IIS

Hiring Services and Web Developers at ArenaNet

Yow-Hann Lee — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:06:24 GMT

Recently, I wrapped up my duties as a lead developer at myspace and headed to ArenaNet over in Bellevue, Washington. My team is hiring and we’re looking for awesome services and web developers. If you’re looking for a new challenge and would like to be part of the next Guild Wars gaming experience, check out the descriptions at:

Services Programmer

Web Developer

And you can hit me up at yow-hann at arena dot net. Hope to see some of the GWB community folks out there!

Seattle Code Camp v4.0

Yow-Hann Lee — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:06:19 GMT

Seattle Code Camp 2008 is once again held at the DigiPen campus. I never got around to recapping the one held earlier this year (v3.0) but have recaps of v2.0 here and here.

Check it out at: https://seattle.codecamp.us/default.aspx.

Seattle Code Camp 2007 (aka v3.0)

Yow-Hann Lee — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:48:50 GMT

Around this time last year, we were fast approaching the Seattle Code Camp held at Digipen in Redmond. Well, it turns out that it will be held in the same location this year on ~~November 3 & 4~~ ~~(edit: received an email from the organizer with updated dates. It will now be hold on Nov 17 & 18) (edit: received another email saying that this would be postponed to January sometime...TBD)~~ (edit v3: Seattle Code Camp V3 will happen on Jan 26 & 27, 2008)

This was a great event last year with strong emphasis on XNA last year as it was "the new hotness". You'll be able to find my blurbs about the event last year here and here (excerpt on IIS 7.0). This time last year, there were two main differences or missing ingredients. I actually didn't have a Vista box to run IIS 7.0 and the other being that I wasn't working at MySpace yet.

Anyways, go check out the Code Camp info at: http://seattle.codecamp.us/.

Bring your enthusiasm!

Calling GWB bloggers experiences on 64bit OS running IIS 32bit mode

Yow-Hann Lee — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 09:14:13 GMT

As per Microsoft support, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894435, running your 32 bit ASP.NET applications in IIS on Windows Server 2003 x64 is a simple matter of flipping the bit and enabling 32 bit mode. After aspnet_regiis on framework, you should be ready to go.

Having said that, has anyone come across post production/deployment issues in said configuration?

I know, I know...what's the justification for running such a scenario? You could have an internal library that references 32 bit specific dll (native code) in which you don't have the 64 bit version of. Which leads to the next thought..why not use Windows Server x86 with PAE extensions? What are the benefits of Server with PAE as opposed to Server x64? Comments, thoughts and rants are welcome. Answers ranging from "Depending on if x and y are...you will get..." vs. general practices.

Linux Debugging and Profiling Suite - Valgrind

Yow-Hann Lee — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 11:52:00 GMT

Every now and then, as much of a .NET junkie that we've all or rather I've become, it is refreshing to take a look at the open source world for a change. No, NOT Codeplex! But I mean open platform and source. Whether it's playing with Ubuntu or some other flavor of Linux...

Who knows? You might get an idea or two...I blogged a bit about IIS 7.0 last year at: http://geekswithblogs.net/yowhann/archive/2006/10/28/95366.aspx. In IIS7.0, look at how IIS has evolved to take after Apache.

Well, so for .NET, you have memory profiler tools such as the CLR Profiler. Today's link is to that of a debugging and profiling suite on Linux, called Valgrind.

.NET technologies are awesome...but every now and then, it's great to play around. It becomes inspiration for enhancing your own development experience. For example, web application testing WatiN being inspired by Watir. Or Ruby On Rails inspiring SubSonic .NET as another example

Top 10 Most Influential People in the Microsoft .NET World

Yow-Hann Lee — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 08:47:00 GMT

Steps to & Justification for Remote Debugging

Yow-Hann Lee — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 07:43:00 GMT

Day 1 - Seattle Code Camp

Yow-Hann Lee — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 05:36:00 GMT

This is the second time I have attended a citywide code camp. The first was back in Vancouver earlier this year at the inaugural Vancouver Code Camp. Preparation for the second annual event is already under way there. Seeing as the code camp was a blast, I didn't want to miss out on the one here in Redmond. This one is larger in terms of the number of speakers than the one held in Vancouver. Nevertheless, Medhat Elmasry did a great job with the code camp there and the .NET User Group in general. Since there is another day of code camp to go, I would recommend people out in the Vancouver area to make the 2.5 hour trip for Day 2 of Code Camp.

Onto the technologies...

I attended two sessions on XNA and one on IIS 7.0 (there are four timeslots you can attend, but I missed one to take my driver's written test). Because there were so many options to choose from in each timeslot, I'd be interested in reading feedback on what some of the other sessions were like.

