As an ASP.NET web developer, I think it's important to understand and know how to configure Microsoft's web server, Internet Information Services (IIS). Depending on the organisation you work for you may or may not get the opportunity to tinker with IIS, but this shouldn't stop you from learning the basics.

You could go out and buy a book on configuring IIS and then install IIS on your computer to practise what you've read, but thanks to the guys at Trainsignal.com who have kindly sent me some of their training videos, I've discovered a much easier way of learning.

Train Signal provides video training courses for Microsoft, Cisco and CompTIA certifications, including CCNA, A+, Network+.
I'll also be reviewing the Cisco CCNA training videos here soon.

Train Signal's IIS Web Server video training covers both IIS 5 and IIS6, and features topics including installing IIS, creating test websites, hosting more than one website using host headers, adding security, setting up an FTP server, and web server optimisation.

The course is taught by Scott Skinger, President and founder of Train Signal. Scott has many years of experience in the IT field, holds various IT certifications and is a competent instructor. The videos are easy to follow and Scott's narration is second to none.

The series of videos are backed up with a written guide in the form of the lab book, which comes as a printable PDF on the CD ROM, this goes through the same steps featured in the videos and includes network diagrams like the one above to help you set-up your own lab.

If you want to get up to speed on a particular Microsoft product, obtain an IT certification or you don't like reading IT text books then I definitely recommend you give these training videos a try.

Course Contents in full:

Introduction
Lab Setup
Setting up the lab
Computer 1
Computer 2
Computer 3
Lab
Scenario
Installing IIS on Windows 2000 Server
Creating an HTML file
Hosting Ben & Brady's site
Configure DNS so Internet users can find your website
Testing the website from the client
Lab
Scenario
Creating a test website using an HTML file
Creating an additional website on the web server
Creating host headers
Configuring DNS for the second website
Test and view website from client
Assigning site operators
Adding security to a website
Test and view the website from a client
Lab
Scenario
Downloading and installing service packs and hot fixes
Setting NTFS permissions
Disabling Netbios over TCP/IP
Download and run The IIS lockdown tool from Microsoft
Enable and view logging

I was kindly sent a uCertify PrepKit for review back in December last year for the Microsoft C# .NET 2.0 Web-based Client Development exam (70-528). I'm looking to take the Microsoft MCTS .NET Framework 2.0 Web Applications certification this year, and needed an exam simulator and part of my study.

I've been so busy lately its been difficult to find the time to sit down and put the exam simulator through its paces. Anyhow I've spent a good few hours testing my .NET knowledge with this PrepKit to allow me to confidently evaluate it.

The PrepKit features a bunch of questions that closely follow the style of questions featured in the Microsoft exam, obviously the PrepKit does not contain real exam questions, but uCertify claim they are "realistic", and they are supposed to get you used to the kind of questions you should expect to see when you come to take the real exam.

The tests in the PrepKit contain between 15 and 40 questions each and you’re given 120 minutes to complete each one, but I found that choosing a shorter time and reducing the amount of questions I needed to answer allowed me to spend more time using the PrepKit, because I don’t often have 2 hours of uninterrupted revision time.

There are two different modes to choose from before starting a test. Learn mode and Test mode, Learn mode allows you to get feedback on the current answer immediately whereas in Test mode you can only review the answers at the end of the practice test.

When you complete a test you can review the questions and go back and look at any questions you may have answered incorrectly. You can also choose to re-take just the questions you got wrong. When you re-take the test the multiple choice answers change order to keep you on your toes!
During a test you can pause the timer to take a call, make a coffee etc, tag, print, review and bookmark questions.

Every test you take with the PrepKit gets recorded in the Test History section, from here you can go back and review all the practice tests you've taken, review all the questions you got wrong, re-do the whole tests or re-do only the questions you got wrong.

Custom tests can also be created to turn your weaknesses, based on your test history or certain topics into your strengths.

Besides the practice tests the PrepKit contains study notes, quizzes and tips and flash cards to help assist you in understanding the topic.

I can't recommend this book enough. A lot of the topics covered in this book are common sense. As a Web developer or designer you may think you create very usable sites already, but even if this is true, and you are a true usability guru, a lot of the facts and statistics in this book are useful for backing up your views, and getting your point across to clients who insist on functionality that you know full well will break usability conventions, and potentially harm their finished Web site.

The book is for people who have business goals for their Web sites or the Web sites they work on. This includes sites that match the following criteria:

• E-commerce sites
• Corporate sites
• News sites
• Non-profit organisations
• Government agencies

If you are trying to get users' to accomplish something when they visit your site then you should be concerned about usability.

This book contains the results of many studies into how people behave on the Internet and consequently what makes Web sites succeed or fail.

This book alone is not enough to ensure your site will be the most usable it can be, but it is crammed full of tips and real world examples of what to do, and what not to do when it comes to designing Web user interfaces, writing Web copy and planning your Information Architecture. Ideally you will need to perform usability testing as well, but the information in this book will significantly help in improving your Web site.

The book begins by explaining how people use the Web and how to optimise your site accordingly. It explains how users' use search engines to find answers to problems, and how to improve your site to cash-in on these users.

