Aug. 12, 2011
You can have the Session but you have to know the secret knock
Was very perplexed by this issue, context was fine, but context.Session was null, until finding this StackOverflow post.
One better though if you don't need to write context.Session is to implement: System.Web.SessionState.IReadOnlySessionState instead, which is probably somehow cheaper.
June 2, 2011
At least they support options
"... will offer a choice of database services, including MySQL and the NoSQL system MongoDB. It also will offer MongoDB and Redis open source systems..." from Information Week's print article "VMWare Platform Takes It Deeper Into Cloud."
At least they have fixed it in the online version, though it's published under a different title. It's always funny to me that they can be so wrong technically while being so wrong editorially as well.
March 18, 2011
Troubleshooting slow ASP pages
Since I've always wondered about this and never bothered to figure it out before....
In IIS 6 logs, the timetaken value represents the entire time that IIS was touching the request. This at the very least includes time after IIS got the request, but is waiting to hand it off to ASP/ASP.Net for processing. It may also include time spend sending the bytes back to the client, but I don't have big enough data or slow enough networks to really answer that question well.
This does make a certain amount of sense. It's an web server log, not a web framework log, but it makes trying to troubleshoot "slow" pages really, really hard. We can't run multiple workers because it breaks classic ASP Session. So everything just queues up every time there's a long running request. So given a page with a large timetaken in the log, did that page really run for a long time? Or was it sitting on a queue waiting on another page that was running slowly? Sure the first page in order that was slow is prob. the root cause of all the following slowness, but how does one determine that root page?
What would be ideal would be separate timequeued, timeprocessing, timenetwork type columns... maybe those exist in IIS 7.... of course that would require getting our classic ASP certified for Windows 2008.
March 15, 2011
Dear Information Week please just let me go
Since cancelling my free subscription Information Week can no longer afford to fact check... oh wait, they never did that before either. Their latest flub that jumped off the page at me "...Java's JSON-based..." wait, what? Java's JSON? Pretty sure that's not the case and a 2 second Google confirms, "JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format..." wow, that was hard. Of course it's not the first time, and I'm sure it won't be the last.
I've ignored the renewal emails, for months, but the quality of reporting is so low, it doesn't really shock me that they can't manage to end my subscription either. I guess correctness doesn't matter nearly as much as number of eyes on the page when you're pitching to management types.
And just to get out ahead of Information Week's next mis-statement, "The final choice of name caused confusion, giving the impression that the language was a spin-off of the Java programming language." So, no, Information Week JavaScript has nothing to do with Java. Let me know when I can expect my Researcher check in the mail.
