Robert McMurray

I've been playing around with Web API a lot recently, and I've found that it's a really powerful and elegant way to create internet-based applications. After writing several server-side Web API applications, I thought that it would be fun to write a Windows Phone 8 application that used Web API to communicate with one of my server-side applications.

As you may have seen in my previous blog posts, I tend to use several of Microsoft's various editors when I am working on web projects: Visual Studio, WebMatrix, and even FrontPage on occasion. But every once in a while I also use FrontPage's successor: Expression Web 4.

Microsoft released the Windows 8.1 Preview on June 26, but some of the articles that the IIS team was working on for IIS 8.5 needed a little more work before we published them. That being said, those articles were published on IIS.net earlier today, and here is a quick preview of those articles and the new features in IIS 8.5 which they describe:

I recently had the opportunity to take a day-long class about jQuery from the good folks at Wintellect. The class went great, and I wrote all of my code for the class in WebMatrix. You might recall from my previous blogs that I am a big fan of WebMatrix, but at first there was one thing that was missing from WebMatrix's arsenal of cool features; in order for WebMatrix to really be useful as an editor for jQuery, I really wanted to have IntelliSense support for jQuery. Thankfully, even though IntelliSense support for jQuery is not built-in, adding IntelliSense for jQuery is extremely easy, and I thought that would make a great subject for today's blog.

Despite the plethora of other tools and editors that I use to create websites, there are times when I simply have to dust off my copy of (gasp!) Microsoft FrontPage 2003. It may be a dinosaur, but there are some things that it does really well, and periodically I simply need to use it.

I get a lot of questions about Active versus Passive FTP Connections, specifically when people are configuring their FTP firewall settings as described in my articles like Configuring FTP Firewall Settings in IIS and FTP Firewall Support, and I get related questions when people are trying to figure out why they can't use the command-line FTP.EXE utility that ships with Windows over the Internet. With all of this in mind, I thought that I would put together a quick blog that explains Active and Passive FTP connections and why those matter when you are connecting to an FTP server over the Internet.

In Part 1 of this blog series about adding custom FTP providers with the IIS Configuration Editor, I showed you how to add a custom FTP provider with a custom setting for the provider that is stored in your IIS configuration settings. For my examples, I showed how to do this by using both the AppCmd.exe application from a command line and by using the IIS Configuration Editor. In part 2 of this blog series, I will show you how to use the IIS Configuration Editor to add custom FTP providers to your FTP sites.

Publishing technical documentation is an interesting business, and a lot of discussion & deliberation goes into the creation process for articles and videos that we produce at Microsoft. For example, when I am writing an article for IIS, should I publish that on www.iis.net, or technet.microsoft.com, or msdn.microsoft.com? Or should I just write a blog about it? And after I have published an article, how will my intended audience find it? As we continue to publish hundreds of technical articles to the websites that I just mentioned, the navigation hierarchy becomes increasingly complex, and content discoverability suffers.