During my most recent event in Madison, I got one question and one observation that I felt were particularly worth sharing out on my blog.  Both the observation and the question took place during the Optimizing Web Applications session.

The observation came during a run of a test script in Microsoft Application Center Test.  A cryptic message "Robots.txt will be checked" appeared in the status bar of the test details window.  I made a comment about looking into its meaning and a friendly fellow in the front row explained to the audience that this file was used to define authorization rights for web robots, aka spiders.  I searched the web for more information and found this extremely informative Web Robots FAQ.  I highly recommend checking this out, especially if you manage a website.

The question was related to managing performance counters during application deployment and went something like this - How does one go about automatically deploying custom performance counters as part of a web application during migration from the test box to the production box?  I was determined to find one good solution, but I actually found two.  The first is to programmatically create counters in your application - for more information, check out this MSDN article.  The other method is to use a PerformanceCounterInstaller as part of your Setup Project when you deploy the application.  During my search, I also found that Mark Miller endorses using the latter method to install performance counters.  A good site for additional guidance on using performance counters is the article ASP.NET Performance Monitoring, and When to Alert Administrators.

Happy Coding,
Jacob