Error opening Silvelright 2, Beta 1 Project

The other day was “one of those days” when nothing was working. My Internet was not working, my computer almost crashed/stalled and then this…

Problem

System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException

What? So here I am, opening an old test Silvelright 2.0 Beta 1 project and I get this while its loading. The SL project loaded, but its test website did not.

Being highly annoyed yet fortunate enough to be in the middle of an email exchange with some VERY NICE folks in Redmond I decided to ask this as a side question.

The reply was immediate “Do you also get this when creating a new host web project” and it hits me, I know what he is leaning towards.

Solution

Let me be honest here, I don't know what caused my problem but creating a new test web project and removing the troubled one fixed the issue.

My best guess is that I must have changed something in the IIS configuration of the test project, but I just cant put my finger on it.

This solution is perfectly fine since the test project is simplistic and only typically contains one page with object tags to host the Silverlight control. If anyone does figure out the exact reason for this please feel free to post a reply here, otherwise just accept the solution and move on.

IIS 7.0 - Security and Performance

Windows Server 2008 comes with a new version of IIS, version 7.0. Ever since IIS 6.0 I have been very happy with the platform and while its not perfect it is typically stable and secure.

In my continued attempt to learn about upcoming technology I listened to IIS 7.0 Security and Security Features podcast on TechNet Radio. This podcast brought out a few interesting facts that I wanted to share in summarized format:

Enhancement

• The Architecture of IIS 7.0 is built from the ground-up with Security as a primary concern
• You can install IIS with only the components required to run the content you will be delivering. Therefore if you run just a static site you can configure it to not even have any ASP, PHP, ASP.NET or other more complex extensions installed. Therefore even if there an exploit in one of these sub-systems it wont impact your customized installation
• Configuration data is no longer globally accessible. In IIS 7.0 the main configuration is only accessible to administrators and subsets of it are created at run-time and provided to the applications in very limited and scope specific chunks. This will help ensure that applications do not "peak at" configuration settings out of their intended scope
• The interface has been improved to help you configure IIS. This will be especially welcomed due to the added complexity of the new component based architecture
• IIS has been tuned to run a large amount of applications at one time without degrading performance. This is not necessarily a performance improvement in the typical sense but instead an optimization for stability and increased server capacity

What you wont be getting

• IIS 7.0 does NOT bring any performance improvements, it wont serve your pages faster. Anything they gained in performance (pages per second) they lost through the additional security and architecture enhancement

Warning for ASP.NET Developers

• If your using in-process session state watch for settings that control the new "dynamic idle threshold". This could reset your application pools loosing your session state a lot quicker then you expect as it would change dynamically based on load. Its fully configurable but you need to be aware of it

The podcast has a lot more information then this, but these are the items that stuck for me personally. I really look forward on working with this new platform.

Want to learn more?

For more information I encourage everyone to check out http://www.iis.net/, the official IIS website.

Also you can play with IIS in a virtual lab by visiting this URL: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb499672.aspx