WebLog

When creating new website with new application pool, bu default IIS sets your application pool in a way to save resources when inactive. This is because it does not want to run your website all the time if is there is no activity on it and keep using resources on the host for idle worker processes (w3wp.exe). This is the reason you might experience slow response when opening your website URL from time to time especially if your website has low traffic. ...read more

More often you will need a list of strings from a single string with a Split method, not so often you need to get a single string from an IEnumerable of strings, but still those requirements exist form time to time. This does not look like a complex tasks, but still there are several ways to achieve this. ...read more

MSMQ (Microsoft Message Queuing) is a built in Windows component. It is not so popular now days as there are more efficient and robust solutions available. However, it still has it's place in application architecture as a simple queueing system, plus as I mentioned, it comes out of the box with Windows operating system as a Windows component.This means it is still widely used Windows based applications mostly for internal notifications and services between components of the solution...read more

Depending on the application architecture, your Windows virtual machine might have one or more applications or components of a single solution. Those might be WebApi services, Web Applications or Windows applications. Any of these components may generate logs which are important for diagnostics and tracking down events...read more

Microsoft IIS Server is by default logging every request that reaches it. This can be pretty useful for tracking down the issue which my occur over time, but it is also pilling up log files on server's disk which eventually can cause low disk space. You an always clean up these files manually, but wouldn't it be nice if server does that for you? ...read more

PowerShell is the best option for automation on Windows platform. Regardless of which platform and how you organize Continous Deployment, you will always need to introduce certain level of customization during the deployment process. Scripting with PowerShell can play main role with these kind of customizations...read more

Very often you need to setup ASP.NET Web application on IIS server, you need to setup file and folder permission for your application on order to access content of specific folder. This can be easily done through Windows Explorer Properties window in the Security tab. ...read more

Base64 serialized images are useful in many cases for serving images on page. It is also a format of image that JavaScript can generate on the fly. HTML canvas object has native support for base64 and it can be easily serialized to base64 string from JavaScript code by invoking toDataURL method of the canvas element. ...read more

It is an often case that application configuration is different for each environment. Most often this is the case for database connection string where developer has connection string to dev environment database or it's local database and quality assurance (qa) and production have different connection strings wile the rest of the config...read more

Microsoft made IIS management from the ASP.NET code itself much easer and accessible right out of the box by introducing Microsoft.Web.Administration library. Simply by adding the reference in your project to Microsoft.Web.Administration library you are getting options to manage websites hosted on the IIS where application is running. One of the requirements beside referencing Microsoft.Web.Administration library is setting your Application Pool to run under LocalSystem account. ...read more

Using REDIS for caching values for increasing application performance can be quite beneficial and can increase performance and scalability of your application. Although REDIS allows quite large text files, up to 512MB which is something you most likely will not reach if you are storing for example JOSN data, there will be a significant network transfer over the wire for putting and pulling this value in and out...read more

This article is based on one of my previous topic Advanced Base64 image extension in ASP.NET MVC. It uses the same concept to display image on the page and to cache it, but it involves QR code bitmap generation which is basically a NuGet package use. Basically, QR code is generated using NuGet package QRCoder https://www.nuget.org/packages/QRCoder/ and result Bitmap is serialized to base64 string and cached so we do not regenerate same QR bitmap over and over on every request which may lead to server overload. ...read more

The common reason I wrote Windows Services applications for are usually workers. For example, you need to read messages from the queue and process them...read more

Web API and in general REST services are becoming more and more often used layer of the applications. It relies on the HTTP, it is lighter than the SOAP and more natural to JavaScript, therefore easy to use both from the client and serer side...read more

Serializing images to base64 string is well known technique to reduce requests per page. Each image on the page produces a separate request while page is loading...read more