Before going on holidays last week I decided to put a Longhorn Beta 3 box live on the Internet. It doesn't run a lot of things just yet (except for trials of the all-new FTP server), but today I decided to take the plunge and try FastCGI (see Using FastCGI to host PHP applications on IIS7).

An application I wanted to test-drive for a long time is WebSVN. The UI looks like this:

It is PHP-based, needs Cygwin-based tools, and is quite useful for browsing Subversion repositories. After downloading the latest code from the WebSVN repository, I was able to get up and running in about half an hour (that includes failing with WebSVN RC4, installing Cygwin, etc). You can check it out at http://iis7.chrison.net/websvn/index.php

I'll add more applications to this box over the coming days and weeks, to see what works and what doesn't for the mix of technologies I am using.

Oh, and it seems that I am the first European site registered at IIS7 On Tour:

Bill Staples put together a post on what's new in IIS7 Beta 3. He also talks about the all-new IIS7 FTP server (which I knew about for a long time - I had hoped Beta 3 would be available for my MSDN Briefing in Vienna last month, but no such luck). Also, he mentions the GoLive! license for IIS7.

In The Virtues of Monoculture James makes an excellent point: "We celebrate the diversity of choices available to solve a problem and call it freedom. IT managers and CIOs look at it and call it chaos, confusion and uncertainty." Touché.

Via the article WiDS Checker: Combating Bugs in Distributed Systems I found out about WiDS: An Integrated Tool Kit for Distributed-System Development which has been available for quite some time now. That would be a great feature for a future version of Team System!

Please see http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/04/17/configuring-tfs-to-use-sharepoint-2007.aspx

Tonight, SQL Server decided to write a 14GB error log to disk - filling it up neatly, which of course had a couple of "side effects". Drat! All log file directories (HTTPERR, IIS, MailEnable, you name it) - everything except the SQL error log is on a separate partition for exactly one purpose: that no application log can stop the server dead in its tracks.

After clearing up the mess I thought "let's move the logs for SQL Server". Thanks to Alex I finally figured out where to do that - in the Configuration Manager:

Go to the Properties dialog, and modify the Startup Parameters (-eC):

Details can be found in the article Moving System Databases, section Moving the master and Resource Databases. Someone from Microsoft care to enlighten me as to why this log directoy has been hidden so far away from sight?

Buck Hodges has a blog entry on this acquisition. To quote the most interesting part for everyone: "Effective today, TeamPlain is available, at no additional charge, to users who own a Team Foundation Server". If you need a Web interface for TFS, go get it!

Want to know what's next? Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem/futures/

World and dog has been reporting about the Orcas March CTP, so I'll stick with reporting news on released technology: the Visual Studio 2005 SDK Version 4.0 is here. Why is this important? It has all the cool stuff in it for extending VS, VSTS and TFS SP1.

Fiddler is a HTTP debugging proxy. Although it is easy to use (a very good thing!), it is also very powerful. Point in case and why I am writing about it today is that I stumbled across a drive-by-download site (stumble is the wrong word, the URL came with what seemed like a phishing mail and that piqued my interest):

That site is actually quite clever though: when you go there the second time, it detects that it tried to infect you before and tells you that your IP is blocked. And it doesn't send a peep to a browser other than IE. Plus - and that takes the biscuit - it also verifies the referer.

But I still wanted the code, so I reset my router and started Fiddler:

Although Fiddler has tons more features, this did the trick for me in this case (if you want to learn what Fiddler can do, look here).

So what's the obfuscated script about? The short version: it is a variant of the ASUS download server drive-by download incident. The actual code can be found in a discussion on our German .NET community site here.