Community Blogs

Wow, what a week of innovation for the Microsoft Web Platform.  This week we released a ton of new software which, if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out.  Here is a quick overview:   IIS Search Engine Optimization v1 final release Read More......( read more ) Read More...

Awesome service but it is coming to an end apparently. Microsoft Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live Beta is being discontinued and will eventually be taken down I’ve been using that service since it started and really enjoyed it. Was easy to create WMV webcasts, upload them, then create Silverlight wrappers for ASP.NET sites. What to do now? Well some Developers have mentioned using Channel 9 . Great idea. When I mentioned this to DiscountASP.NET concerning our free technical webcasts they were...( read more ) Read More...

November 12 *Free* ASP.NET 4.0 Hosting (beta 2) Sandbox now available! You have been asking for it, and it is finally available; a .NET 4.0 beta hosting sandbox! Signup is easy, just go to the DiscountASP.NET labs page and follow the link. The number of accounts on the .NET 4.0 beta server are strictly limited, so if you are interested you should sign up today. This is a public beta , so you do not have to be a current DiscountASP.NET customer to take advantage of the offer. We are including MS SQL2008...( read more ) Read More...

There are some known issues/bugs related to VS 2010 Web Deployment features in VS 2010 Beta 2 Read Me… I can imagine reading the entire Beta 2 read me file can be daunting so I thought I can just copy paste the ones related to Web Deployment here… DB Read More......( read more ) Read More...

So I’m a newbie when it comes to Windows Home Server but I’m quite seasoned when it comes to DotNetNuke, IIS, and that entire stack.  I wanted to cover off a the topic of installing DotNetNuke onto your Windows Home Server. Windows Home Server is essentially Small Business Server, just tweaked for network attached storage (NAS).  There are many other NAS solutions available, but I find this one superiour (at least for me) is the fact that it is built on top of the Microsoft solution.  I know ASP.NET, I know IIS, I know .NET, etc..  When I first heard of this product I was pleasantly surprised. Here is a shot of my Acer Aspire Home Server H340 physical machine.   Enough about me, on with the install! Throughout this installation...

Since the Windows 2008 Server launch last March, the IIS team has shipped a bunch of new features that plug-in to IIS7 and in parallel worked on IIS 7.5, launching today in the Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 release.  IIS 7.5 includes many bug fixes, improvements and new features, and is definitely worth grabbing.  If you haven’t tried IIS7 yet, check out the many reasons to try it.  If you’re already using IIS7 and want to know what’s new in IIS 7.5, Mai-lan just posted an update to...( read more ) Read More...

IIS Media Services 3.0 has been released and is now available as a free download for Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2!  Chris Knowlton has a comprehensive post on the release and all the details, here is a quick summary:   IIS Media Services, an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform, delivers true HD (720p+) streaming and provides real-time logging to measure media investments. By offering a complete media delivery platform together with a traditional Web server, rich dynamic Web...( read more ) Read More...

Few minutes ago a colleague and friend asked me about some problem he was having with ASP.NET themes. He was using a theme and including a CSS file in it, the CSS file was linked in the generated HTML but clearly it was not applied. Putting the URL of the CSS file in the browser address bar would return an empty result in Firefox, and a crappy DOCTYPE,HTML,HEAD,BODY tags in IE. The same website works normally with other developers running Windows XP or Windows 7. Going further to the problem, I tried checking the file access, giving extra permissions and so on, checking web.config and global.asax for any ASP.NET HTTP Handler or HTTP Module that might be handling all requests. None of this existed. Then, I switched to IIS, trying to change the...

The final release of the Web Deployment Tool (aka Web Deploy or MsDeploy) has been released to the web.  This is likely more significant than many people realize.  At first glance, Web Deploy seems like a tool for system administrators to copy sites and settings between servers (IIS6 to IIS6, IIS6 to IIS7 and IIS7 to IIS7).  It does do that, including SSL, COM, GAC, ACLs, registry, content and more. However, Web Deploy is likely to become a major deployment method for developers too.  Visual Studio 2010 will have native support for Web Deploy, offering the ability to deploy a entire website with the single-click feature of VS2010.  What’s also impressive is that it’s so lightening fast.  Only the file changes are...

I am very proud to announce our September 2009 release of IIS Web extensions! This September launch includes the RTW release of Web Deploy 1.0 , Web Platform Installer 2.0 , and IIS Database Manager 1.0 , as well as the pre-release versions of Application Request Routing 2.0 RC and Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) Toolkit Beta 2.0 . We are also releasing international support for a number of IIS extensions and the Windows Web Application Gallery. Along with these engineering releases, we are proud to...( read more ) Read More...