MSDN has an article on the Web Part Packaging tool (Wppackager). A developer on my staff took it for a whirl today.

Having an MSI for the web parts will be critical for us. With a server farm, the content must be replicated on all the servers. For standard ASP.Net applications, I can use the Distributed File System service to synchronize folders on multiple servers. (And it works very well!!) But with the web.config entries and web part resources, it will be more complicated for WSS sites.

My first impression (as the guy running the install, not the one creating it) is pretty good. One of the resources was not included (a file that is loaded via a SCRIPT tag), but I don't know whether it's a build problem or an install problem.

I wrote blogging offline a while back.  This will not be necessary, since dasBlog has the wonderful “mail-to-blog” feature.  I send an email to a specific address and the text of the message is the content of a blog entry.  Outlook already supports offline mode, so I'm all set.

The next step in our setup is to stress test the web farm/sql cluster. I considered Application Center Test (ACT) that is included in Visual Studio Enterprise, as well as the Web Application Stress tool (WebTool) (WAS Tutorial).

ACT is integrated with Visual Studio .Net. It also has a command-line interface, so you can schedule tests for unattended operation. However, the version bundled with .Net does not allow the test to have multiple client machines. (I couldn't find any other version, however. I assume there is a version included in Application Center 2000, but that's a big load balancing solution that I didn't want to investigate.)

WebTool is an older product, but is still usable. The key part, for me, is that it installs a service on the machine. Each machine that has the service installed can be controlled by any other machine with WebTool installed. In our load-balanced web farm, I need to simulate traffic from different IP ranges. This distributed testing model will do that quite nicely

This is a test of the mail-to-weblog feature of dasBlog

Over the last few months, I have had difficulty with running FrontPage websites on the same shared host as ASP.Net websites.  I don't understand completely, other that sometimes the .Net sites issue a generic “Error occurred” message. 

Today was the last straw.  Two different sites were unavailable, for no apparent reason.  No explanation from the vendor.  I am moving to SecureWebs. They host the blog of Scott Watermasysk, the creator of the .Text blog engine.

I have received top-notch help from Scott (a different Scott) at SecureWebs. I am excited about the move, which will be complete before the end of the month.

As I mentioned, I am contributing to the community blog at SharePointBlogs.com.  My main blog tool, dasBlog, has a cross-post feature written specifically for this situation.  So, blog entries at the main blog (http://www.schaeflein.net/blog) that are in the SharePoint category will also appear at www.sharepointblogs.com/spdiary.

I have joined a blog community at http://www.sharepointblogs.com. I am in the process of installing Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) and will be documenting my progress.

My particular corner is at http://www.sharepointblogs.com/spdiary

Rob Howard: Extending the ASP.NET Roadshow

I went to the Roadshow here in Chicago in January. The site was changed a few days before since the event outgrew the original location. The new location was a circus tent attached to a restaurant.

To make matters worse, they turned off the heaters when the presentation started. I lasted 15 minutes...

Kirk Allen Evans:

A Better ExceptionXmlPublisher for the Exception Management Application Block. This snippet incorporates part of a post from microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.  It shows how to allow multiple threads to write to the same file at once, using a mutex to provide concurrency.  This example is integrated with the Exception Management Block to provide a means of logging errors in multi-user applications to XML files.

I use the EMAB as well to log to a file. I need to put this mutex code in my solution -- Thanks Kirk. However, the log file in Kirk's example may not be well-formed. He is appending exceptionInfo.OuterXml to the file each time. My version: ExceptionPublisher.htm

I spent some time looking at SmarterTools. It is designed for an ISP to generate reports for their customers. For example, you create "sites" and define where to find the logs for that site. The location can be local, UNC paths or FTP sites. It will then collect the log files and update its internal statistics in the background.

I am very impressed. I won't be using the tool, however. Although I built the websites for a number of organizations, I am not hosting a statistics service for them. If I were, SmarterTools would get serious consideration.

I found a .Net-based program that will generate statistical reports from your webserver log files. SmarterTools is fee for use on your development machine, so it is perfect for in-frequent requests about traffic.  Very nice.

While I can understand code written in C#, I still feel more comfortable in VB. To fill in the blanks, I use the converter page at Clarity Consulting to help with the translation. Thanks Clarity Consulting!

http://www.chamisplace.com/colorizer/cc.asp Very nice.