IIS7

There weren't too many attendees for Brett Hill's talk. My guess would be that some people feel that it is too far down the road (at least a year) for them to start caring about. I was surprised to hear that the IIS team is a twenty person unit (some in the team don't have 100% of their time allocated for it) that falls under Scott Guthrie's reign.

An ex-coworker had pointed out www.iis.net a few months ago and commented on the lack of non-UI related changes. I suspected it was just more difficult to show off non-visual features and well, it is now a few months down the road now. It's analogous to how really cool features for IT Pros and developers in Vista are not as well publicized as the sexy UI improvements.

In any case, one of the most valuable things you can take away from this talk is CONTROL. IIS 6.0 and previous versions were basically black boxes. All requests went through a pipeline that IT pros and developers had no control over. Now, it is much more modular and you control what is included in the pipeline. Sounds like they have taken a chapter out of the open source world? (Apache...). In terms of configuration, they've taken it and merged it up with your web.config file in ASP.NET. And this applies to non-.NET apps as well. Think of the control it gives developers now and basically/hopefully moving to an xcopy approach for deployment (reduces communication/transfer of instructions to IT Ops or at least that is what I think their intention is?). One higher up from the website configuration level is IIS' applicationhost.config, just another xml file. And if you take it another level, imagine if each web server all pointed to a common master setting. Sounds like it would scale well.

Speaking of scaling, here are a couple fun marketing tidbits about IIS (albeit the RTM versions):

MySpace runs IIS - site sees approx 23 billion page views/month

According to a recent study, 54% of companies on the Fortune 1000 list use IIS.

XNA

Some really cool stuff presented. More on this later.....

One thing I would love to see in the Seattle Code Camp is for the presentation materials to be available for download. Right now, I don't see something on http://seattle.techevents.info for this. They may have done this last year and will do so after the code camp is over?

Custom Error Pages: IIS Custom Error Edit Tab vs. Web.config

Yow-Hann Lee — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 09:56:00 GMT

So there are a couple ways of presenting custom error pages to users. One approach is to directly edit the error page paths to point to your own on IIS and the other is to specify custom error pages in your asp.net application (whether this is in web.config, redirect in global.asax, or pageerror). I had a bit of experience with doing IIS custom error pages with non-asp.net apps; but for the most part, the convention for asp.net apps was to specify customErrors in web.config and redirects at the page level for more granularity.

When setting up IIS->WebSite->Properties->Custom Errors Tab->Edit HTTP Error and editing the page paths to point to a custom error page, this will get handled for non-aspx pages. So if someone types a non-existent *.html/*htm page, then they will be directed to the custom error page. However, if they specify a non-existent *.aspx page, they will see ASP.NET's 404 'The resource cannot be found Description: Http 404...'. This is because the aspnet_isapi.dll handles the .aspx extensions. So after editing the custom error properties on IIS, you would have been surprised by this default behaviour.

To keep it simple then, it would be recommended to just handle this in the web.config of your application. The other advantage of doing this is so that it reduces an extra step for IT Ops/Release Managers to take care of. If you really want to take it a step further and have consistent error pages regardless of someone heading to *.htm or *.aspx extensions, you can add application extension mapping by specifying aspnet_isapi.dll as the executable and .html as the path. There is a great article on it that goes into greater detail. Hopefully, this will alleviate some of the trial and error testing when dealing with this.

A BETTER approach is actually to edit IIS custom error properties if a "catch-all" approach for any file extensions is what you're after. To do this, for all original extensions that gets handled by aspnet_isapi.dll, make sure that 'check that file exists' is checked. Edit the paths for custom error properties on IIS and you should be set now. All errorCodes not handled in your application will now use custom error pages specified on IIS.

RANDOM THOUGHTS OF THE DAY:

Security

JavaScript security and best practices was on my mind today. You know how problems become more real to you when you actually see examples of it? (i.e. the first time you tried performing a sql injection on someone's web app after you started dealing with database driven web apps, read about it or were lectured on it). After you see it live, it becomes ingrained in your head. Well, I decided to find some case studies...

I was reading about Google's social networking service, Orkut, and all the security and vulnerabilities. Boy, there were problems and it ultimately resulted in a product that didn't take off.

Social Networking Companies

Curious about this company and social networking: http://doostang.com/. Apparently, this is by invitation only. The intent is to maintain the quality of people in the community. On the other hand, http://www.linkedin.com is a organization freely allows users to register.

Google Docs

I have been playing around with Google Docs lately. This latest addition to their "Office" suite is their document editing/sharing app. Their track changes/revisions feature has been pretty useful when two people are collaborating on the same document However, it looks like they need a bit more work on the yellow "Refresh". It is not very intuitive since it acts as a link but is non responsive. However, your document does get updated with the collaborators changes eventually.