carlosag

Very funny blog to read, Linux Hater's blog

CarlosAg Blog — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:00:00 GMT

One of the things I try to regularly do is to read blogs that are not necessarily pro-Microsoft and one of my favorite ones is Miguel de Icaza's blog. The other day I was reading one blog post that caught my attention about a blog he says he is a "fan of" named " Linux Hater's blog ". So of course I decided to give that a read and went and started reading the entries in there, and I just could not stop laughing and laughing, and before I noticed I had been reading for almost an hour. I do have to warn though, the vocabulary used is their entries is ...um... lets say fluid?. Disclaimer: I'm not saying that their entries are right or wrong, I just literally couldn't stop laughing about some of the comments and their replies, and in some cases...(read more)

IIS 7.0 Remote Administration and Database Manager Video

CarlosAg Blog — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:00:00 GMT

DiscountASP.net published a very nice video that shows how you can enable IIS Manager and Database Manager and other modules for their customers. If you don't use DiscountASP.net as your ISP at least its interesting to see how IIS 7.0 and its Remote Administration capabilities over HTTPS and Delegated Management look like. Also you can see the Database Manager in action that you can download for free from http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/416/basics-of-database-manager/ First couple of minutes show how they expose this functionality to their customers, but If you just care to see the IIS 7.0 features running seek to minute 2:00. http://iis7test.com/iis7_modules/iis7_modules.html...(read more)

Adding ASP.NET Tracing to IIS 7.0 Failed Request Tracing

CarlosAg Blog — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

IIS 7.0 Failed Request Tracing (for historical reasons internally we refer to it as FREB, since it used to be called Failed Request Event Buffering, and there are no "good-sounding-decent" acronyms for the new name) is probably the best diagnosing tool that IIS has ever had (that doesn't require Debugging skills), in a simplistic way it exposes all the interesting events that happen during the request processing in a way that allows you to really understand what went wrong with any request. To learn more you can go to http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/266/troubleshooting-failed-requests-using-tracing-in-iis7/ . What is not immediately obvious is that you can use this tracing capabilities from your ASP.NET applications to output the tracing information...(read more)

Mapping a different file extension for ASPX Pages in IIS 7.0

CarlosAg Blog — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Today I read a question in one of the IIS.NET forums - although I'm not sure if this is what they really wanted to know - I figured it might be useful to understand how to do this anyway. Several times users does not like exposing their ASP.NET pages using the default .aspx file extension (sometimes because of legacy reasons, where they try to minimize the risk of generating broken links when moving from a different technology, to preserve the validity of previous search-engines-indexes and sometimes for the false sense of security or whatever). Regardless of why, the bottom line, to map a different file extension so they behave just like any other ASP.NET page requires you to add a couple of entries in configuration, especially if you want...(read more)

DiscountASP.net releases new IIS 7.0 Manager modules

CarlosAg Blog — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

DiscountASP.net who has been a very close partner of the IIS Team leading several offerings of our platform - including IIS Manager Remote Delegated Access to the Web Site and many other cool tools - has just built and released yet another cool module that extends the IIS Manager capabilities by having a GAC Viewer for their customers. The GAC Viewer is still in Beta but I think it showcases some of the cool stuff that IIS 7.0 platform brings to the table providing extensibility from end-to-end, whether its Runtime, Configuration, IIS Manager, etc. This is the way their GAC Viewer looks like: And when you connect to their site and you don't have it installed our infrastructure will automatically download it as needed when the user accepts it...(read more)

IIS 7.0 Site ID Computation

CarlosAg Blog — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:00:00 GMT

In my previous post I mentioned that IIS Manager (more specifically Microsoft.Web.Administration) has two algorithms for assigning a Site ID when no ID is specified. The two algorithms are: Incremental Site ID . When this algorithm is configured we will assign the first consecutive number available, for example, if you have Site ID's 1,2,3,5,6,8 the next time you add a Site in the UI (or using ServerManager.Sites.Add friendly overloads), you will get Site ID = 4, next will be 7, and next will be 9. The side effect of this is that you will get different Site ID's depending on the sites that are available which might complicate things in certain scenarios when provisioning the same site in multiple machines. The good news is that in IIS 7.0 the...(read more)

Faster IIS Web Sites Provisioning using Microsoft Web Administration

CarlosAg Blog — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:01:00 GMT

Yesterday I got an email about some performance numbers that one of our customers were running into when creating remotely Web Sites, Applications, Application Pools and other tasks in IIS using Microsoft.Web.Administration. In case you don't know Microsoft.Web.Administration is a .NET library that exposes the IIS Configuration System. The code was using Microsoft.Web.Administration from PowerShell to create a single Application Pool, a new Web Site, and finally assign the Root Application to the new Application Pool, and it was measuring each of the tasks. The application then was called continually till 10,000 sites were created. They then created a very nice Excel Spreadsheet that had a chart with how long it took when performing each operation...(read more)

