ServerSide

Help LeanServer grow - become a part of our expert developer team

Mike Volodarsky — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:20:00 GMT

In the last 6 months, LeanServer has deployed several high performance web technologies with some of the biggest names in the web. It’s been a very intense ride, but totally worth it when seeing the impact we can have in a large-scale web environment - and the grins on the faces of people running it. As we approach our first public launch, expect to see more info and some names named on our website in the next several months. We’ve also invested extensively in our internal development...(read more)

LeanServer needs a rockstar .NET Developer in the Philadelphia area

Mike Volodarsky — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:08:00 GMT

Things have been pretty hectic. Although I haven't blogged about this much, I've been working on LeanServer , a new company I started last year. LeanServer is a technical expert in scalability and performance for very large web sites, with multiple technologies and tools aimed at making these sites scale and significantly reduce operational costs. This is a direct continuation of my work on the ASP.NET/IIS 7.0 teams over the previous 5 years - taking all the great platform features we built,...(read more)

Troubleshooting performance counter problems with PerfMon and a debugger

Mike Volodarsky — Sun, 24 May 2009 04:17:00 GMT

Performance counters are a wonderful tool when it comes to quickly assessing system health and performance of Windows subsystems. In addition to learning much about the operation of Microsoft products, exposing performance counters from your own code can be extremely valuable for the very same reasons. We do this a lot for LeanServer code – and it saves a lot of time and money when it comes to monitoring, diagnostics, and performance analysis in production. As with many things, performance...(read more)

Be a part of the energy revolution / Help Save Kilowatt Ours

Mike Volodarsky — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:44:00 GMT

I dont usually post activist stuff on the blog, but I have to make an exception in this case. A year ago, I caught a late night showing of Jeff Barrie's Killowatt Ours, a 1 hour long film about the true impact of energy production on our environment, our health, and the extent to which we can help meet our growing energy demands by simply reducing our energy footprint. Lets just say the film was eye-opening, even given the fact that I've been in the energy field in one way or another for...(read more)

Workaround for using IIS 7 url authorization with ASP.NET roles

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 12 May 2009 03:33:00 GMT

When using the IIS 7.0 Integrated pipeline, you gain access to a ton of cool scenarios where IIS and ASP.NET features work together to provide value for your application – regardless of the application content. Most of these features involve using ASP.NET features (e.g.Forms Authentication) to provide their services for non-ASP.NET content. These have been at the core of most of the demos we did while developing the Integrated pipeline, and consequently are the most well known. The other major...(read more)

Fun with file locking

Mike Volodarsky — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 06:33:00 GMT

If you are developing code that uses distributed synchronization or messaging, you sometimes might need to use files as a locking mechanism. This can be useful because files are persistent (beyond thread, process, or even power session lifetime), and access to them is synchronized between multiple processes if you select the proper file access and sharing modes. C# example of taking a file lock: using ( FileStream lockFile = new FileStream ( lockPath, FileMode .OpenOrCreate, FileAccess .ReadWrite,...(read more)

Analyzing server power consumption and costs

Mike Volodarsky — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 20:05:00 GMT

For many data centers, the cost of powering servers has become a top budget item. The first step to reducing power costs lies in understanding the power characteristics of your server equipment and workloads. We started with a simple power meter and a tool to monitor and correlate power data ......(read more)

IIS 7.0 Url Rewriter gotchas when importing mod_rewrite rules

Mike Volodarsky — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 02:16:00 GMT

One of the best things to happen to IIS 7.0 recently is the release of Url Rewriter , the IIS 7.0 url rewriting equivalent to Apache's mod_rewrite. To ease the process of migrating Apache apps (notably PHP applications that rely on mod_rewrite rules for SEF / friendly urls), the Url Rewriter IIS Manager snapin includes an import function that can import mod_rewrite rules automatically. Apparently not everyone knows about this little gem, so if you need to get mod_rewrite rules running on IIS...(read more)

IIS 7.0 Forms Authentication and Embedded Media Players

Mike Volodarsky — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:04:00 GMT

One of the useful benefits of IIS 7.0 and the ASP.NET Integrated mode is the ability to protect all content using ASP.NET Forms Authentication. In the past, people would often protect the application pages themselves, and leave images and media content open for public access. It wasn’t easy to extend the same internet-based authentication scheme to static content unless the static content was served through custom handlers. Even this wasn’t a perfect solution as you’d often lose...(read more)

When to restart IIS when making changes to your application

Mike Volodarsky — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:02:00 GMT

Knowing when to restart IIS to pick up various types of changes to your application has traditionally been a challenge. IIS and ASP.NET are both stateful software systems, which heavily rely on cached state that is loaded once to provide high performance. They also recognize the downside of being stateful - having to refresh the state when the underlying data changes - and most of the time provide mechanisms for picking up the changes automagically (typically via file change notifications/ReadDirectoryChangesW)....(read more)

Leverage the Top 10 Performance Improvements in IIS 7.0

Mike Volodarsky — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:40:00 GMT

IIS 7.0 improves on the already solid performance of its predecessor in quite a few places. But the real power lies in the new capabilities IIS 7.0 provides that can significantly improve performance, scalability, and reduce operational costs of running web applications...(read more)

Trace IIS 7.0 Errors Like a Pro with Failed Request Tracing

Mike Volodarsky — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 04:25:00 GMT

When dealing with hard to find IIS 7.0 errors, I break out the trusty Failed Request Tracing. My favorite way of doing this is through the command line...(read more)

