Tess Ferrandez has a great article on why debug=true is generally a bad thing to leave lying around in your ASP.NET app's web.config file. This can be a pain for hosting companies like the one I work for when customers upload their app still as a debug build and with debug=true left switched on. We have shared servers that have up to 700 websites on them and it took us a fair bit of time and effort to tune the Application Pools to work around this problem in ASP.NET 1.x. Fortunately now we get to turn it off globally in the machine.config file in ASP.NET 2.0.

Doug Stewart has a nice article about keeping your production ASP.NET apps happy and healthy. All good stuff.

Back In the Saddle

It's been month since I did a show due to being on call and a dose of the flu and a cough that hung around to make it virtually impossible to speak without spluttering. Anyway....here's the play list for last nights show:

Hayseed Dixie - Black Dog
[correction] Neutral Milk Hotel - A Song Against Sex
The Fall - Clasp Hands
Spizzenergi - Where's Captain Kirk
Beck - Girl
65 Days of Static - Install A Beak In The Heart That Clucks Time In Arabic
Part Chimp - B2
Bed Head - Living Well
Ivor Cutler - Life In A Scotch Sitting Room - Jungle Tip (Owl)
Ivor Cutler - Life In A Scotch Sitting Room - Episode 1
Takako Minekawa - Fantastic Cat
And The Native Hipsters - Mr Magic
Grandaddy - A.M. 180
Grandaddy - He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's The Pilot
13th Floor Elevators - Your Gonna Miss Me
Silver Apples = A Pox On You
Neu! - Hero
King of Woolworths - Stalker
Bowery Electric - Fear of Flying
Hooverphonic - Sarangi
Santos - Combination
Backini - Little Big Horn
Stereolab - Get Carter
King of Woolworths - To The Devil A Donut

I thoroughly recommend picking up King of Woolworths' Ming Star album. It's a bloody marvellous and the track Stalker will put the willies up you on a late dark and windy night. I picked up some God Speed You Black Emperor and have been listening all day to them. They're utterly amazing, the album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antenna To Heaven is incredible. It consists of four 20minute (ish) tracks that take you on an aural rollercoaster ride you won’t forget - in a word mind-bending.

This is a pretty handy feature for taking your ASP.NET 2.0 app offline (for maintenance or whatever) and displaying a friendly message explaining why the site is down.

Just place a file called 'App_offline.htm' in the root of your site with whatever message you want to give your users and bingo your app shuts down and the contents of App_offline.htm are served. Just delete or rename App_offline.htm to something else to bring the app back online again.

I don't know what the Attorney General is so upset about, isn't this what the Home Office wants for all our good citizens anyway? They just happen to be starting from the top.