Microsoft provides a free download called  The IIS 6.0 Resource Kit Tools. In all there are 13 tools;

• Apache to IIS 6.0 Migration Tool version 1.0
• CustomAuth version 1.0
• IISCertDeploy.vbs version 1.0
• IIS Host Helper Service version 1.0
• IISState version 3.0
• Log Parser version 2.1
• Metabase Explorer version 1.6
• Permissions Verifier version 1.0
• RemapUrl version 1.0
• SelfSSL version 1.0
• TinyGet version 5.2
• Web Capacity Analysis Tool version 5.2
• WFetch version 1.3

Lately I've been using TinyGet to hit my asp.net sites. This ensures that the pages are parsed and compiled into memory and remain there. Users do not experience the long browser waits while the asp.net runtime compiles the pages for the first time. In order for this to work you need to run TinyGet more frequently than the Idle timeout set in the Application Pool. By default the worker process is shutdown every 20 minutes. Running TinyGet, hitting the site, every 15 minutes, will guarantee that the asp.net application remains in memory. Package the call to TinyGet into a bat file and use the Scheduled Tasks to run it periodically.

A better way would be to pre-compile the site and deploy the compiled version. For small sites, I prefer deploying the source, this way I can do incremental updates to my site, that is, deploy only the changed files. 

Guess the movie

Well hello Mister Fancypants. Well, I've got news for you pal, you ain't leadin' but two things: Jack and shit... and Jack just left town.

I'm a bit of a do-it-yourself-er. I've wired up complete basements. Installed kitchen sinks, plumbing and all. Sometimes I have the correct tools, other times not. When I don't have the correct tools I sometimes improvise using tools that were not necessarily designed for the work at hand. Almost invariably it ends up taking more time than if I went out and purchased the tool or even worse the job gets completed on time but is of poor quality.

The same can be said of programming, the right tool for the job at hand is invaluable. Take for example LINQPad. This SQL Management Console like tool but for LINQ allows you to construct LINQ queries and run them directly in the LINQPad IDE. I've tried simple LINQ queries and it works great! Thanks Joseph Albahari, another tool to add to our Toolbox.

Guess the movie

I killed two people. One was... yesterday? He was just a boy and I led him into quicksand. The other was... well, before Aqaba. I had to execute him with my pistol, and there was something about it that I didn't like... I enjoyed it.