Scott Hanselman

It's Carl as a one-man-band playing piano, drums, bass and guitar, mixed together seamlessly into one amazing Hi-Def 720p video. Remember to double-click for fullscreen once you're in the player.

He explains the technical details on his blog. How he recorded it, which cameras, what programs and the final squishing with Expression Media Encoder. Here's the link to his original test and to

You wanna talk multi-talented? I need to learn the piano. Great job, Carl, truly amazing.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Hello Dear Reader. I have been working with IIS7 for a while and I'm convinced that it's the cat's pajamas^[1]

I started playing with IIS7 and noticed that it had FastCGI support. This means I could plug in PHP or maybe Perl or even Ruby into IIS7. This would be nice because I could host my ASP.NET blog, but also drop in some of the nice open source PHP applications that are available for maybe a photo gallery or something, all hosted on the same IIS machine.

What I did was take Bill Staples blog post on FastCGI as a guideline and got IIS7, FastCGI and PHP running on my machine. I did three load tests, one with CGI, one with FastCGI and one with Kernal Output Caching (new IIS7 feature) turned on. This video shows a number of tools and how to configure IIS7 step by step.

You can watch the video/screencast on the new Hanselman Silverlight Player (thanks Tim!) or download the WMV directly. If you guys want more IIS7 videos in detail, give me feedback in the comments and I'll see what we can do about putting together a series over on http://www.iis.net.

FastCGI GoLive on IIS6

If you're running IIS5.1 or IIS6, there is a GoLive release available to put your PHP apps into production on IIS and FastCGI. If you've previously downloaded the FastCGI TP2 release, be sure to get the latest GoLive version for IIS5.1/6.

There's also an actively maintained FastCGI IIS Forum with members of the team and MVPs helping out.

FastCGI for IIS7

If you're running IIS7 on a non-SP1 Vista, you can get FastCGI as a download for x86 and x64 as well. However, if you're running Vista SP1 Beta, as I am in the video, or Windows 2008 RC0, then you've already got FastCGI. One less step, eh? Check it out in the video.

WCat (Web Capacity Analysis Tool) 6.3

In this video I use a tool call WCat that you can download in x86 and x64 flavors. It is very lightweight and can simulate thousands of concurrent users on even a laptop. I pushed my local IIS7 with caching to over 2000 requests a second. It's free, easy with a basic scripting language. It's a great way to beat on your development servers and do some powerful profiling. I loves me some free tools.

Screencast Survey

I have been thinking about doing a series of IIS7 screencasts to augment the very good articles on http://www.iis.net. If you haven't been over there, I recommend you check it out.

Anyway, if you've seen me speak on stage, you know I'm a visibility/accessibility wonk and I really like to think about how folks learn, etc. I've been working with Camtasia for a while now and doing some video editing in Sony Vegas. In the recent ALT.NET Videos I put myself in PIP (Picture in Picture) and the response (even though the video was very rough) was very positive. I think that PIP really adds a lot to a screencast, but only if combined with appropriate editing, callouts, zooming and moving/sizing of the PIP window to make sure nothing is obscured. I wonder if you agree?

I'm interested in both your thoughts and opinions on the FastCGI stuff but also on Screencasts in general:

• I'd also like to try creating screencasts that look great at 640x480 but also would be viewable on a 320x240 screen using Zoom and Pan or a Viewfinder technique. Do you have any interest in that?
• Are screencasts a big part of your learning process?
• Does Picture in Picture add value to you?
• Do you prefer a fairly casual screencast with PIP like I've done here, or a more formal greenscreen/floating head with a nice suit reading a script. This screencast was fairly "organic" on purpose because it's real. There's no fakery.

Thanks, Dear Reader.

^[1] Cat's Pajamas - An adjective used by hipsters of the 1920's to describe a person who is the best at what they do. lso used to describe another person who is genial and fun to be with.
"Martin sure knows how to dance, he's the cats pajamas, man!""

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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UPDATE: Here's a Bit.ly Bundled Link of the complete "Wiring your house for Gigabit Ethernet 5 PART SERIES."

Looks like folks ARE interested in the Home Wiring topic. I'm not an expert, but I do read a lot. Here's some answers to some great questions in the comments.

Q: "Wooden walls... huh... wooden walls. Umm, right, whatever. But why don't you use tubes inside the wall that hold the wires?
Right now when you close the wall, you can't add new cables, right?
Over here in The Netherlands/Europe we embed tubes in the concrete or bricks so we are able to pull new wires through it." - Rutger

A: Sure, that's sometimes used. Usually instead we just pull WAY more cable that we'd need. Wooden walls "can" be opened (with trouble) and additional pulls can be "fished" through, but your point is well taken, this is a hassle. We've done a combination by pulling lots of wires, but also by including a 2" conduit (in orange in the picture) leading between floors as well as to the main entertainment center (TV).

