I was running out of disk space in C: and was unable to install a small software that I needed, so I decided to clean up a bit. For that I like using WinDirStat http://windirstat.info/ which very quickly allows you to find where the big files/folders are. In this case I found that my c:\Windows\winsxs folder was over 12 GB of size. One way to reclaim some of that disk space is to cleanup all files that have been backed up when a Service Pack has been installed. To do that in Windows 7 you can run the following DISM command:
dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded /hidesp
That freed up 4 GB in my machine and now I can move on.
Disclaimer: I only ran this in my Windows 7 machine and it worked great, have not tried it in Server SKUs so run at your own risk.
Wow, just realized that in the last 6 months I’ve only had a chance to post 2 items and I think it is about time to start this going again.
So why this much silence? Well, About 8 months ago a couple of big changes happened at my division as described in this link. As part of that transition my responsibilities changed and I transitioned from being the Development Manager for the Web Platform (IIS, WebMatrix, WebDeploy, etc…) to take a new role and start a new team that we called Azure UX team. Our team is in charge of reimagining the Windows Azure User Experience and we stated on a mission to really make it even better. As part of that we’ve been super busy delivering a set of projects, some of which we released in December such as our brand new Windows Azure web site at
By default in Windows Server 2008 when you are using the Web Management Service (WMSVC) and Web Deploy (also known as MSDeploy) it will use Basic authentication to perform your deployments. If you want to enable Windows Authentication you will need to set a registry key so that the Web Management Service also supports using NTLM. To do this, update the registry on the server by adding a DWORD key named "WindowsAuthenticationEnabled" under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WebManagement\Server, and set it to 1. If the Web Management Service is already started, the setting will take effect after the service is restarted.
For more details on other configuration options see:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd722796(WS.10).aspx
This is the third post on the series:
1: Moving a SitemapPath Control to ASP.NET Web Pages
2: Use URL Rewrite to maintain your Page rankings (SEO)
ASP.NET has a nice feature to help for deployment processes where you can drop an HTML file named app_offline.htm and it will unload all assemblies and code that it has loaded letting you easily delete binaries and deploy the new version while still serving back to customers the friendly message that you provide telling them that your site is under maintenance.
This is the second note of the series:
My current Web Site was built using ASP.NET 2.0 and WebForms, that means that all of my pages have the extension .aspx. While moving each page to use ASP.NET Web Pages their extension is being changed to .cshtml, and while I’m sure I could configure it in a way to get them to keep their aspx extensions it is a good opportunity to “start clean”. Furthermore, in ASP.NET WebPages you can also access them without the extension at all, so if you have /my-page.cshtml, you can also get to it using just /my-page. Given I will go through this migration I decided to use the clean URL format (no extension) and in the process get better URLs for SEO purposes, for example, today one of the URLs look like
After many years I decided that it is time to rewrite my Web site using Razor. A bit of history, I started it around 2003 using ASP.NET 1.1. When .NET 2.0 came around in 2005 I migrated to it and it was great being able to leverage features like MasterPages, Themes, Sitemaps, and many other features. Honestly it is a pretty simple Web site, with mostly content, so very few controls, Sitemap, my own custom Menu control, and a couple more. Last week it was moved to use .NET 4.0 and it feels its about time to go back and update it a bit, both in look and features. So this (if time permits) will be the first of a series of migration notes that I discover as I move it to use ASP.NET Razor (aka WebPages). Do note that this is not meant to be a best practice in anyway, I would never claim I can make such a thing, these will be only my personal notes as I discover more details in ASP.NET WebPages features and as I move my own implementation to use them.
Today there was a question in StackOverflow asking whether it was possible to read the IIS binding information such as Port and Protocols from the ASP.NET application itself to try to handle redirects from HTTP to HTTPS in a way that was reliable without worrying about using different ports than 80/443.
Turns out this is possible in the context of the IIS worker process by using Microsoft.Web.Administration.
The following function will take care of that by reading the Worker Process isolated configuration file and find the HTTP based bindings.
