Friendly HTTP Errors Are Not

Debugging ASP pages? Then friendly HTTP errors will drive you mad.

Friendly errors will show you something like HTTP error 500 - server error, instead of
Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0126' Include file not found. Needless to say, the latter is much more helpful.

This is easy to turn off within IEs advanced settings. However, minds greater than mine have decided I don't need access to that tab.

If this is the case for you, simply run RegEdt32 and look for the following value name: Friendly HTTP errors. It should live under [KEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]. Change the value to NO, exit RegEdt32 and restart IE. You may also have to dump your browser cache.

Using WINDIFF to compare 2 directories

Have you ever copied the contents of a folder and the operation erred out midway because of a permission conflict or corrupt file? How do you determine which files are in the new location, so you can restart the copy operation? File-by-file comparison can be difficult if you're dealing with a large number of files.

The DIFF command has been around for a while in the Unix world, and does just what we want. It compares two directories (or files) and reports the differences between them. With WINDIFF, this functionality is available for Windows.

Syntax: C:\>windiff path1 path2

Example:

C:>windiff \wwwroot\GLOBAL\img \Backup\global\img

Generates this:
.\thumbs.db identical
.\vsd.gif identical
.\vssver.scc identical
.\windows.gif only in \wwwroot\GLOBAL\img
.\xls.gif only in \wwwroot\GLOBAL\img
.\zip.gif only in \wwwroot\GLOBAL\img

If you don't have WINDIFF, it is available as part of the WinXP SP2 Support Tools suite (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=49ae8576-9bb9-4126-9761-ba8011fabf38&displaylang=en).