After installing Insider Build 14342 I ran into some major issues with IIS crashing hard and resulting in stopped Application Pools. After some tracking it turns out this is due to application pool bitness which causes 32 bit Application Pools to crash for me.

Windows Updates often hose Software Activations and Licenses for various commercial software packages. It's a pain in the ass and it's time to let those vendors that use the outdated practice of counting activations based on Windows OS criteria is no longer viable.

ASP.NET Core provides built-in support for using strongly typed classes to represent configuration information. The configuration system provides a flexible mechanism for using different configuration storage providers and mapping those providers to your strongly typed objects. In this post I show how to set up strongly typed resources and use them in your ASP.NET Web applications.

Although Westwind.Globalization is primarily aimed at Web applications, you can also use it to edit arbitrary RESX files using the Localization Administration interface that comes with the library. In this post I show how you can import RESX resources, then use the editor to manipulate RESX resources interactively, and then export the resources back out, using a local Web application on your machine.

If you're building document centric applications, Singleton style EXE applications are pretty common. Rather than creating new windows for each opened file, a more common scenario is to open new tabs in a single instance. In this post I'll describe how to create a WPF application that allows only a single instance to run and passes command line arguments passed in secondary instances to the primary instance and I'll describe some pitfalls that you might have to watch out for.

The pressure is on: HTTPS is pushed front and center more and more as we see the browser vendors and API tools providers, making SSL encryption no longer an optional part for many things that you build on the Web. SSL and HTTPS are becoming a requirement and for good reasons. I personally ran into this with the Google Maps API in one of my applications that now requires an HTTPS based client page in order to use this API. In this post I discuss some of the issues and why this is actually a good thing, and some of the steps I took to move my existing site to HTTPS.