As promised during my TechTalk today at Microsoft Denmark, here are the links to all slides and demo code. Unfortunately you'll not be able to download the VPC's as those total around 30GB. Download slides & code I sincerely hope you enjoyed the presentation as much as I did. Either way, I'd appreciate your comments on SpeakerRate - Thanks :)

Once you start distributing your ASP.NET website across multiple webservers, you're going to need a way to share session state. That is, unless your app is stateless, in which case scaling it should be a breeze! One of the easiest ways to provide common session state for a small cluster (very dependant on load and hardware specs, but ~10 servers max, per state server), is to use the built-in ASP.NET State Service. It's a free service that's installed alongside the .NET Framework on all Windows servers. While the InProc session storage is stored directly in the w3wp process,...

Join me for a practical demonstration of how to setup SQL Server mirroring. I'll discuss operating modes, mirrors & licensing. Contains demo videos of setup!

There are two primary reasons for venturing into the realms of clustering/load balancing - availability & scalability. In this post I'll give a quick demo of how to setup Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB) on Server 2003 and how it affects the availability of a web application. When we have several nodes doing the same thing, if one of them fails, the cluster as a whole continues - provided that the nodes are not so overburdened that a single node failing will kill the others due to the extra load. Most applications will have an upper limit on how...

I spend a lot of time architecting for scalability, availability and security during my daily work. Currently I've got a distributed system consisting of several windows services communicating across machines using WCF and authenticating through Active Directory. In such a situation, if the Active Directory Domain Controller (let's just call it DC from now on) dies, everything more or less dies as no clients/servers are able to authenticate incoming requests anymore. Security is paramount, so the services are not allowed to simply cache the domain logon, thus the logon has the occur at each service call - requiring a...