Q: "what about sound isolation? Seems to me pretty noisy." - Rutger

A: The closet will just have the Home Server, Media Server, the switch and the wireless router. The servers are fairly quiet, but certainly not silent. I haven't given much thought to sound isolation in the wiring closet, instead focusing on the room I record Hanselminutes in. If it becomes a problem, first I'd add a sealing strip of rubber to the bottom of the door, and then I'd look at "blowing in" extra insulation in that one wall, and finally I'd line the one inward-facing wall with sound dampening material.

Q: "Let me guess - you handle the tech, while your wife is in charge of picking out the color scheme, window treatments, appliances, granite countertops, carpeting, landscaping, shower curtains, decor, and new furniture?" - Frank

A: Uh, gulp. Actually, if you knew some things about me you'd know I'd kind of a Nate Berkus about this stuff. I came up with most of the colors, the window treatments, all the appliances. Mo and I did the countertops (ceramic, not granite) and carpets together. I'll do most of the furniture and decor, accents and landscaping, fencing, etc, and she'll do art, photos, pictures, knick-knacks etc. I actually just spent my lunch hour at Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

Q: "I was a little surprised to see you getting a Netgear Switch. Netgear is a good consumer brand but they really don't have the chipsets to compete with the big boys such as Dell, HP, and Cisco. See through put is all dependent on how much the chipset can handle. Really what you want to look at is the switching capacity because it is totally different than bandwidth." - Nick

A: Hm. I picked up a nice Netgear GS724TS for literally nothing on Ebay. I can add more switches as I need to, and it has a switching capacity of 20Gbps. Even if I had every port full (I won't) with everything running at 1Gbps (I don't) I'd still be "ok." Sure I could have got an HP with 48Gbps capacity, but it seems overkill and was more money. The Dell you references only had an 8Gbps capacity, so I think I did well for very little money. Of course, the switch is just mounted into the closet, so it can always be popped out for the future, but I think 20Gbps is pretty reasonable.

Q: Also, designate where you electrical taps are and ensure your office has at least 3 dedicated circuits if you're going to have a reasonable amount of gear/UPS. I took the rule of a jack box a foot away from each power drop so that I didn't end up with wires all over the floor. For instance, I have three separate jack plates in my office alone, each with 2+ CAT5e jacks. The one by the server has 6 CAT5e jacks so that everything can have a dedicated drop to the switch to avoid overloading a single cable. - Chris

A: Totally agree. I've got two dedicated 20 amp circuits in my office and another 20 amp in the wiring closet.

Q: What model of switch do you have? You said it can do RJ11 ports, which sounds like a cool feature. - Tony

A: It's not the switch that does the RJ11, basically it's the punchdown block. There's a separate "hub" thing for RJ11, and if I want to change a Data Run into a Phone Run, I just move the run from the switch into the phone hub. Then can put RJ11 wires into an RJ45 in the room and I'm set. I'm moving off of Vonage now that they are imploding and going back to Verizon for phone service, but we'll be using Skype exclusively for our many overseas calls.

Again, I'm just stumbling through this, it's only the second time I've put together this kind of setup and the first time was only 8-ports and 100mbps, so I DO appreciate all your comments and (constructive) criticisms!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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POST UPDATED: Scroll down...

Looks like it's official and my second conference speaking gig (or perhaps first, because technically ALT.NET wasn't speaking as it was "convening an Open Spaces dialog") is at DevConnections in Vegas on November 6th. Later that week on Friday I'll be doing the ending Keynote at the PNP Summit in Redmond. (Still haven't figure out what to talk about...but I'm getting there.)

Here's my current DevConnections schedule.

This one is an old-ish abstract. We're going to likely split this talk into 30 minutes on Dynamic Data Controls and 30 minutes on MVC, although there's internal rumor of a full 60 minutes on MVC. We shall see.

AMS306: ASP.NET Beyond Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5
Scott Hunter and Scott Hanselman
See some of Microsoft's future plans for enhancing ASP.NET development including better CSS and AJAX integration, the new Dynamic Data Controls, a new Silverlight control, next generation search support, and support for dynamic languages like IronPython and Ruby. Find out how to use these capabilities to make your ASP.NET development even easier.

Eilon is very smart...he's a mastermind behind much of the MVC code you've heard so much about. I suspect this topic and abstract will be changed to be more interesting. We'll probably change it to "Building a Real-World Web Application with Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework v3.5, Part 3 of 2" or "Building a Real-World Web Application: Episode 4" and add Ajax and Silverlight to ScottGu's Part 1 and Part 2 application.

