When setting up an Orchard website you’re given a choice to use a ‘normal’ SQL database, or SQL Compact. When developing new modules I often choose for the SQL Compact option. I choose this option, because it’s very easy to backup and restore the database file. If you mess something up, you’re fairly safe.
You can of course backup and restore normal SQL databases, but this takes a bit more effort compared to copy-pasting a database file.

All of a sudden all my websites didn’t work anymore. Using some common sense in searching for the root of the problem I discovered the IIS Admin Service hadn’t started after booting up my machine. Trying to manually start up the service didn’t help much either, I was confronted with a message telling me “The system cannot find the file specified.”. Sadly, the event logs didn’t help much, as the logs told me about the same “The IIS Admin service terminated with the following error. The system cannot find the file specified”.

Some time ago my ForeFront TMG server had crashed and not being an expert sysadmin, I wasn’t able to figure out what was wrong. The only thing I could think of was restoring the server from an earlier snapshot. Thanks to the Hyper-V interface this is really easy, even a software developer can do this.

At the moment I’m working on a (Orchard) project which is deployed to Windows Azure and uses a SQL Azure database. As my team needed to fix some issues which occurred in the Acceptance and Production environment, I wanted to get a recent database dump so we would be able to reproduce the issues on the development machines.

A few days ago I listened to a new episode of the .NET Rocks podcast, with Kimberly Tripp on the show. While she was going through the list of things every developer needs to know, one in particular caught my interest. She mentioned we should use the different types consistently in the database. Not using types consistently within your database can cause quite some performance loss. This is because SQL Server ‘upcasts’ the minor type to the higher type (example: varchar to nvarchar). As the term ‘quite some performance loss’ is a bit broad, I wanted to know how much this performance loss is exactly and if it’s worth rewriting/redesigning your database.

Including a lot of files in your website can impact the performance of your site. Your browser needs to request all those files from the webserver(s) and download them individually. Luckily this fetching is pretty fast and your browser can do multiple requests at once. However, there is a maximum to the number of requests a browser can make, so if you include 100 external files, will probably be (relatively) slow.
I’ve tested this by creating a new MVC 3 web application, copying the Site.css file 12 times and include all of them in the head-element of the page. Below you can see the FireBug and YSlow reports for this test page.

Note:

I finally succeeded in setting up a VM with OSX Lion installed. Setting up an OSX environment in any VM tool has always been hard, but since Apple has decided to build for the x86 platform it has gotten a lot easier.