One of the most infuriating things about IIS configuration in general is how the Request length is configured in the IIS and ASP.NET. There are several places that control how much content you can send to the server and over the years this setting has changed in a number of ways. The places where it's configured is not super obvious and they can be fluid because some of these features are...

If you're using ASP.NET MVC to build API endpoints in your application you might have run into a problem where the PUT and DELETE HTTP operations don't work - you get a 404 instead. Turns out that the IIS default configuration doesn't include the verbs for a required handler. Here's what the problem is, and how to fix it if it hits you.

Ran into a nasty problem with Cookies not getting sent in HttpHandler code when using Response.AppendHandler() with the Set-Cookie key. It turns out it's a very narrow edge case, but one that can bite in unexpected system level applications.

Physical directories that map paths that are also mapped by ASP.NET MVC routes can cause some consternation, especially if you're not aware that there's pathing overlap between the two. This post is a story about an operator error episode of an accidental file move that took a while to trace down due physical path interference.

If you're running the full version of IIS and you try to debug your Web application's startup code in Application_Start you might have found that you can't debug this code as the debugger doesn't break there. Here's why and some easy ways you can work around this limitation.

GZip and Deflate compression is easy to use in ASP.NET applications, but there are a few caveats that you need to watch out for. This post reviews the basics of implementing compression in ASP.NET code and describes a couple of scenarios that can cause problems when using programmatic compression via Response.Filter.

Ran into a nasty problem today with IIS not starting up and the culprit turned out to be: Skype. Here's what the deal is.

Microsoft recently released a preview of WebMatrix a tool geared towards hobby/non-developer types to build Web applications. This all in one environment is supposed to simplify Web development with having to be an expert. In this post I review some of the interesting features and how they stack up.

I ran into some problems this time around renewing my SSL certificate for west-wind.com and it looks like the problem is related to how IIS 7 handles renewals. After all the years of problems with certificate renewals in IIS I figured that by now Microsoft would have this nailed, but in the end only a completely new certificate request managed to work for me.

Moving between IIS 5/6 and IIS 7 often causes some web.config conflict between the system.web and system.webserver handler and module sections. IIS 7 expects its handlers and modules defined only in its configuration section - if you still have handlers in system.web a configuration error occurs. Here's a useful switch that lets you turn off validation of system.web handlers and modules so you can ship web.config files that contain both.