Over the years I have had the luck to work alongside many really smart, switched on people in the development community. I’ve learnt from them many intermediate and experienced programming skills. Generally when it comes understanding the very basis of how the internet functions using DNS, most of these very same experienced developers haven’t got a clue. I wrote this post to hopefully help pay back some of the awesome karma they  have earned helping me over the years, by teaching them something in return. Lets learn about DNS.

These days IIS has so many bells and whistles installed that it can be hard to find the settings panel that does what you want it to do (or if you’re an IIS 5/6 guy like me you may just get lost in general some times). The one thing that is lacking as a feature in IIS is log file recycling. If you manage an IIS installation of any decent size, you’ll know first hand how quickly log files can fill up a server’s hard disk, and bring it to its knees if not managed properly – how do i take care of this?

By default Windows 2008 only allows a user one single session over RDP. While in some instances this can be quite handy, if like me, you have multiple developers working on a single server, your frustration from being randomly logged out by a colleague can come to the boil. Quick and easy solution.

A very quick one for today – There are times when you need to run alternative services on port 80 other than IIS. In instances like this it would seem logical that it simply requires two separate IP addresses and you’re done. IIS thinks your plans are shit, and says in it’s best Soup Nazi voice “No port 80 for you!”.

Over the last few days I've had the pleasure (2… 3… noot) of installing Blackberry Enterprise Server on our new (6 months old) Exchange 2010 setup at work. Setting up the permissions using the Exchange Command Shell lead me to a problem that drove me absolutely insane. When applying Send-As permissions using the exchange command shell commands that RIM themselves have in their documentation, i hit a brick wall.

Team Foundation Server has some notoriety when it comes to administering security. When it comes to giving a client or remote user access to enter work items and bugs only, wading through the quagmire of MSDN can make it seem impossible. I’ll show you a quick direct path to giving a client remote access.

NTLM Authentication for websites is a great addition to the bat-belt when writing ASP.Net sites. Additionally it is also a great to have support for it in Team Foundation & SharePoint portals. However as great as having support for NTLM authentication may be, having to enter & re-enter your credentials when surfing Intranet or Extranet sites can be an annoyance that is just not worth it.

ASP.Net web applications are awesome most of the time. But there is a sad reality: ASP.Net applications are tuned to handle huge amounts of traffic, not 50 page views a day. This becomes an issue when you have limited traffic to your site, because if your it doesn’t keep being viewed, your application pool may recycle, and that important visitor number 1 gets screwed waiting as your site rebuilds or your app pool to fires up. Whether it’s a SharePoint site, an ASP.Net or your internal TFS 2008/TFS 2010 Server, you want it to be FAST… all the time.

Microsoft’s Hyper V has really shaken the virtual machine industry up with it’s free virtualisation technology. The Hyper V/Virtual Server/Virtual PC product line is many things to many people, but as it is a growing technology, there are some things that the product can not do: Downsizing a VHD is one of those things – But there is an easy solution.

Another quick fix post for the day: In Windows 2008 R2 running IIS 7.5 an odd issue occurs when trying to view a PDF in Adobe Acrobat’s browser add-on. There appears to be a bug in Acrobat’s adherence to the RFC conventions, stopping your users from viewing PDFs in their browsers, and both sides’ responses are vague as hell. I’ll help you wade through the crap and get a working solution.

While recently setting up a new Exchange 2010 box is came across an issue where some users that had active synch enabled for their user account still couldn’t synch using their iPhones or Blackberries.

After my recent service roll-up for Exchange 2010 users who were homed on one of my servers where unable to set their out-of-office replies on. After some quick troubleshooting it would appear that the service roll-up had reset some of the permissions on some of my Exchange IIS virtual directories.

Under certain conditions there are times when you have a machine in your domain that you don’t want to update its DNS A records. These are usually edge cases however the need is still there. I needed to do this recently, so as they say on Law and Order in a robotic Stephen Hawking voice - “These are their stories”