After a long and very much needed hiatus, I have regained control of this blog and returned to blogging. For the curious reader, you can read about some of the happenings here . But, I am not one for dwelling on the past (except to learn and improve upon); I look forward to the future. And speaking...

Annually, the IIS team gathers at Emily's house on the shores of lake Sammamish to enjoy a day of fun under under the sun. We call it "water day", and it has been a team tradition for at least as long as I have been on the IIS team. Its organization, activities, and participants constantly alter,...

Lately, I have not been making frequent blog posts. There are good reasons, of course... and I will get to disclosing them in the near future. Recently, I have been spending a lot of time house-hunting. Yeah, I have decided that it is about time for me to move from my condo into a stand-alone house...

Ok, maybe this is something you business/marketing types understand intrinsically... but it is something that I do not understand, so please bear with me. Why do people complain about getting something for free that used to require money? I thought people like getting something for nothing. For example...

Back in this blog entry , I mused about the nice Audio over RDP feature. It is pretty sweet to have secure, remote access to one's audio collection. Well, I recently started playing with RDP over the new TS Gateway on Vista Server, and I have to say that it just keeps getting better. In the past...

Ok, I know that I just purchased an IBM X41 Tablet last fall, but I am in the market for a new laptop again. No, nothing wrong with my computers... I am just going to be giving the X41 to my younger sister so that she can use it during Law School the next few years. I wager she needs it more than...

Gosh, how quickly time flies by. It seems like yesterday when I was just getting started on this blog and typing out the entry for my 5-year anniversary at Microsoft. At that time, I had just finished doubling my number of blog entries, was in the midst of converting from purely newsgroup posts to blogging...

Nothing! Maybe it is just the summer-time lull, but I have not been terribly motivated to write anything lately. Alas, the IIS newsgroup has not been spawning anything interesting nor new in terms of issues either, and my private blog comments are starting to degenerate into "can you help me figure...

Hmm... it seems that ever since I made the blog entry about how to install PHP on IIS7, I seem to have become the default tech-support for PHP/IIS7 issues. That'll teach me to ever post beta guidance again - I just get more "help, I've fallen and I can't get up" questions, especially the sort when the...

Three months ago, I ranted in this blog entry about blog comment spam. Well, it appears that the arms race of allowing anonymous blog comments (which I deem highly important) has been steadily escalating, and the latest crop of blog comment spam are pretty clever to the point that I think that anonymous...

About twelve months ago, I started to hit a comfort zone with blogging. I had written a lot of initial content the prior two months, started to get a small number of private blog comments as well as a handful of comments to various posts, and I paid attention to answering just about every single one...

Ok... I have just returned from my three week vacation in Europe. Jet-lag is kicking in about now, so I am going to sleep. I had a blast visiting London, Copenhagen, Berlin, Cologne, Brussels, Luxembourg, and Amsterdam... I will get to observations about them future entries. For certain, I learned...

Well, it is time for me to take a vacation . For the next three weeks, I will be intentionally disconnected from technology and touring through a north/central Europe. Oh, yes, I need the break to disconnect and re-center myself. I have not done that in a few years now. So adios, ciao, cya later....

I started typing this as a response to this blog entry and then decided that I was investing a little too much of myself into the response... so here goes. The original question was about "how to install Virtual Server, install its VSWebApp.exe component, without IIS ever being installed" because...

I started posting this as a blog response elsewhere, and then I decided that I was having way too much fun composing it to leave it stranded as a mere comment... so here is my take on Product Team Roles at Microsoft. Yes, read it with a grain of salt, good humor, and enjoy the self-deprecating satire...

I swear... sometimes, I wonder what the MS Hardware Group which works on keyboards is thinking. As I see it, they have a really simple job - find and keep the keyboard layout that works for the users, and lead/innovate/maintain with the technologies behind the keyboard. Leading Technologies ...

In two weeks, I will be heading off to Europe for a three week vacation touring Denmark, northern Germany, Benelux, with a brief stop through London. No worries... I am going to queue up treatises of some very interesting topics as blog entries inside of Community Server to publish during that time...

I do not do these advertisements often... because I rather be an information producer and not necessarily a conduit. But, sometimes, I wager I should try to be a good corporate citizen... I had worked with John before on the Web Based Shared Hosting Accelerator and the general space of Mass Hosting...

I had a chance to sit in with the WiX "team" on their weekly Tuesday night "meeting" where the majority of the heavy-lifting of WiX development happens. For those of you who think that Microsoft cannot "get stuff done" ... you should see how WiX works. Now, I knew Rob already, but tonight was the...

Ahh... such an innocuous requirement - "I want to allow my User to easily click on a link and directly install Software from a Web Page - without all the confusing IE security hoopla popping up and possibly failing to allow Installation if your Software is not signed. After all, my User trusts me." ...

IIS has always had an identity crisis. Is it a platform for hosting and building web applications, or is it a web server product? Well, for the first time in IIS product history (that I am aware of, anyways...), IIS is treated more like a product with a competitive purpose instead of just being the...

I know that ASP.Net Atlas strays a little bit from my usual topics and focus, but I have to rave about cool things when I see it. :-) If you have yet to watch Scott take a lap around ASP.Net Atlas and show how insanely easy it is to build standards-conforming web applications using ASP.Net and then...

For those of you who enjoy photos and putting faces to names... here is one of the entire IIS7 PM, Development, and Test team. Fortunately, the weather Thursday afternoon was pretty agreeable, so the picture came out well. Random Factoids: For the curious - I am the one in the white mock...

Hurray... one of my favorite technologies, Virtual Server, is now freely available for download at this location . I suggest that everyone go grab a copy and install it. Especially if you have VMWare. ... except if you are running XP Home for your "production" environment. But then again, what...

One of my pet peeves is users running "Security Scanners" against their servers and treating the resulting report as Gospel... <mock> Oh my gosh, I have to fix all of these vulnerabilities in IIS6 that this report lists! Such an insecure piece of software, this IIS6 is! </mock> ...