Last week, I loaded up my blog aggregator and I was pleased to see Joel Spolsky had written a new article on architecture astronauts. He made a good point about how Microsoft is rewriting the same software over and over and no one seems to care. I totally agree with Joel's argument about architecture astronauts as we are wasting precious intellectual resources and solving the same issues over and over.  (Side note: an interesting read about how we're wasting massive amounts of brainpower.)

However, that's not what I'm writing about today. I found myself reading faster and faster as I progressed through the article, reading the last paragraph at a frenetic pace. You can definitely feel Joel's frustration - the big boys in the industry are "stealing" all the great programmers by offering starting salaries leagues above what smaller companies can offer. Why do I think Joel's frustration is paradoxical?

Joel's Premises

• Hire only the top quality people
• Treat your employees as if they were superstars in your beautiful New York offices - spare no expense.
• Build a closely-knit team that works on challenging problems to retain your employees
• Set an example as being the best damn place for a software engineer to work and inspire millions of developers to follow your example.

Joel's Aspirations

• Recruitment problem: solved.
• Develop and commercialize high quality software
• Thanks to a well-defined (and very selective) hiring process, retire from software at age 45 to start your own avocado grove as a hobby.

The Contradiction

• Joel is frustrated about losing prospects to Google and Microsoft.  Yes, THE Joel we turn to for tips on software recruitment.
  • (Note: He still has a couple years left to fine-tune his left-handed avocado picking technique.)

Okay... I'm generalizing just because I find it ironic to see Joel having hiring woes. Even if as a general rule things are going well, that doesn't mean you get anyone you want. Everyone has hiring frustrations, even those who set the example. However, I'm left to wonder... has anything changed in the context of hiring? Is there anything you need to do differently today to grab the best technical talent? I can't answer these questions myself, but I see lots of companies struggle with hiring.

I do agree that it is impossible for smaller companies to compete with some of these starting salaries (unless they are keen on burning VC money) but smaller firms do have (many) advantages. But what are they?

1. Get back in the kitchen and make me some pie

What I like most working for a startup (and it would be the case even if it wasn't mine) is the opportunity to touch a bit of everything (engineering, marketing, sales, legal, etc.). Even if you go work for a 40-person startup, if you're interested in contributing to elements which aren't related to your primary function (software developer), you probably can help out. For example, if you think the company's website doesn't communicate what the company does, you can take a step back, think about it a bit, and propose enhancements. (Complaining doesn't bring you anywhere, but constructive criticism helps everyone out!).

If you're a hardcore coder, you can still benefit from working for a smaller company, because you'll have a greater impact on the final product.

However, this fact is not something that has changed in the hiring context... what has?

2. Not everyone wants to work in New York, Redmond or Mountain View.

This is one key differentiating factor for startups. Not all of the world's most talented individual feel inclined to move to get a job and I feel the number of people who will start their own software business in their home town will increase in the coming decade. In the past, we've seen a few companies such as Eric Sink's SourceGear in Illinois do well even if their offices are in the middle of nowhere, so to speak. This is due partly because of increased high-speed Internet availability combined with the lower cost to start your own software business. I think we'll definitely see more success stories from entrepreneurs living in non-metropolitan areas over the next decade because starting your own business (or working for a local one) is such an attractive alternative. It's funny how making it easy to go global causes the creation of many smaller local hubs.

On a related subject, I don't recall that many local startups trying to recruit us while we were software engineering students at the University of Ottawa... there were a few but we were mostly solicited by IBM and Research In Motion (leading to the infamous "hey! do you want a RIM job?" quote). If you're a competent student today, you should definitely look around at local startups that are working on interesting concepts.

3. You can read about it on the Internet

There are tons of people talking about their software startup experiences on the Internet and it's easier to actively participate in the community today than it was a decade or so ago. I can't really see myself connecting to a BBS with my 14.4kbps modem to learn about software startups. Today, you can find people with similar interests very easily but, best of all, you can learn from their experience.

Rather than enumerate a long list of advantages that you wouldn't bother to read, I'd like to ask you an open ended question.

What do you think will change in the way we hire software engineers in the next decade?

