ServerSide

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 ...

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 ...

Server power consumption is rapidly becoming a hot topic in the IT industry.  For many data centers, the cost of powering servers has become a top budget item.  In fact, in 2008, the average cost of power used by a server exceeded its purchase price (1). Nationally, the EPA estimated data center electricity consumption to cost over $4.5 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This month, TechNet Magazine published my article about the top IIS 7.0 features you can use to unlock the performance potential of your web server.  You can read it at Top 10 Performance Improvements in IIS 7.0. IIS 7.0 improves on the already solid performance of its predecessor in quite a few places. However, this article is not about ...

When you are working with the web server, dealing with errors is a fact of life.  They creep in when applications change, when you deploy to a new server, make configuration changes, or add new functionality.The IIS 7.0 philosophy with respect to errors is that an error is better than something seemingly working in a way that you don’t ...

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.Or, in other words, you can use IIS 7.0 build lean web servers.Ever wonder how far you can go with modularizing IIS 7.0? Actually, you can go ...

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 ...