AMS301: Create Great Looking Web Applications Using the New Design and CSS Features in Visual Studio 2008
Eilon Lipton and Scott Hanselman
See how the new Web designer in Visual Studio 2008 makes it easy to build Web applications that are easier to use and more compelling. Find out how Visual Studio 2008 provides the capability to take full advantage of CSS and allows design and development to work seamlessly together in your ASP.NET applications.

For this talk I will likely provide the "jazz hands" to Eilon's most competent code-monkeying.

AMS302: Silverlight for ASP.NET Developers
Eilon Lipton and Scott Hanselman
Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. See how developing Silverlight applications compares to ASP.NET development and how you can integrate Silverlight into your ASP.NET applications today to truly differentiate your web site. See how designers and developers can easily work together using Microsoft Expression to create these great user experiences. In addition you will get a glimpse of the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, which will allow you to build rich experiences using the managed C# and Visual Basic programming models you are familiar with.

We will do our very best to not suck but we are being thrown in to the pool with both feet tied! ;) Three talks in a day is a lot. I'm happy to paired up in these cases.

UPDATED: We've changed the schedule and I think it'll be a much better show this way. Changes are highlighted. Eilon and I are also doing AMS302 so we're together for three talks!

AMS306: Developing Data Driven Applications Using ASP.NET Dynamic Data
Speaker: Scott Hunter

ASP.NET dynamic data controls are part of a powerful, rich new framework that lets you create data driven ASP.NET applications very easily. It does this by automatically discovering the LINQ data model at runtime and deriving UI behavior from it. A scaffolding framework instantly provides a functional web site for viewing and editing data. This scaffolding can then be easily customized via a template, or by creating standard ASP.NET pages to override the default behavior. At the same time existing applications can easily integrate pieces of the scaffolding logic with their existing pages. In this talk, we will demonstrate how to build rich data driven Web applications from scratch with minimal effort.

One of the benefits of using a MVC methodology is that it helps enforce a clean separation of concerns between the models, views and controllers within an application. In the near future, ASP.NET will include support for developing web applications using an MVC based architecture. The MVC pattern can also help enable red/green test driven development (TDD) - where you implement automated unit tests, which define and verify the requirements of new code, first before you actually write the code itself. Join us for a dive into the new MVC Framework and you'll learn how to leverage this new alterative in your own applications.

AMS301: Building a Real World Web Application with Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework v3.5, Part 3 of 3
Speakers: Scott Hanselman and Eilon Lipton

In this session we'll extend the real-world application built in the previous two parts using Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5. We’ll see how Ajax technology can be cleanly added to an existing codebase to improve the user experience and use less bandwidth without difficulty. Then we’ll add Silverlight to the application to take the user experience to the next level and explore how complementary ASP.NET and Silverlight are and how easy it is to mix HTML and Silverlight seamlessly.

Hope it's good!

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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UPDATE: Here's a Bit.ly Bundled Link of the complete "Wiring your house for Gigabit Ethernet 5 PART SERIES."

It's official, we're moving! We close tomorrow on a house we've been building. Since it'll be not only our home but also my home office while I work at Microsoft, it needs to be wired as such. It'll be using Verizon Fiber Optic (FIOS) and my Internet connection will be 15mbps downstream and 2mbps upstream.

The pics below are of the "framing" part of the house. For those of you who read this blog who aren't in the US, you may be surprised (or continually surprised) to see our all-wood houses. It's the one thing that we have lots of (so far) here in the US...or at least here in Oregon.

What you're looking at here is the stairs in our living room that head upstairs. The walls haven't been put on in this picture. Under the stairs is my wiring closet. The door is on the far left side there.

The picture on the left here shows the piece of cardboard that is soon to be the wiring cabinet. It'll have a clear glass front and a lock. The wiring is all Cat 6 (not Cat 5E) and I'll be mounting a 10/100/1000 Netgear Switch in that cabinet along with a UPS and a wireless router. The switch will also let me route VOIP and RJ11 traffic over ports, so I can re-purpose ports like a small business.

There's 24 RJ45 ports, with each room having at least 2 RJ 45 and 2 Coax. The Office will have at least 10 ports. I just don't trust wireless when I can get hard-drive speed over a hard-wire. So it's Gigabit for me throughout.

Jeff Sandquist's team is going to be doing "Microsoft Cribs." He says "we're honing in on the actual technology people use in their homes." Cool. He's said I can do a video on our setup.

I figure I'll have it all setup by the end of November. Wish me luck! If this is an interesting topic, I'll do a series of posts on the wiring closet, how to save money, how to test for capacity, etc.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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