All IIS logging properties are not selected by default. Some of them, which are not selected by default can add some valuable information when troubleshooting performance or availability issues. To modify the properties which IIS 6 logs, first select...

Rendering custom error pages can be helpful when, for example, the custom error page provides some information on how to resolve the error. Perhaps if a client attempts to access a file which does not exist on the web site, meaning they receive a 404...

I am very excited, to say the least, to start using the preview/beta releases of Windows 8 Server, Windows 8, IIS 8 and Visual Studio 11. I did choose to install the instance of Windows Server 8 and Windows 8 into a Hyper-V Virtual Machine. I did this...

I was setting up an Application Request Routing server and received the error shown in Figure 1 when I attempted to access the ARR URL. Figure 1, HTTP Error 502.4 – Bad Gateway The cause was due to the Health Status of the servers being...

One of my favorite aspects of ORMs is that I no longer have to write SQL. I like this because I was never really good at it once it exceeded the joining of 2 tables. The really complicated queries I left with the SQL people or a DBA. Nonetheless, I still...

I have spent a lot of time Working with NHibernate 3.0 and now am also giving some attention to the Entity Framework. One of the road blocks for using NHibernate is the initial configuration requirements. There are a significant number of actions which...

On a web server with multiple application pools, there most likely will be multiple W3WP processes. Therefore, the first action to take when creating a memory dump of a W3WP worker process is to find which W3WP process you need to get the dump of. ...

I am very excited about the Web Farm Framework (WFF). Having administered many web farms in my past, this technology resolves a lot of the activities which where a burden. This blog will show a standard architectural configuration of a WFF environment...

There is a new troubleshooting capability available in IIS 7, it is called Failed Request Tracing Rules. It provides a lot of very useful information which can help pinpoint the cause of performance problem or error. At the moment it is not installed...

On a web server with multiple application pools, there most likely will be multiple W3WP processes. Therefore, the first action to take when creating a memory dump of a W3WP worker process is to find which one you need to get the dump of. I wrote a...

When you have multiple websites running under different application pools on the same server, you may need to trouble shoot a specific worker process. On Windows 2003 and Internet Information Services 6 (IIS6), I use the iisapp.vbs script as shown...

Troubleshooting a performance problem can be very complicated. Unfortunately, in many cases you prepare and begin learning about how to fix a performance problem when it is happening or just after a performance problem. The fact is, you need to monitor...

When optimizing and tuning an ASP.NET application you may want to increase the value of the requestQueueLimit. The requestQueueLimit is the maximum number of requests that can be queued by an ASP.NET process before errors get returned to the client. ...

Kerberos is a request based authentication protocol. That means with each request, there is a resulting authentication step. See the following figure 1 where you notice a Ticket request for each GET Http Command. Figure 1, Network Monitor log for...

I wrote 2 previous blogs about NTLM and Negotiate/Kerberos which discussed briefly about how those authentication packages work within the context of Integrated Windows Authentication. Another authentication package supported in Windows is called Secure...

Object Relational Mapping technologies have been around for many years. Hibernate was one of the first, if not the first, ORM library which targeted the Java platform. Today, there are also NHibernate, which is a port of Hibernate to C# and the ADO.NET...

IIS provides a number of different authentication techniques. One of which is Integrated Windows Authentication. Integrated Windows Authentication utilizes Negotiate/Kerberos or NTLM to authenticate users based on an encrypted ticket/message passed between...

IIS provides a number of different authentication techniques. One of which is Integrated Windows Authentication. Integrated Windows Authentication utilizes Negotiate/Kerberos or NTLM to authenticate users based on an encrypted ticket/message passed between...

Prior to getting my job here at Microsoft, I was, and in many aspects still am passionate about NHibernate. I discovered a particular liking to ORM’s in general. I liked it so much that I wrote a book called “Working with NHibernate 3.0”...

Understanding the differences between how and where 32bit and 64bit programs can run is, at the beginning, a little tricky. Simply, 32bit programs can run on 32bit and 64bit machines, while 64bit programs can only run on 64bit machines. When the topic...

The first step to take when making changes to a system is to backup what you currently have so that if there are problems with the system after the changes have applied, you have time constraints and can’t get the system to work, then you have at...