JohnBs personal blog

Under IIS6 you’ll have a worker process for each application pool defined on your server, ie multiple w3wp.exe listed in task manager. If you’re running each pool as a different identity then it’s pretty easy to identify which worker process belongs to which application pool via the username column, if not - drop into DOS and go to the Windows system32 folder and enter:


cscript iisapp.vbs


And you’ll get an output screen showing you the processID and the application pool that spawned that worker process.

A useful link (mainly for reminding myself) is http://www.kbalertz.com/allKbs.aspx where you can view MS Knowledgebase articles via RSS for most of the product range - as well as signing up for alerts by email when new articles are added.

Last week at their Developers conference Microsoft released a beta version of the Developers toolbar for IE, you can download it from here.

Its feature set seems less than that of the equivalent Firefox extension but nevertheless it’s a darn useful tool for checking stuff crossbrowser.

Microsoft have at last released Beta 1 of the long awaited IE7 to MSDN subscribers. Naturally I was keen to see whats gone on in the product. First obvious sign is that you could be mistaken that you were in Firefox and not Internet Explorer - welcome tab browsing to IE (activated with same key press as Firefox, CTRL + T), the top right corner has the familiar search box as per Firefox. Hitting a site with an RSS feed a button lights up in the menu bar showing the available feeds - no livemarks like in Firefox though. Clicking on a feed no longer shows the raw XML rather an XSLT’ed prettified version of it (if it’s well formatted!). As for CSS changes, there’s nothing obvious - it still fails the Acid 2 test. All our sites look just the same as they did in IE6, perhaps we’re missing something here - but it is only Beta 1 after all but you’d kinda expect CSS to appear being as it’s quite major to us web folk. Alpha transparency has made it into this release though - at least that’s one thing!

Those of you that have played with Windows 2003 load balancing will already know it’s pretty good at doing what it says on the tin ‘Load Balancing’. It’s super simple to setup two boxes in a web farm and then load balance port(s) between the two nodes for no additional cost other than server hardware and OS. Having just graduated to dealing with large(ish) scale ColdFusion Enterprise environments there’s a couple of gotcha’s I’ve stumbled across and thought I’d share them with you. These ideas also apply to single server installs of CF too minus the load balancing stuff of course.

I’ve just noticed MS have posted another Beta 1 of their antispyware tool, available here.

Mind you, i’m not totally relying on the MS tool, I just ran a Search and Destroy search and that found spyware on my computer!!

But, as always - there’s a catch!

If you’ve bought a new PC and it’s come with a pirated copy of Windows XP, Microsof will replace it with a legitimate copy free of charge. Needless to say there are a bunch of requirements that must be met, receipts and statements sent in etc etc

Read more on the Microsoft website, here

Check this patent application out.

enough said! Thanks to Techdirt.com for highlighting this one here!

A little premature as it’s not releasing until Q1 2005 but the latest SQL Server offering from MS looks like it will have some real gems in it and offers some signicant reasons for upgrading.

The whole licensing surrounding MSDE (the developers edition) and whether it can be used as production Db server for small scale web sites, limited connection count and poor management has been replaced by SQL Server 2005 Express, which will come with proper user config tools and only minor restrictions; single processor only, 1GB RAM restricted and a single Db restriction of 4Gb is now licensed by MS for running on a live webserver- putting it directly up against MySQL.

The full version of SQL 2005 has some new fault tolerant features which enterprises will take interest in. You can now ‘mirror’ databases to a second well connected (LAN, ADSL etc) SQL 2005 server. One server will be defined as a live server which would pass executed transactions to the other SQL servers - much more efficient than traditional replication methods and doesn’t require expensive hardware. A third server can be introduced as a ‘witness’ server to resolve conflicts as and when they occur.

Something else which I like the sound of is the ability to turn a stored procedure into a webservice - enterprises will like this as it will allow them to move the responsbility of the webservice to the Db admin away from the web developer.

You can read more about SQL 2005 here as well as download a prerelease version of the product.

No don’t worry, Microsoft haven’t suddently ‘released to manufacture’ Longhorn - I’ve recently been spending time researching and playing with Longhorn and the new UI layer, codenamed Avalon. I came across some great ‘new’ meanings for RTM that tickled my fancy that i thought I’d share

• Rumoured to media
• Reluctant to materialize
• Really there, mostly
• Ready tomorrow, maybe
• Released this millenium
• Release the monkeys
• Reinvent the milestones

- my favourite and the entry that one the competition!