Finbar Ryan's Blog

Here are some links that might be useful in your day to day job.

There has been a lot of news this week with Tech Ed North America running and sending out lot’s of information.

TechEd IIS and Web Development Sessions

Today I would like to talk about the headers that you get if you utilise Application Request Routing in your environment.

What is Application Request Routing?

If you haven’t used this IIS Extension then you’re in for a treat.
It’s a useful way of allowing you to define how your Web server environment will scale and handle requests.
It also allows you to build a Content Delivery Network and place your content on the edge of your network if needed.

http://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/application-request-routing has more on this and it also introduces by saying the following.

”IIS Application Request Routing (ARR) 2.5 enables Web server administrators, hosting providers, and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to increase Web application scalability and reliability through rule-based routing, client and host name affinity, load balancing of HTTP server requests, and distributed disk caching.”

When you configure Application Request Routing you will notice that it will send a header back in the request "X-Powered-By: ARR/2.5".

In your environment you might not want to send this header so there are a couple of different ways to remove.

How you remove it will depend on how you are using ARR.

ARR allows you to forward your HTTP Requests in two ways.

I was recently helping a colleague with a customer who was running a security check against their IIS Server on Windows Server 2008.
(Editor’s Note: This is an extremely good thing to do and we do recommend that everyone runs a security check against their server.)

The security tool they used highlighted that the server was running Asp.Net and might be vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks.

The Asp.Net engine does validate every request that comes in.
We do however recommend that you still ensure your application is not susceptible to the scripting attacks that are out there.

As I mentioned before I will intermittently post a number of links I find interesting on the topics I am working on.

Windows Azure Web Sites.

Would you like to publish your Web Site from Dropbox?
Well now you can as discussed at https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/28 

I recently came across this presentation and I think it highlights that it’s possible to stay up to date on the fast moving world that is Web Development and Design.

https://speakerdeck.com/chriscoyier/how-to-stay-up-to-date-on-web-technology

There are lots of little hints and tips in there about blogs to read, emails to sign up and the amazing Web Design communities that exist out there.

I have also been playing a little with some of the online tools like

http://plnkr.co/
This is an online editor to enable you to prototype Web Design configurations.

Hello,

I thought I’d put together a list of the interesting Windows 8 Sessions at Build so you can use it for your self-study.
Most of the sessions are 1 hour in length.