In a project that I completed a few years ago I had need to programatically zip an xml file for use as an email attachment. This specific implementation was a part of a BizTalk Adapter written in VB.Net, but the code library used to carry out the zip process was a freely available C# library that can be used in any .Net code for zipping purposes. The library used was called SharpZipLib. The .Net SharpZipLib library (formally NZipLib) supports Zip as well as GZip format and comes with C# source code ......

I was recently introduced to the PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool. This is a great tool that allows you to produce HTML reports based on the analysis of performance monitor counter logs. It applies complex thresholds based on those defined by Microsoft. The HTML reports produced include charts and very useful descriptions and links for important counters, they also contain various degrees of alerts for when thresholds are exceeded. These reports can be very useful aids when performance tuning ......

Recently I needed to try and reduce contention within IIS when calling a number of web services. Eventually this led to the need to make some changes to the machine.config file. The changes identified were based on the Microsoft recommended settings. These recommended values should be viewed as a start point for continued tuning, but have been shown to work in most circumstances. They are based on the premise that for each ASPX page in use you are making one Web service call to a single IP address. ......