Today somebody asked a question about how to manage some ASP.NET configuration settings such as changing the trust level of the application and adding a few application settings and changing compilation settings to debug. I thought it would be trivial to search the web for an article or something that would show the features we added in IIS 7.0 to manage those, but to my surprise I was not able to find anything that would clearly show it, so I decided to write this pretty quickly for anyone that is not aware.
The SEO Toolkit includes a set of features (like Robots Editor and Sitemap Editor) that only work when you are working with a local copy of your Web Site. The reason behind it is that we have to understand where we need to save the files that we need to generate (like Robots.txt and Sitemap XML files) without having to ask for physical paths as well as to verify that the functionality is added correctly such as only allowing Robots.txt in the root of a site, etc. Unfortunately this means that if you have a remote server that you cannot have a running local copy then you cannot use those features. (Note that you can still use Site Analysis tool since that will crawl your Web Site regardless of platform or framework and will store the report locally just fine.)
In my spare time I’ve been thinking about new ideas for the SEO Toolkit, and it occurred to me that rather than continuing trying to figure out more reports and better diagnostics against some random fake sites, that it could be interesting to ask openly for anyone that is wanting a free SEO analysis report of your site and test drive some of it against real sites.
One thing that I’ve been asked several times about the SEO Toolkit is if it does a full standards validation on the markup and content that is processed, and if not, to add support for more comprehensive standards validation, in particular XHTML and HTML 4.01. Currently the markup validation performed by the SEO Toolkit is really simple, its main goal is to make sure that the markup is correctly organized, for example that things like <b><i>Test</b></i> are not found in the markup, the primary reason is to make sure that basic blocks of markup are generally "easy" to parse by Search Engines and that the semantics will not be terribly broken if a link, text or style is not correctly closed (since all of them would affect SEO).
So the first thing I would say is that we have heard the feedback and are looking at what we could possibly add in future versions, however why wait, right?
One thing that many people do not realize is that the
A couple of months ago I blogged about the release of the v1.0.1 of the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. In March we released the localized versions of the SEO Toolkit so now it is available in 10 languages: English, Japanese, French, Russian, Korean, German, Spanish, Chinese Simplified, Italian and Chinese Traditional.
Here are all the direct links to download it.
Today there was a question in the IIS.net Forums asking how to expose two different Internet sites from another site making them look like if they were subdirectories in the main site.
So for example the goal was to have a site: www.site.com expose a www.site.com/company1 and a www.site.com/company2 and have the content from “www.company1.com” served for the first one and “www.company2.com” served in the second one. Furthermore we would like to have the responses cached in the server for performance reasons. The following image shows a simple diagram of this:
A few weeks ago my team released the version 2.0 of the URL Rewrite for IIS. URL Rewrite is probably the most powerful Rewrite engine for Web Applications. It gives you many features including Inbound Rewriting (ie. Rewrite the URL, Redirect to another URL, Abort Requests, use of Maps, and more), and in Version 2.0 it also includes Outbound Rewriting so that you can rewrite URLs or any markup as the content is being sent back even if its generated using PHP, ASP.NET or any other technology.
It also includes a very powerful User Interface that allows you to test your regular expressions and even better it includes a set of templates for common types of Rules. Some of those rules are incredibly valuable for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes. The SEO rules are:
The other day I was asked if I knew about a tool that would allow users to easily analyze the IIS Log Files, to process and look for specific data that could easily be automated. My recommendation was that if they were comfortable with using a SQL-like language that they should use Log Parser. Log Parser is a very powerful tool that provides a generic SQL-like language on top of many types of data like IIS Logs, Event Viewer entries, XML files, CSV files, File System and others; and it allows you to export the result of the queries to many output formats such as CSV (Comma-Separated Values, etc), XML, SQL Server, Charts and others; and it works well with IIS 5, 6, 7 and 7.5.
Are you an developer/owner/publisher/etc of a site that uses HTTPS (SSL) for secure access? If you are, please continue to read.
Have you ever visited a Web site that is secured using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) just to get an ugly Security Warning message like:
Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely?