Make your next IIS 7.0 web server a lean one

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 04:04:00 GMT

Among IT circles, IIS 7.0’s modularity is definitely one of its most welcomed traits. It promises a significantly reduced surface area, lightweight management overhead, and better performance. Ever wonder how far you can go with modularizing IIS 7.0? ...(read more)

The next step

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 27 May 2008 05:46:00 GMT

It's been one week since I left Microsoft, and what a week its been! I dont remember the last time I was on so little sleep :) I'll be making some changes to www.mvolo.com and posting more info about the new stuff shortly. I have to say though that my focus is still almost completely on IIS 7.0 and related Windows Server 2008 tech. In the past week, I've been doing more learning and writing code than I have in a long time, which has been extremely exciting. I've been working on and...(read more)

Connecting to IIS 7.0 configuration remotely with Microsoft.Web.Administration

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 27 May 2008 03:20:00 GMT

IIS 7.0 provides a number of APIs that you can use to manage configuration remotely. This post provides the info and tools you need to configure remote access to IIS 7.0 configuration, including for use on Server Core installations....(read more)

Leaving Microsoft ...

Mike Volodarsky — Wed, 14 May 2008 21:54:00 GMT

After almost 5 years at the company, I am both sad and excited to say that I’ll be leaving the IIS team and Microsoft at the end of this week. Looking back , I can say that my experience at Microsoft has been truly amazing. I got to ship two amazing products, ASP.NET 2.0, and IIS 7.0. I got to do what I love to do – design and build platform technology, while working with great people on the most ambitious web technologies Microsoft has ever released. I wrote more about my experience...(read more)

The IIS 7.0 Resource Kit Book

Mike Volodarsky — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:59:00 GMT

The IIS 7.0 Resource Kit Book is out! Coming straight from the IIS 7.0 team and some of our best MVPs, this should be the best IIS 7.0 book out there today ... ...(read more)

IconHandler 2.0: file icons in your ASP.NET applications

Mike Volodarsky — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 06:27:00 GMT

Since its release, IconHandler has been a pretty popular module (on its own and with the custom DirectoryListingModule ). Today, I am releasing v2.0 of IconHandler, which contains some much-requested functionality and fixes a few issues that people have reported with the original version. ( I don’t RTFM, take me to download ) Here are the notable changes in v2.0: 1. Icon pre-generation . The IconHandler now includes IconGen.exe , a tool you can use to export all of the icons registered on your...(read more)

Mvolo.com moves again

Mike Volodarsky — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:02:00 GMT

Ever since I started blogging about IIS 7.0, I had the plan to do it on a server that was running the actual technology I was blogging about ... I deviated a little from the plan when I first stated out, making the first few posts using GoDaddy's QuickBlog . Shortly afterwards, I moved to a self-hosted IIS 7.0 IDX 1 server sitting in my roommate's garage. It was the first server on the internet to run Community Server in Integrated mode (that was a big deal to me back than, as many apps we...(read more)

Creating portable ASP.NET applications that work on IIS 6.0, IIS 7.0 Classic, and IIS 7.0 Integrated modes

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:30:00 GMT

ASP.NET applications in IIS 7.0 Integrated mode requires configuration changes if they define custom modules or handlers ... However, it is possible to create portable ASP.NET applications that can function in all three environments without configuration changes....(read more)

Using Visual Studio 2005 with IIS 7.0

Mike Volodarsky — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:05:00 GMT

I've blogged quite a bit about using Visual Studio to develop and debug IIS 7.0 applications in the past. A few weeks back, I put together a detailed article about using Visual Studio 2008 to work with IIS 7.0 applications, collecting all the various how-to and gotchas in one place. Now, you can find the same information for Visual Studio 2005, in a new article titled Using Visual Studio 2005 with IIS 7.0....(read more)

Backing up and restoring IIS 7.0 shared configuration

Mike Volodarsky — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:41:00 GMT

Bill's recent post reminded me of a question I often get about backing up and restoring configuration when IIS 7.0 is being used in the Shared Configuration mode. In this mode, the applicationHost.config file is stored on a UNC share to allow multiple IIS 7.0 servers to share a single configuration file. ...(read more)

IIS 7.0 Bit-rate throttling module

Mike Volodarsky — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 01:58:00 GMT

Last week, the IIS team released bit-rate throttling module to the web. As the self-proclaimed daddy of the project (I designed and wrote the initial prototype in early 2007), I am very thrilled to see it out. The new IIS media team folks have done a great job getting it production ready and rounding out the feature-set, which you can review in its full glory in Vishal's post . Download links: - 32 bit - http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1640 - 64 bit - http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1641...(read more)

Using Visual Studio 2008 with IIS 7.0

Mike Volodarsky — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:30:00 GMT

In the past, I've blogged a number of times about using Visual Studio to develop and debug IIS 7.0 applications. I am happy to say that Visual Studio 2008 has added a number of improvements to work better with IIS 7.0, making it a lot easier to use it to develop, deploy, and debug those applications both locally and on remote IIS 7.0 servers. To help you get started with using Visual Studio 2008 to work with IIS 7.0 applications, I put together a new iis.net article precisely on the subject:...(read more)

IIS 7.0 ships: a trip down memory lane

Mike Volodarsky — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:39:00 GMT

After 5 years in development, IIS 7.0 is finished ! Personally, it is hard to believe that it is over. I remember joining the IIS 7.0 team over 4 years ago, when the project was in its infancy, to drive the design of the web server engine. I remember getting in the room with all of the senior IIS 7.0 developers, with a spec of how the web server pipeline was going to work … feeling like I was about to be eaten alive :) Somehow, it worked out, and soon I was a regular at the dev team’s...(read more)