Please feel free to discuss in the comments. Ideas: Outsourcing? Co-working? Telecommuting? Nothing at all?

A month or so ago we mentioned co-working environments in one of our blog posts about startup lessons. It appears we're now the number one hit on Google for co-working software startups. When I first heard of co-working, I assumed they were mainstream because the added value these environments bring to software startups is so obvious. However, they are an emerging trend in the software world and you should expect to hear more about them in the future. 

The advantages of co-working environments:

1. It provides a location where members of a small core team can meet, brainstorm, and work on their new idea.
2. It is a low-cost alternative to renting/owning your own office. You can use the space as much or as little as you need it and don't need to buy chairs, desks, a photocopier, fax machine, espresso machine, routers, etc.
3. It opens the door to meeting new people and networking with peers in the same industry.

In a sense, they improve on the familiar software engineering lab environment that is available to university students and we know universities help create startup hubs.

Given the fact that it has become so inexpensive to start your own software company, co-working environments are a perfect fit for the small software start-ups that want to strike it big but have limited resources. Furthermore, who better to help you with your software startup business plan than someone who's gone through the process in the past? Most government agencies that help you start your business don't fully grasp software companies, but the people in a software co-working environment do!

Rather than ramble on about why co-working environments are so great, I'd like to make an announcement: 

LavaBlast Software will develop an industry-specific POS and interactive kiosk for The Code Factory, a new franchisor in the co-working arena.

The Code Factory will open their first location within a couple weeks. Ian Graham, the founder, is very much involved in the Ottawa startup community and this co-working space will definitely help budding software entrepreneurs in the Ottawa-region. The first event to be held at the Ottawa location will be the Ottawa Web Weekend, who is currently looking for more programmers for the event!  Those of you who are not familiar with the franchise industry (and thought it was limited to McDonalds and Subway) might be surprised to see a co-working environment using the franchise model but you'd be surprised by the wide variety of businesses that do (software shops, web design shops, etc.)!

Not only are we very happy to have a new franchisor on board, we're especially excited by the fact that The Code Factory will be out first client outside the child-related retail industry to use our industry-specific interactive kiosk as a key differentiator.

How we did it

The only things you need is an image like this one here:

Then we used the following CSS to define our text boxes style.  The "Login" css class is applied to the ASP.NET Login control and the class "TextBox" are applied to both textboxes in the login control.

.Login .Textbox, .Login .Hover

{

    width: 337px;

    height: 17px;

    background:transparent url(images/inputlogin.png) no-repeat top left;

    color: Black;

    border: none;

    padding: 5px;

    font-weight: bold;

}

.Login .Hover

{

    background:transparent url(images/inputlogin.png) no-repeat bottom left;

}

Has you can see, the only difference for .Hover class is that we tell the background to show the bottom of the picture (the orange part) instead of the top of the image.  If Internet Explorer supported the "focus" CSS pseudo class then it would be much simpler, but IE doesn't support it, so we have to use jQuery to achieve the effect.

Don't forget to add jQuery.js somewhere in the page and then you can add the following script to your page:

$('.Login .Textbox').focus(function(){

  $(this).attr('class', 'Hover');

});

$('.Login .Textbox').blur(function(){

  $(this).attr('class', 'Textbox');

});

Basically the code above registers an event to all DOM elements which have the "Textbox" CSS class and are children of a control of the "Login" CSS class. The first call registers an event handler on the focus event of the text box which changes the class to Hover.  We do the exact opposite for the blur event when we the text box loses it's focus.   There may be a better way to do this why jQuery; if you know how, let us know.

Finally, as a special added touch, we use an AnimationExtender after a successful login:

<ajax:AnimationExtender ID="animLogin" runat="server" TargetControlID="LoginButton">

<Animations>

    <OnClick>

        <Sequence>

            <FadeOut Duration=".5" Fps="20" AnimationTarget="pnlLogin" />

        </Sequence>

    </OnClick>

</Animations>

</ajax:AnimationExtender>

One last thing, if you use this AnimationExtender, you have to make sure your validators don't run on the client side. Validation must occur on the server otherwise the fade out animation will still occur and the login control will disappear. For example, we used a RequiredFieldValidator for both the username and password text boxes and we had to set the EnableClientScript property to false on both these validators.

