering Limit in IIS

Another way to solve this issue is explained below, demonstrated using IIS 10 but should work the same way with IIS 7 or later as well. This would be the best solution but you need access to your IIS.

Launch your IIS Manager and select your site on the Connections box on the left. Then double-click on the ASP on the right pane, which is under IIS section.
Once the ASP window is opened, look for Limit Properties and expand on it and go to Response Buffering Limit.
If the value was never modified, you would see 4194304 which translates to roughly 4 MB.
This is the value, we want to modify so go ahead and change it to a larger number. In this example, we put in 64000000 (~64 MB, not quite but you get the point), basically adjust according to your need.
Once you entered the value, just click on the Apply link button to save all settings.

The effect should be immediate without requiring a restart of IIS or Application Pool. That’s all there is to it.

How to Make Visual Studio Code Colorize Classic ASP Code

If you still have to do development with Classic ASP or VBScript and you want to use Visual Studio Code, you’ll soon find out that even though the code editor was built by Microsoft, there’s no language colorization support for ASP code by default. Fortunately, adding the feature can be done easily using Extensions. So here are the steps to do so:

Launch Visual Studio Code and click on Go and select Go to File… or just press CTRL-P.
On the dialog box, type in the following: ext install classic asp and press [ENTER].
Another way to do it, you can just click on the Extensions icon (it should be the last one on the left-hand side (or press CTRL+SHIFT+X) and type in classic asp in the search box.
Select Classic ASP by Ilya Verbitskiy and click on the Install button as shown below:
Once installed, we still have to associate the asp file extension to the newly ASP colorizer so we don’t have to manually select ASP as the language every time we open an ASP file. As it is now, Visual Studio Code still has no way to detect it as an ASP page so it will treat it as an HTML file.
From the File menu, open Preferences and select Settings (CTRL + ,).
In Search settings box, type in “file associations” and you can either click on the Add Item button and populate the Item and Value (option 1), or you can click on link Edit in settings.json (option 2). In the older version of Visual Studio Code, only option 2 was available, but now if you only have a few entries, option 1 would be easier to do.
If you chose option 1, after adding the items, if you clicked on Edit in settings.json you should see the following:
```
"files.associations": {
  "*.asp": "asp",
  "*.vbs": "asp",  // optional
  "*.inc": "asp"   // optional
}
```
If you chose option 2 though, you have to add those in yourself.
Save the file (CTRL-S) and close it.

That’s all there is to it, now you every time you open an asp file (or vbs script for that matter), the selected Language Mode will be set to ASP and any classic ASP code will be colorized accordingly.

This is not limited to ASP only, you can always look for any language of your choice by going to Visual Studio Marketplace.

Download

Visual Studio Code
Classic ASP (Classic ASP Language Support) – Ilya Verbitskiy

How to Fix Invalid SendUsing Configuration using CDO

When you use CDOsys to send email from a classic ASP, you might see an error message below and if you look at the line error, it’s always on the message.Send:

The page cannot be displayed

There is a problem with the page you are trying to reach and it cannot be displayed.

Please try the following:

Contact the Web site administrator to let them know that this error has occurred for this URL address.

HTTP 500.100 - Internal server error: ASP error.

Internet Information Services

Technical Information (for support personnel)

Error Type:

CDO.Message.1 '80040220'

The "SendUsing" configuration value is invalid.

/path/filename.asp, line 100

Browser Type:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.71 Safari/537.36

Page:
POST 279 bytes to /path/filename.asp
POST Data:
category=...

Time:
Monday, October 26, 2015, 10:12:55 PM

More information:

Click on Microsoft Support for a links to articles about this error.

Go to Microsoft Product Support Services and perform a title search for the words HTTP and 500.

Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS Manager (inetmgr), and search for topics titled Web Site Administration, and About Custom Error Messages.

In the IIS Software Development Kit (SDK) or at the MSDN Online Library, search for topics titled Debugging ASP Scripts, Debugging Components, and Debugging ISAPI Extensions and Filters.

Several posts would suggest that you put the SMTP server in the code. But when you already have an SMTP server setup on IIS 6.0, here’s a couple things you might want to check as well:

Check if the Application Pool is at least running under version 2.0.
Give user MACHINE\IIS_IUSRS modify permission on C:\inetpub\mailroot directory (or if you moved the SMTP folders somewhere else, give that permission to the new directory instead).

Also check the links under Further Reading below for the common solutions pertaining to this error.

Method 1

Method 2

Further Reading

What is 500 Internal Server Error

Enable Debugging and Send Errors to Browser

Check IIS Log

Where to find the IIS Logs?

Turn Off Page Buffering

Modify Response Buffering Limit in IIS

Further Reading

Further Reading

Download

Further Reading

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