Extending the IIS Configuration System using COM

CarlosAg Blog — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:30:00 GMT

Today I was going to post about extending the IIS Configuration, in particular about a feature that not everybody knows that allows you to extend the IIS Configuration System using dynamic code. What this means is that instead of hard-coding the configuration using XML in a .config file, your configuration can be provided by a COM object that implements IAppHostPropertyExtension, IAppHostElementExtension and IAppHostMethodExtension. Then, just to make sure I was not repeating what somebody else already said I searched for this in live.com (Worth to say, excellent results, first hit is the documentation of the interface, second hit is an excellent article in iis.net). So instead of repeating what you can already find in those places in IIS.NET...(read more)

IIS Admin Pack: Database Manager

CarlosAg Blog — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:00:00 GMT

OK, this blog entry sat in my drafts for more than a month now, but finally today I will be talking about another cool feature of the IIS Admin Pack , Database Manager. Database Manager allows you to easily manage a SQL Server Database from within the IIS Manager User Interface. Now, why would you need another UI for managing a database? Here are some of the facts that make Database Manager interesting: No additional components are required in the machine, just by installing the IIS Admin Pack you get a UI with support for remote management, and many more features (with TP2 it will install SQL Server Management Objects). Allows you to manage both local and remote database from your machine. By using the Remote Management capabilities of IIS...(read more)

URL Rewrite Technical Preview 1 available

CarlosAg Blog — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:08:00 GMT

Today we are releasing a very cool feature that lots of customers have really been asking for, URL Rewrite Module is now available for download at: Download the x86 CTP version for IIS 7.0: http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1691 Download the x64 CTP version for IIS 7.0: http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1692 I'm pretty happy about this release not only because its a great feature that many of us have been waiting for, but also because I personally got to work quite a bit on it, helping with the Configuration Design, my team (Gurpreet Singh) built the UI, my good friend Daniel built the runtime module and I actually got to write some code and built the apache mod_rewrite translation...(read more)

New Articles for Building IIS Manager Extensions Published in IIS.NET

CarlosAg Blog — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:50:00 GMT

Gurpreet Singh who is a developer in my team published last week a couple of articles on how to extend IIS Manager 7: 1) The first one talks about how to write an IIS Manager extension in general and walks you through the process using Visual Studio: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/441/understanding-ui-extension-authoring/ 2) The second one shows how to extend the IIS Reports feature in Admin Pack to add your own report to it and shows this using Log Parser: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/464/walkthrough-for-creating-an-iis-report/...(read more)

IIS Admin Pack Technical Preview 2 Released

CarlosAg Blog — Tue, 13 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Today we are releasing the Technical Preview 2 of the IIS Admin Pack, it is an update of the release we made on February. Install the Admin Pack and Database Manager today! Admin Pack (x86): http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&i=1682&g=6 Database Manager (x86): http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1684 Admin Pack (x64): http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&i=1683&g=6 Database Manager (x64): http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1685 New Features: There are a lot of interesting features we've added to almost every component for this release: Database Manager Specify your own Connections . We heard during TP1 that it was a very important feature...(read more)

IIS 7.0 Talk at ASP.NET Connections at Orlando

CarlosAg Blog — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:15:00 GMT

Last Monday I gave a presentation at the ASP.NET Connections event in Orlando, the title was IIS 7.0 for ASP.NET Developers . I just wish I had more time to stay at Orlando, weather was great, especially considering that Sunday I was watching Snow in Redmond and then Monday and Tuesday I was around 80 degrees in sunny Orlando. Anyway, thanks for all the people who attended the session, you can download the Slides and the Demos from here. Here are some of the things that I demonstrated: First Demo: ApplicationHost.config, Web.config and Tools. Showed the Application Pools list and how Visual Studio 2008 now provides IntelliSense for all the configuration of IIS. Added a new Application Pool using Notepad, and IIS Manager shows it. Showed the...(read more)

Not getting IntelliSense in your web.config for system.webServer sections in Visual Studio 2008?

CarlosAg Blog — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:20:00 GMT

Today I was playing a bit with Visual Studio 2008 and was surprised to see that I was not getting IntelliSense in my web.config. As you might already know IntelliSense in Xml in Visual Studio is implemented by using a set of schemas that are stored in a folder inside the VS folder, something like: \Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Xml\Schemas. After looking to the files it was easy to understand what was going on, turns out I was developing using .NET 2.0 settings and Visual Studio now ships different schemas for Web.config files depending on the settings that you are using: DotNetConfig.xsd, DotNetConfig20.xsd and DotNetConfig30.xsd . As I imagine I looked into the DotNetConfig.xsd and it indeed has all the definitions for the system...(read more)

How to register a new Section Definition using Microsoft.Web.Administration

CarlosAg Blog — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:10:00 GMT

Today I was asked how can someone would be able to add a new section definition using Microsoft.Web.Administration, so I thought I would post something quickly here just to show how this could be achieved. using System ; using Microsoft.Web.Administration ; class Program { static void Main( string [] args) { using ( ServerManager m = new ServerManager ()) { Configuration config = m.GetApplicationHostConfiguration() ; SectionDefinition definition = RegisterSectionDefinition(config, "system.webServer/mySubgroup/mySection" ) ; definition.OverrideModeDefault = "Allow" ; m.CommitChanges() ; } } public static SectionDefinition RegisterSectionDefinition( Configuration config, string sectionPath) { string [] paths = sectionPath.Split( '/' ) ; SectionGroup...(read more)