Is your TableServiceContext missing IgnoreResourceNotFoundException when building with .NET Framework 3.5 System.Data.Services.Client.dll?

If you are developing code with Azure tables, and building against .NET 3.5 DLLs, you may encounter a compilation error like this: “The name ‘IgnoreResourceNotFoundException’ does not exist in the current context” At LeanSentry, we do a lot of custom Azure development to power our scalable data backend.  Now, most of our codebase is using … [Read more…]

Fun with file locking

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 … [Read more…]

IIS 7.0 Forms Authentication and Embedded Media Players

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 … [Read more…]

When to restart IIS when making changes to your application

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 … [Read more…]

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

As you know, IIS 7.0 provides a number of ways to manage configuration other then MWA, including IIS Configuration COM objects for script, IIS Configuration COM objects from .NET or native clients, WMI, the IIS Manager tool (inetmgr.exe), and AppCmd. While all of these can be used to manage an IIS 7.0 box remotely (AppCmd with … [Read more…]

IconHandler 2.0: file icons in your ASP.NET applications

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 … [Read more…]

Using Visual Studio 2005 with IIS 7.0

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 … [Read more…]

Using Visual Studio 2008 with IIS 7.0

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 … [Read more…]

MSDN Magazine: Enhance Your Applications with ASP.NET Integrated Pipeline!

This month, the Enhance Your Apps With the Integrated ASP.NET Pipeline article is finally out in MSDN Magazine.  I just got several copies in the mail (thanks Howard!). ****** UPDATE: Scott Hanselman presents the demos from this article at CodeMash 2008 ****** To be honest, I am VERY excited about this article.  I’ve been talking … [Read more…]