This webpage contains content that will not be delivered using a secure HTTPS connection, which could compromise the security of the entire webpage.
Last week we released a refresh for the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit v1.0. This version is a minor update that includes fixes for all the important bugs reported in the IIS.NET SEO Forum.
Some of the fixes included in this version are:
In this blog we are going to write an example on how to extend the SEO Toolkit functionality, so for that we are going to pretend our company has a large Web site that includes several images, and now we are interested in making sure all of them comply to a certain standard, lets say all of them should be smaller than 1024x768 pixels and that the quality of the images is no less than 16 bits per pixel. Additionally we would also like to be able to make custom queries that can later allow us to further analyze the contents of the images and filter based on directories and more.
For this we will extend the SEO Toolkit crawling process to perform the additional processing for images, we will be adding the following new capabilities:
The IIS SEO Toolkit includes a lot of functionality built-in such as built-in violation rules, processing of different content types (like HTML, CSS, RSS, etc) and more, however it might not do all the things that you would need it to do, for example, it might not process a set of documents that you use, or it might not gather all the information that you are interested in while processing a document. The good news is that it includes enough extensibility to let you build on top of its rich capabilities and provide additional ones easily using .NET.
There are three main extensibility points in this first release, including:
Two weeks ago I presented at DevConnections the talk "AMS10: Developing and Deploying for the Windows Web App Gallery", here are the slides.
Download the Web Application Gallery Talk slides here.
A few final links:
Microsoft Web Platform: http://www.microsoft.com/web/
Download Web PI: http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx
Submit your Applications at: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/developer.aspx
In the new version of the IIS SEO Toolkit we added two new reports that are very interesting, both from an SEO perspective as well as from user experience and site organization. These reports are located in the Links category of the reports
This report shows a summary of all the redirects that were found while crawling the Web site. The first column (Linking-URL) is the URL that was visited that resulted in redirection to the Linked-URL (second column). The third column (Linking-Status code) specifies what type of redirection happened based on the HTTP status code enumeration. The most common values will be MovedPermanently/Moved which is a 301, or Found/Redirect which is a 302. The last column shows the status code for the final URL so you can easily identify redirects that failed or that redirected to another redirect.
One question that I've been asked several times is: "Is it possible to schedule the IIS SEO Toolkit to run automatically every night?". Other related questions are: "Can I automate the SEO Toolkit so that as part of my build process I'm able to catch regressions on my application?", or "Can I run it automatically after every check-in to my source control system to ensure no links are broken?", etc.
The good news is that the answer is YES!. The bad news is that you have to write a bit of code to be able to make it work. Basically the SEO Toolkit includes a Managed code API to be able to start the analysis just like the User Interface does, and you can call it from any application you want using Managed Code.
Today we are announcing the final release of the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit v1.0. This version builds upon the Beta 1 and Beta 2 versions and is 100% compatible with those versions so any report you currently have continues to work in the new version. The new version includes a set of bug fixes and new features such as:
Yesterday I presented the session "AMS04: Boost Your Site’s Search Ranking with the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit" at the ASP.NET Connections, it was fun to talk to a few attendees that had several questions around the tool and SEO in general. It is always really interesting learning about all the unique environments and types of applications that are being built and how the SEO Toolkit can help them.
Here are the IIS SEO Toolkit slides that I used.
Here you can find the IIS SEO Toolkit download.
And by far the easiest way to get it installed is using the
One of my favorites features in the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit is what we called Report Comparison. Report Comparison basically allows you to compare two different versions of the results of crawling the same site to see what changed in between. This is a really convenient way to track not only changes in terms of SEO violations but also to be able to compare any attributes on the pages such as Title, Heading, Description, Links, Violations, etc.
There are a couple of ways to get to this feature.
1) Use the Compare Reports task. While in the Site Analysis Reports listing you can select two reports by using Ctrl+Click, and if both reports are compatible (e.g. they use the same Start URL) the task "Compare Reports" will be shown. Just clicking on that will get you the comparison.
