Tobin Titus

Reading IIS.NET Blogs (or any RSS) with Powershell

2007-02-15T01:46:00Z

Being a member of the IIS team, I often find myself checking blog posts to see what the members of the product team are blogging about. However, since Powershell came out, I find myself doing more and more work on my scripts. It's a bit annoying to have to jump out of Powershell to go read blog posts. As such, I've written a few quick scripts to help me read IIS.NET from my pretty blue shell. For those of you who are already familiar with powershell and don't want to read the long blog post, you...(read more)

IIS 7 Logging UI For Vista - Download Now

2007-01-31T01:28:00Z

As many of you already know, the management console for IIS 7.0 on Windows Vista does not have a UI for logging. Since this was a pain point for several customers, I decided to test out the extensibility APIs by creating a logging UI module. ( continued )...(read more)

Extending Microsoft.Web.Administration through PowerShell (Part II)

2006-12-01T22:46:00Z

In my previous post , I showed you how easy it was to leverage your knowledge of the IIS 7 managed SDK in Windows PowerShell. We loaded the IIS 7 managed assemblies and then traversed the object model to display site information and stop application pools. While this in itself was pretty cool, I don't think I quite got my point across about how powerful IIS 7 and PowerShell are together. As such, I wanted to show you some more fun things to do with PowerShell in the name of easy IIS 7 administration....(read more)

Accessing Microsoft.Web.Administration through PowerShell (Part I)

2006-12-01T22:43:00Z

I've caught the PowerShell bug. In between stints with my ever-expanding code samples, I play with PowerShell a lot. I thought I'd share a quick example of how to load Microsoft.Web.Administration.dll and use it to perform some basic tasks. Note: I'm running these samples on Windows Vista RTM, but I have no reason to believe this will not work on the PowerShell release candidates for the Vista RC* builds that are available now . So let's get started. First, PowerShell has no idea where Microsoft.Web.Administration.DLL...(read more)

Where can I find in IIS 7.0 ?

2006-10-11T00:40:00Z

Question : Where can I find Windows Authentication in IIS 7.0 ? I've seen this question or questions like this asked numerous times so I thought it would make a nice quick -- and hopefully useful -- blog post. In previous versions of IIS, administrators were able to enable or disable features on their servers by simply checking or unchecking a box in the IIS management console. However, when an administrator unchecked a feature in IIS, the feature still existed on the machine and was even loaded....(read more)

Steve Wozniak ... at Microsoft?

2006-10-09T08:00:00Z

I know it may sound very strange coming from a Microsoft employee, but last Friday I found myself in awe while I sat directly in front of Steve Wozniak while he gave a presentation ... on Microsoft campus. ( continue )...(read more)

Unsafe thread safety

2006-10-05T10:42:00Z

As I stated in my last post, for the past two days I've been sitting in Jeffrey Richter's threading class. The class is near the end and I can't say that a lot of new concepts have been taught. Another student and I have decided that the class should have been renamed, "Threading Basics". That's not to say anything of Richter's teaching skill or the content of the class. It just goes to show that if the architecture of a product is right, the threading code should be extremely simple to use. However,...(read more)

Back in business...

2006-10-03T00:58:00Z

I haven't blogged for some time now. This in large part has been due to heavy workload, close deadlines, and the fact that I was alone in my workload. Over the past few weeks, I've been able to get my head above water. While our open position on the team is still "open", we've filled our contractor position. Not only have we "filled" it, we've actually brought in one of our old contractors who is more than capable. He is definitely helping to alieviate my workload already. I've finished my Vista...(read more)

Why am I smiling?

2006-07-22T00:22:00Z

I moved to Redmond just over four months ago. In the time I have been here, my rental car was side-swiped, my truck was broken into, my headlight and bumper were damaged by someone in our own parking garage, someone stole my copy of " Professional Visual C++/CLI " from my office today (clearly someone missed the " corporate values " talk at New Employee Orientation), and my relocation to the great Pacific Northwest has been less than smooth or swift -- waiting for the insurance company to assess...(read more)

Looking left and turning right: management style

2006-07-08T02:43:00Z

Today, I was returning from my manager's office to my own when I nearly collided with another manager-type in the hall. As I was approaching a hallway intersection, a manager emerged in a bit of a hurry looking to the left while she was turning to the right. She prolonged her view to the left for so long that her path was diverging directly into mine. In motorcycle safety course several years ago we were taught while taking a corner that we should look in the direction of the curve. Looking to the...(read more)

SDK Sample: Programmatically change the runtime version of an application pool in IIS 7

2006-06-29T06:02:00Z

I have posted a new sample on IIS.NET demonstrating how to programmatically change the managed runtime version of an application pool in IIS 7.0. I have posted code in VB.NET and C#. Enjoy....(read more)

Communication breakdown: internal spam affects productivity

2006-06-29T03:49:00Z

When I interviewed with Microsoft, I was asked, "What is one thing we can count on you to do at Microsoft?" My reply was brief: " You can count on me to complain ." My interviewer suddenly took on the puzzled look that an interviewee would normally take when presented with an unfamiliar scenario. The facial expression of my inquisitor demanded an explanation. I decided to end the torment by presenting further detail; “ When something is wrong, I’m going to bring it up and someone will hear me. I’m...(read more)

Security: There's incompetence, and there's major incompetence

2006-06-22T08:11:00Z

It's one type of incompetence to keep the personal identifiers and financial data of customers on your laptop and then lose it -- twice ; It's an entirely different type of incompetence that allows government data to be compromised through a network. Last year at TechEd, a demo showed how a completely patched network could be compromised using an exploit in a web site. The best part of the exploit was made possible due to turning on more functionality than was necessary. Namely, one issue in the...(read more)

ADO.NET 2.0 Boot Camp

2006-06-21T06:01:00Z

Sahil Malik , a prolific speaker, Microsoft MVP and author of " Professional ADO.NET 2.0 " is holding a one-day ADO.NET boot camp in Charlotte next month. If you are in the area, I think this class will definitely give you your money's worth. Sahil has a very unique way of teaching that is easy to follow and highly effective. If you are going to be in the area on July 21st, and want to master ADO.NET, I would encourage you to take a look at this great opportunity in the Charlotte, NC....(read more)

Workaround: Adding a script map in IIS 5.1

2006-06-17T11:15:00Z

I was contacted by a customer who commented that he could not add a Script Map to IIS 5.1. After selecting his executable for the script map and adding his extension, the "OK" button was still disabled -- preventing him from committing the script map change. To work around this issue, once you have selected the executable and set the extension, click inside the "Executable" text box to expand the full path to the executable. Doing so will enable the OK button and you will be able to commit your script...(read more)