Josh Wieder

Helicon Ape is a great tool that allows people to stop complaining that Windows does not provide support for .htaccess, or for those who need URL rewriting in pre-Windows 2008 servers. For maximum confusion, Helicon names its configuration file httpd.conf like Apache. I made some modifications to the logging verbosity in that file, helping out an admin who hadn't realized that debug-level verbosity on redirect logging results not just in poor performance from the additional overhead needed to write to a file each time a URL is mod'd, but in a huge file that will quickly overwhelm available storage. Attempting to save http.conf resulted in errors because it was in use by a process so I copied my modified file to the desktop, renamed the existing conf file and copied my copy back into the Helicon configuration directory.  My changes weren't applied. The syntax was correct in my changes and Helicon kept processing redirects. Sure enough I compared permissions on the tw...

When thinking about launching an .NET application with IIS, memory tuning the webserver is often ignored. I often complained about how php.ini offered more straightforward means to address performance tuning - but I was wrong. Windows Server reserves half of its available RAM for the operating system. Of the remaining RAM, by default IIS will only allow 60% to be allocated to applications (in v1.0 I think it was actually 40%, in later versions its more generous). This setting is configurable, and can be set in your machine.config of the relevant framework path (%system% Microsoft.NET\Framework\) by adjusting the memoryLimit parameter . I recommend not reserving more than 80%. There is a ton to do here, and more than I can address in one post. Benchmarking these settings in development is a necessity, so do the needful and check out this overview here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff647813.aspx

I recently stumbled across this article on how to create custom hosting space field's for websitepanel, a cool control panel software for Windows Servers: http://websitepanel.net/developer-guide/custom-links-in-account-and-space-menu I have mixed feelings about control panel software generally (they make it necessary to troubleshoot two things - software and underlying services), but this one is as good as it gets in Windows and I have had to fix quite a few of them over the years. For these to be practical in production, customization is needed and I thought it was cool of WebsitePanel to have a fairly comprehensive developer guide on the topic.

So this is a weird one. I recently installed phpmyadmin 3.5.1 in a MySQL 5.1 / IIS 7.5 environment. Everything was going well until I realized that following the installation (which was fully functional) I could not login to MySQL (from the CLI) without referencing the hostname (-h flag). I figured that maybe the .sql script included with the installer messed with my grants, but a quick show grants revealed I still had the same permissions granted to root as when I started. So I figured that I would update the grants on root to what was displayed in show grants just in case. This produced an insufficient permissions error even though root had "full" privileges. To resolve this I added skip-grant-tables to my.ini, restarted the mysql service, logged in as root, flushed privileges, and again updated grants to what was displayed in "show grants". I then removed skip-grant-tables and restarted, and I was again able to login locally. I'm still not certain what caus...

Still amazing 170 years later.

Do you know who Tess Ferrandez is? If not, you are missing out on the author of what I consider the most lucid series of articles on the topic of debugging .NET. Check out her series of demos on how to fixxit all things .NET . The most useful post I have seen so far is her piece on how to capture dumps on 32 bit process within 64 bit systems  (without needing to DL procdump). +1 nerd points to Ms Ferrandez for making my job of learning all things Windows a bit less painful.