Game over: on Azure, don’t IISRESET

Game over on Azure

Best not iisreset an Azure instance

Like, I suspect, many other developers, I think I need to know more about my deployment environment than perhaps is good for me. But with PaaS (platform-as-a-service) hosting, sometimes that can give, well, unexpected results.

For example, Windows Azure offers a (really very handy) facility to open a Remote Desktop session to a Windows Server host that runs an Azure instance. You’re logged in as local Administrator, too, so you can cause some serious damage in there if you want.

Or even if you don’t want.

Continue reading

Faking DNS entries for the Android emulator using Unbound

Previously I ranted about JQuery Mobile and the immature state of mobile development tools. While I was on that project I reckoned it might be a good idea to use an emulator so I could test what my mobile Web site might look like in real life.

A nice idea, but in practice it seems the mobile toolchain is… rather more full of good intentions than actual capability.

Continue reading