A week ago I started to learn about HttpModules and HttpHandlers watching a pluralsight course by Robert Boedigheimer . First of all I want to really recommend this course, I learned a lot of stuff which I could not find in any other course, book or blog post. As I already did in the past with another course , I want to add some comments and extend the HttpModule part. I refer to the course example with the serverMaskModuleGAC. I walked into some trap doors and thereby I found another approach to simplify the installation process of the module to GAC a little bit. With this approach I am able to verify my custom config sections and module registration is correct. Here is my approach: 1. When you have finished your implementation for serverMaskModule, install it in the GAC as usual by using the gacutil tool. By the way, there are some traps when you need to install it on Windows Server 2012 . Here I am using Windows 8.1 64 Bit. I created my HttpModule with .NET 2.0 because it se...

Currently I am collecting interesting links about it . Is there a better solution?

In Part one I have already described how to remove phantom apps here on more supplement. These phantom apps could also remain in the AppFabric Monitoring db: Just delete no longer needed entries in this table. Duplicate collection entry When you receive this kind of issue, like "[...] Cannot add duplicate collection entry [...]" you have defined the a configuration section twice in two different Web.config files in different places in your file system. Clear One easy solution is to use a clear statement . Searching for the inherited element There is a post in Microsoft's documentation which is explaining how to do it. Visual Studio in debug mode When you are working with Visual Studio in debug mode, which means you are just pressing F5 to run it on your local IIS instead of publishing it to a web server, you should keep in mind that e.g. your obj folder might contain more copies of your Web.config file. This could lead into this duplicate collectio...

While you are working with IIS installing and uninstalling web applications you might run into this issue on AppFabric Dashboard: Another example is this error message: There are two steps necessary to get a cleaned AppFabric Dashboard. Delete old virtual paths Old virtual paths might remain in %windir%\system32\inetsrv\config\ApplicationHost.config. To get rid of these crappy virtual paths switch to command line tool and use the following script: C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv>appcmd.exe list vdir VDIR "Default Web Site/" (physicalPath:%SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot) VDIR "Default Web Site/Service/App1/" (physicalPath:C:\Service\App1) VDIR "Default Web Site/Service/App2" (physicalPath:C:\Service\App2) VDIR "Team Foundation Server/" (physicalPath:C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 12.0\Tools\Templates) VDIR "Team Foundation Server/tfs/" (physicalPath:C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Serve...

To get started with ETW I highly recommend this pluralsight course by Kathleen Dollard. It gives you a really good introduction, including background and some examples. It will be much harder to succeed just by googling or reading books. I will not spoil anything from this course. Here I will just give a few more hints and annotations to show where I struggled with ETW, to help you not doing the same mistakes. After finishing the pluralsight course I was really eager to get going with my own implementation but I ran into some annoying trapped doors. Nuget package for EventSource The current nuget package for EventSource (Vers. 1.0.16) will create the manifest file automatically (it validates your implementation upfront, only when validation succeeds manifest file will be created. Otherwise there will be no updated or no new manifest file in your bin folder!). Therefore there is no need to create it by hand. wevtutil.exe Running wevtutil.exe without parameters to see its help,...

In my opinion it is really hard to get started with Windows Server AppFabric. There is good material, but it is shuffled around in different sources. A good intro can you find here: this all-in-one intro by Scott Hanslmann  this caching intro by Wade Wegener  Additional helpful resources are Microsoft's Introduction Part 1 and Microsoft's Introduction Part 2 by Jon Flanders  Pluralsight's Hosting Fundamentals   Pluralsight's Caching Introduction   Microsoft's Caching Documentation   Good books are Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook   and Pro Windows Server: AppFabric Please also watch out for software updates, currently there is CU 4 . To keep yourself updated subscribe to Distributed Services News Feed . Updated my list on 11.03.2014 with one more Download the Windows Server AppFabric Samples

Windows Server AppFabric is a great enhancement for IIS and its caching capabilities are great for .NET applications. But currently there is a very annoying bug regarding its monitoring UI, so called “Dashboard”. Especially for me as a non WF guy (I am actually just working with WCF) it was really hard to figure it out. Hence, many thanks to Gianluca from Distributed Services at Microsoft! Windows Server AppFabric Dashboard does not work on Windows Server 2012 / Windows 8. You will receive this error message "Unable to cast object of type 'System.Management.Automation.PSCustomObject' to type 'Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Management.Data.GroupByInfo'." This error will cause that you cannot see any request statistics neither WF nor for WCF: The reason is, I quote Microsoft here: "[...] the root cause is a powershell script embedded in AF code that returns different results when ran on Windows 2012. This script is about statistics for Idle & per...