Nielsen and Loranger then go back to the usability problems they found back in 1994 and discover what significant usability issues are still relevant today, including bugbears such as:

• Breaking the back button
• Pop-ups
• Flash
• Uncertain clickability
• Plug-ins
• Splash pages

The forth chapter helps you prioritise your Web site usability issues and decide what to tackle first. They do this by categorising usability problems by severity, frequency, impact and persistence.

Site search engines and their user interfaces and results pages (SERPS) are covered next, including a brief introduction to Search Engine Optimisation.

Chapters 6 and 7 concern navigation, information architecture, readability and legibility. This is followed by a chapter on how important it is to specifically write for the Web, using summaries for key points, and by using simple language. The importance of knowing your audience and how people skim read articles on the Web is talked about, as is the use of marketing slogans and hype.

The following chapter is geared towards your e-commerce goals. How to provide good product information and win consumer confidence in your site and product to increase and promote sales.

The penultimate chapter looks at presentation and users' expectations, while the final chapter in the book is all about balancing technology with people's needs. This covers the use of multimedia content such as videos and the use of familiar interface conventions in Web design.

Prioritizing Web Usability
By Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger
Published by New Riders
ISBN 0-321-35031-6

I've decided to try out Feedburner. We use RSS to syndicate content at work and have to use server log file analysis to track them, web-beacon based web analytics packages are good for websites, but you can't add Javascript to feeds, which are pure XML. We've tried using .NET to database the hits we were getting on the feeds, but after a short while of testing we were seeing our database growing quickly in front of our eyes, not to mention consuming our precious CPU cycles.

Feedburner not only takes away the hassle of analysing web feed statistics and subscribers, but adds a lot of other functionality too.

My main initial issues with Feedburner were the following:

* What if Feedburner went bankrupt? All the sites syndicating my feed would be using the feedburner URL (unless I pay for the Pro service). How would I be able to change this back to my own URL or another Feedburner type URL? (hopefully saying goodbye to Feedburner would also still hold true if they went bankrupt?) [UPDATED: On June 1st 2007 Google purchased Feedburner, therefore making bankruptcy much less likely :-) ]

* I can't redirect any current traffic from my old Blogger Atom feed on my shared Windows hosting as I don't have access to IIS through my control panel. The file is an .xml file, and I can't use .htaccess for obvious reasons. I would need to use an ISAPI rewrite tool I suppose, which I probably wouldn't be able to get installed in a hosted environment.

* If I want to later upgrade to the Pro service, I would surely have to keep my Feedburner URL even though I could have a URL hosted on my site with this package just so I keep all my subscribers using the same feed URL. (I guess I could use the "saying goodbye to Feedburner" process above?)

Despite these issues, I've decided that the pros of knowing my subscribers etc out way the cons and I'm now syndicating through Feedburner! Read my Feedburner research.

I am wondering however, how Feedburner manage to host so many blogs. I assume they have some serious kit to handle the many requests they get. I would be interested to know what the Feedburner IT infrastructure looks like.

I'm a big fan of Google Reader. I tried the first Google Reader interface not long after it was released and couldn't get on with it. It didn't have much going for it. It was hard to use and read articles from, and it was buggy although it was a beta release.
Since the interface was changed however it has progressed in leaps and bounds. It is now my feed reader of choice. I didn't particularly like the Bloglines interface either.

Mobile Feed Reading

I'm a busy person and I don't get much time during the day to catch-up on the news I want to hear about. So after purchasing a Windows Mobile MDA with unlimited 3G Internet access I was on the look out for a decent mobile feed reader.
Even though browsing normal websites with mobile devices is possible, it's not a rewarding experience because not many sites are optimised for the small interface.
Thankfully Google Reader has a fairly decent mobile interface, that includes a mobile proxy to reformat normal web pages to make them much more readable on small mobile devices.
Google have managed to shoe-horn most of the functionality into the mobile version, but it is a lot more buggy than the normal web version. Perhaps some of the bugs I come across are down to buggy web feeds, but Google should be able to find a way around most problems.

Google Reader Mobile User Interface Enhancements

Here are some of the bugs/bugbears I have with the mobile interface (in no particular order)

* There should be a link straight through to the article on the site in question, not just the summary page in Reader. This will reduce the amount of clicks if you know you want to read the article even without reading a summary first.
* Why do we need the more... Link when we now have the mark these items as read... Link?
* When you star an item it reloads the whole page. Can it not return to the list on news items?
* Some blogs cause http errors, produce no article when you click through, feature loads of links that you need to scroll through to get to the content, or show the summary as being the same as the blog title.
* I would like the option of being about to read only a subset of my feeds from the mobile interface.

..and finally...

I use the new shared items widget on my blog to let my users know what I've been reading lately. From the web interface you can quickly share feed items with a simple click. This functionality is missing from the mobile interface however. So the work around for the time being is to star each item I want to share with my readers and click the share button on each item when I get on a desktop machine.

The interface is improving all the time, so hopefully Google will listen to its users, because I know I'm not the only one who has views on some of these topics.