IIS 7.0 Server-Side

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

2010-02-13T22:20:00Z

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

2009-07-09T05:08:00Z

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

2009-05-24T04:17:00Z

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

2009-05-21T17:44:00Z

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

2009-05-12T03:33:00Z

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

2009-03-01T06:33:00Z

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

2009-02-01T20:05:00Z

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

2008-12-08T02:16:00Z

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

2008-11-16T22:04:00Z

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

2008-09-12T06:02:00Z

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

2008-08-03T00:40:00Z

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

2008-08-01T04:25:00Z

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

2008-06-17T04:04:00Z

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

2008-05-27T05:46:00Z

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

2008-05-27T03:20:00Z

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)