Thursday, July 30, 2009

ASP.NET application "wakeup" program

SharePoint, Exchange Outlook Web Access, and other Web applications based on ASP.NET are sometimes painfully slow and first use each day. This is because after so many hours of not being used, Internet Information Server (IIS) flushes the application from its cache. The delay you experience is IIS rebuilding the application in cache.

The Codeplex project SPWakeUp can be used with any ASP.NET application. Simply configure it with the URL of the application and a schedule it to run every few hours. This will "touch" the site and either load it in to cache or tell IIS to keep it in cache.

This can also be used with my company's Directory Update and Directory Manager applications.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Thank you for your service...

The other day at lunch, I was sitting the food court in a local mall with a few of my military friends (Air Force and Navy.) They were in uniform. A middle aged lady walked up to the table and in all sincerity told them each "Thank you for your service."

For a few moments after she left, even my friend who is never at a loss for words was a bit speechless. I don't think they would have been any happier than if she had even given them each a $20 bill. It was a very nice gesture on her part and was very well received. I would hope that more people would do this.

So, to the hundreds of thousands of men and women in U.S.A. voluntary military serivce, I also say "Thank you for your service."

Saturday, July 18, 2009

MyWinConnections magazine published

The new MyWinConnections magazine has now been published on the DevConnections web site. This includes several articles including one by yours truly. Jeffery Hicks article on Getting the Most Out Of PowerShell's Custom Properties was really informative as was Dan Holme's article on who last used a computer, and Juergen Hasslauer's explanation of Lost Log Resiliency. I put Dan's article to use immediately at work, by the way. Thanks Dan!

Exchange Server 2007 "Advanced Administration"

I have had a number of people ask me about the Exchange Server 2007 Advanced Administration book? This is the book that would have formely been known as Exchange Server 2007 24seven. I talked with the publisher about doing this book about a year ago, but given the low adoption rate of E2K7 at that time and the proximity to the release of Exchange Server 2010, it was decided that a better use of my time would be to put out a 2nd edition of the Mastering Exchange Server 2007 book.




With Exchange Server 2010 in beta now for several months and the adopotion rate of Exchagne Server 2007 being fairly low, there will not be an Exchange Server 2007 Advanced Administration book.

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Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Exchange Server 2010 favorite feature

At this point, while I really like the idea of database availability groups (DAGs) and other cool features of Exchange Server 2010, I think I like the best the New-MailMessage cmdlet. This allows you to easily send an e-mail message from an Exchange Management Shell cmdlet.


NAME
New-MailMessage

SYNOPSIS
The New-MailMessage cmdlet creates a new e-mail message for the specified user mailbox placing the e-mai
l message in the Drafts folder of the user's mailbox.


SYNTAX
New-MailMessage [-Body ] -Mailbox [-BodyFormat]
[- Confirm []] [-DomainController ] [-Subject ] [-WhatIf [] ] []


DESCRIPTION
If the cmdlet is run without specifying the subject or body parameters, an empty e-mail message is placed in the user's Drafts folder.
You need to be assigned permissions before you can run this cmdlet. Although all parameters for this cmdlet are listed in this topic, you may not have access to some parameters if they're not included in the
permissions assigned to you. To see what permissions you need, see the "User reporting" entry in the Client Access Permissions topic.