In this article, we will look into the built-in logging features of IIS 7 and 7.5 to log request details. An IIS log is a useful resource to troubleshoot requests. In IIS 7 and 7.5, we can log the details of a request, such as client IP, time taken, response size, cookie and so on into a file. This information helps to find the load on the server in terms of number of requests, size and time taken to serve the request.

Let's open IIS, configure logging for a website and analyze it. We can configure logging at server level or website level. Let's do it at the website level. Go to Default Web Site, go to the Logging feature and click "Enable":

In the following Logging dialog, we can configure the format of the log file, it can be:

• IIS: IIS log file format is a fixed ASCII text-based format, so you cannot customize it (Can't select fields) and fields are separated by commas.
• W3C (default format): It is a customizable ASCII text-based format. You can use IIS Manager to select which fields to include in the log file and fields are separated by spaces.
• NCSA: its log file format is a fixed ASCII text-based format, so you cannot customize it and contains less information than an IIS log format.
• Custom: ODBC logging is implemented as a custom logging module and helps to log information into ODBC-compliant databases like SQL Server or Microsoft Access.

Select W3C as log format, click on "Select Fields" and choose the fields that need to be logged in the log file.

We can set the location or directory for the log files, set options to create a new log file based on file size, daily or weekly and so on. When we check "Use local time for file naming and rollover" it will use the local server time instead of UTC for log file naming and time for log file rollover. This setting will not affect the time field format of the request logged in the file and uses UTC time format.

Let's may a request to welcome.png present in the Default Web Site and analyze the log file. This log file will be under the path set in the Logging Feature + W3SVC<website identifier>. In my case, it is "C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1" and contains the following information:

Most of the fields are self-explanatory and field prefixes have the following meanings:

    s- Server actions
    c- Client actions
    cs- Client-to-server actions
    sc- Server-to-client actions
    sc-bytes - response size
    cs-bytes - request size.

The Time-taken field will show the total time taken to generate the response as well as the time to send the complete response to the client until the last byte. This is done by taking into account the last ACK from the answer to the response. Let's say a request took 5000 milliseconds to generate the response and 3000 milliseconds to send the complete response to the client, so it will show time-taken as 8000 milliseconds.

Most of the preceding logging features are also available on a FTP site as well. In most of the cases, your log file will be very large and can't be analyzed in a notepad. In that scenario, we can use the Log Parser (Available here). Let's install it and open our log file as shown below:

Click on New Query from File Menu and select Log type as IISW3CLOG and hit F5. The result will be as shown below:

We can even write our own queries in SQL syntax to filter the data:
SELECT TOP 10 * FROM '[LOGFILEPATH]' where time-taken >100

As well, there are a few sets of built-in queries for IIS in the Library tab as shown below:

By using the Log Parser Studio, we can analyse large log files to determine load and performance issues at the page or user level. We can use IIS logs as a first step to troubleshoot performance issues. This log helps us to determine any performance issues that exist or not. If any exist then which page is taking time to respond and so on. I will end this article, by mentioning tools helpful in troubleshooting IIS issues in scenarios like a crash, hang, high CPU or memory and so on (we will discuss the following tools in depth in future articles):

    IIS Logging
    IIS Advanced Logging
    FREB Tracing [Failed Request Tracing]
    Fiddler or IE Developer Tools
    Memory dumps collection ofw3wp.exe using Debug Diag or AD Plus.
    Memory dumps analysis using WinDbg tool.

I hope this article will be helpful for all.

In this post I’m going to tell how to create a virtual directory in IIS. Most of the ASP.NET beginners wonder about how to create a virtual directory in IIS. In order to help them, I prepared this post. Before you proceed just check you have installed IIS on your local machine. If not, please check my previous post here,

What is Virtual Directory?
Virtual directory is a mapping between the actual web application files and IIS. That is we map the website files to the IIS in Virtual Directory. If you see in IIS, it looks like a directory but it actually points the exact web application path.

Create Virtual Directory
Here I’m going to create a virtual directory in IIS for the web application which is located in the path:  “G:\DotNetExamples\AllInOne”,

Step 1: Open IIS. To open IIS, press windows key + R key, which opens “Run” window and type “inetmgr” and press enter, which opens the IIS.

Step 2: In IIS, right click on the “Default Web Site” and select the “Add Application” in the float menu.

Step 3: In this “Add Application” window, we need to specify the “Virtual Directory” name and the physical directory where the actual web site files are located. Leave the application pool as it is. Click OK.

Step 4: Now the Virtual Directory has been created under the “Default Web Site”. To test the application right click the virtual directory and choose “Manage Application, then Browse” which will open the application in the respective default browser.

Hope this helps beginners!

In this article, we will understand how to deploy an ASP.NET Core hosted Blazor application with the help of IIS 10 on a Windows 10 machine. We will use Visual Studio 2017 to publish the app and SQL Server 2014 to handle DB operations. We will also troubleshoot some of the common hosting issues for a Blazor application.

Prerequisites
Install IIS in your machine
Install URL Rewrite module from here

Please refer to my previous article Cascading DropDownList in Blazor Using EF Core to create the application that we will be deploying in this tutorial.

Installing .NET Core hosting bundle

Since we are going to deploy an ASP.NET Core hosted Blazor application, the first step is to install the .NET Core hosting bundle in our machine.
Follow the below steps to download .NET Core hosting bundle,

Step 1 
Open https://www.microsoft.com/net/download/all

Step 2 
Select the latest non-preview .NET Core runtime from the list. For this tutorial, we will select the .NET Core Runtime 2.0.7.

Refer to the image below, 

Step 3

On the .NET Core runtime download page, scroll down to the Windows section, select the “Hosting Bundle Installer” link to download the .NET Core Hosting Bundle. Once the download is finished, double-click to start installing it. You will see a window similar to the one shown below,

1. .NET Core hosting bundle should be installed after installing IIS only. If you install.NET Core hosting bundle before installing IIS then you need to repair it after installing IIS so that it will update its dependencies for IIS.
2. Restart the machine after installing the .NET Core hosting bundle.

Right-click on the Server project of your solution and click publish. In this case, it will be BlazorDDL.Server >> Publish.

You will see a screen similar to below. Select the folder from the left menu and provide a folder path. You can provide any folder path where you want to publish your app.

Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc path in your machine and open the “hosts” file using any text editor.

We need to add the hostname that we provided in IIS against the localhost IP address. Refer to the image below,

• “Failed to load <web API> : No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource.

• If you republish the application then do not forget to refresh your website as well as the application pool in IIS.