Question: What are Machinekeys? On what particular keys IIS 7.x is dependent upon?

Ans: IIS uses MachineKeys for encrypting data like passwords, App Pool identities which are stored in configs(applicationhost.config and web.config)

By default, IIS 7 includes two main providers for securing properties located in applicationhost.config [More]

As we all know that only TRUTH that will never change is CHANGE itself. Even a butterfly and a baby eventually leave the warmth of the safest, most comfortable and the only nurturing places they know, the cocoon and the womb respectively. Such is the circle of life where Change is the only constant. [More]

Today while helping my colleague AnilKP to debug a memory leak issue for w3wp.exe. It was the perfect example to demonstrate scenario where memory leaks were self induced. Here is the complete saga

End customer complained that they had noticed worker process(w3wp.exe) hogs lots of memory. They have notices 1.2 GB process size in the task manager.

Time to look into the dumps in windbg

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The Dynamic IP Restrictions Extension for IIS provides IT Professionals and Hosters a configurable module that helps mitigate or block Denial of Service Attacks or cracking of passwords through brute-force by temporarily blocking Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of HTTP clients who follow a pattern that could be conducive to one of such attacks. This module can be configured such that the analysis and blocking could be done at the Web Server or the Web Site level. [More]

Application Initialization 1.0 for IIS 7.5 enables website administrators to configure IIS to proactively perform initialization tasks for one or more web applications. [More]

On IIS 6 you can disable CRL check by running following command

C:\Inetpub\Adminscript\cscript.exe adsutil.vbs Set W3SVC\CertCheckMode 1 but on IIS 7 we don't have metabase.xml. Now this key has been moved to Registry [More]

In the changing .Net world it's difficult to keep track of version corresponding to framework.

Following chart would help you to keep upto date:

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One of the most common error message on IIS 7 is 500.19.

For your easy reference I’m adding scenarios and resolutions from KB 942055
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Rick Anderson posted step by step tutorial series on MVC covering

And Plural Sigh video library links to MVC [More]

Recently my colleague Ravi cleared the PMP exam. Here is the secret for clearing the exam in his own words

“I cleared the PMP exam after several sleepless nights. I am sharing my experience and I hope it will help you prepare for the PMP exam.

You may call me obsessed with PMI approach to manage the projects; but I treated my PMP exam as a real “Project” and followed the same approach to plan and execute to achieve the PMP certification. Here are the details:

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