You can set up an application pool to start automatically but the worker process (w3wp.exe) will actually be launched once a request is made to the web site. However, in some scenarios you may want to have a worker process started automatically whenever...

We have just released IIS 8.0 Express Beta. Internet Information Services (IIS) 8.0 Express Beta is a free, simple and self-contained version of IIS that is optimized for developers. IIS Express makes it easy to use the most current version of IIS...

With the release of Windows 8 Server Beta, IIS 8 is coming to the world. If you are curious about what is new in IIS 8, you can check the following article: What’s New in IIS 8 http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2012/03/01/what-s-new-in-iis...

If you are not sure if Kerberos or NTLM authentication is used in your web application then you can use the script given in the following blog: http://www.ilinfo.fr/blog/post/Page-de-test-Kerberos-et-de-delegation-ASPX.aspx The blog is in French...

Check out the new logo of Windows (will be introduced in Windows 8) from Windows Team's blog: Redesigning the Windows Logo http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2012/02/17/redesigning-the-windows-logo.aspx You can also...

I found adding notepad shortcut in the "Send to" menu very useful trick as I can send any file to notepad quickly as seen in the screenshot below: Follow the instructions below to add notepad shortcut in "Send to" menu: Type shell:sendto in...

If you are running your application within a .NET 4.0 application pool (IIS 7.0 or IIS 7.5) or your web site is configured as an ASP.NET 4.0 web site (IIS 6.0) and would like to show your clients an "under maintenance" page for a limited time, the easiest...

Microsoft will host a webcast to address customer questions on latest published security bulletin about vulnerability in ASP.NET which could allow denial of service: Title: Information About Microsoft's December 2011 Out-of-Band Security Bulletin Release...

Although this class is not famous, it does a great job to calculate the execution time. Usually, the execution time of a code block is calculated by setting a start and stop variable (DateTime) just before and after the code block and then calculating...

Here is a frequently asked question: why can't I see IIS logs written immediately after a request? The anwer is that the HTTP.SYS buffers the IIS logs and flushes to the disk every 60 seconds because of performance issues. If you are running IIS...

I have just found that one of my colleauges, Spike, posted a nice blog article here explaining how to create a StackOverflowException using .NET Framework. He also explained how to find the root cause of the issue with live debugging using WinDBG. ...

I was helping to one of my customers where his Sharepoint web sites stopped working unexpectedly. All of the web sites were failing with HTTP 500 Internal Server Error message. When I checked the details of the error message, I have found that the issue...

"At 11:44 a.m. on September 19, 1982, a man named Scott Fahlman posted a message to an electronic computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University. And with that simple action he did something wonderful: He became the individual...

I have tried to put together Microsoft's official twitter accounts in a list below. Please let me know through comments section below if you would lke to add others to the list. Microsoft - The official Twitter page for Microsoft http://twitter.com...

An interesting blog is posted on ZDNet: Ten watchwords for Microsoft's Windows 8 conference Summary: Microsoft’s Build conference is going to be full of Windows 8 terms and technologies. Here are 10 of the related codenames and features about...

Debug Diagnostic Tool (a.k.a. "Debug Diag" or "DebugDiag") version 1.1 is one of the most popular debugging tools which helps us to collect/analyze crash or hang dumps. However most of the features of the v1.1 is not working on Windows 7 or Windows Server...

The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2010 features and a variety of framework technologies including: ...

Fiddler is a great tool for logging HTTP/HTTPS traffic in the client side. However, you may see that no traffic is logged if you would like to debug your web site by browsing http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1. If this is your case then you can try...

You may see that IIS related services fail to start and receive "Windows could not start the Windows Process Activation Service - Error 6801: Transaction support within the specified resource manager is not started or was shut down due to an error" error...

This is an overlooked behavior which may break your ASP.NET application if you are using Session_OnEnd or Session_End events in Global.asax. Here is a snippet from related article from MSDN: The Session_OnEnd event is only supported when the session...

Long story short – you can use SuppressIldasmAttribute attribute. However, please note that it won’t prevent decompilers (such as .NET Reflector, ILSpy or JustDecompile) from reverse engineering your code. Here are the details: What...

A .NET application is compiled into IL (intermediate language) during compile time and it is compiled into platform specific binary code during runtime by JIT (Just in time) Compiler. You can decompile IL code to get the source code of the assembly. This...

Twenty years ago, May 20th, 1991 at Windows World, in Atlanta, Microsoft founder Bill Gates demoed Visual Basic 1.0. We are celebrating 20th birthday of Visual Basic this year. Please read the full story at Visual Basic Team Blog: Happy 20th Birthday...

What is a dump file? A dump file is a snapshot of a process' memory written on the disk. You can use a dump file to troubleshoot several issues including crashes, hangs and performance problems. Basically, you collect "crash dumps" if a process quits...

As of today, we have announced that we acquire Skype. Here is one of the most exiciting part of the announcement: With 170 million connected users and over 207 billion minutes of voice and video conversations in 2010, Skype has been a pioneer in creating...