This concludes how to do a skinned Login control à la LavaBlast.

As you know, LavaBlast develops most of its applications using Microsoft technologies but we like to dabble with other technologies. We're behind the open source movement and have worked on a few open source projects, mainly in Java. One of these is StatSVN, a tool that retrieves information from a Subversion repository and generates various tables and charts describing the project development. It's so great even Eric Kemp used it on SubSonic. The tool uses StatCVS internally and I've recently been promoted to the project admin status on SourceForge (along with Benoit Xhenseval of Appendium). StatSVN has not evolved much in the last year, since the release of v0.3.1, but we've recently done a few enhancements.

Current improvements to both StatSVN and StatCVS

• StatSVN: Faster diffs.
  • StatSVN now takes advantage of a new Subversion 1.4 feature which allows us to perform one svn diff per revision, instead of one svn diff per revision per file. If you don't have 1.4, the old behavior will continue to work.
  • The Apache project blocked our demo because we were doing too many svn diffs on their servers. Hopefully, this will solve this situation in addition to making everything faster.
  • You can still use the old mechanism by using the -force-legacy-diff command line option, should you encounter any problems with the new feature.
• Both: Export to XML format.
  • A new -xml option generates XML files instead of the typical HTML reports.
• Both: Now showing affected file count in a commit.
• StatSVN: The revision number shows up on the commit page.
• StatSVN: Added support for -tags-dir as a way to specify 'top' directory where the tags are stored, defaulted to "/tags/".
• StatSVN: Added support for a -anonymize command line option, to anonymize committer names
• ... and a few minor things.

*** Download the alpha version ***

We're looking for some outside help

Instead of releasing v0.4.0 prematurely, we'd like to ask you to help us out!

1) Beta testers and benchmarkers

Before going with a full blown release, we want to ensure that the new StatSVN diff works as intended in various contexts. It works on our repositories, but we'd like you to run it on yours. We want to ensure it works well regardless of the operating system, your language, the type of files in your repository, the number of revisions, etc. Ideally, you'd time the whole thing and let us know how much faster it is. Furthermore, if you're a real zealot, you'd compare the line counts computed by both algorithms to ensure they match. (The counts are cached in a local XML file... very easy to compare the results).

2) Minor bug fixing & improvements

We've basically fixed the issues that annoyed us personally, but there are some that remain in both the StatCVS tracker and the StatSVN tracker. You may also be interested in creating new reports, which you think would interest the community.

3) Cool enhancements / external projects.

StatCVS/StatSVN can now export XML. This enables you to create new applications that use the computed data... why not whip up a cool dynamic web application? As a demo, I've imported the XML in ASP.NET and used the Open Flash Chart control we've blogged about in the past.

4) Up for a challenge?

Subversion supports move operations and CVS doesn't. While developing StatSVN, we decided we'd treat moves as a delete-add sequence, for simplicity's sake. However, this does generate inaccurate statistics. If you're in for a challenge, you could tackle this StatSVN enhancement. We prototyped something in the past, but it ended up being too slow for production use.

A few links

• StatSVN
  • Wiki (User Manual)
  • SourceForge
  • Demos
  • StatSVN on StatSVN
  • Download v0.3.1
• StatCVS
  • User Manual
  • SourceForge
  • StatCVS on StatCVS
  • Download v0.3

Conclusion

Even though StatSVN/StatCVS are Java-based and most of our readers operate in the .NET space, the application itself is platform independent. Personally, I enjoy loading up a recent version of Eclipse and working in Java once in a while because it helps me observe the best in both worlds. I much prefer coding in C# because of the easier string manipulation and the fact that everything is an object so you don't have to explicitly create an Integer object from your int to insert it into a collection. However, when working in VS.NET, I dearly miss the automatic incremental compilation feature that Eclipse runs when you save a file. 

A month ago, I posted an article on a few console commands for managing ASP.NET applications and IIS. In the weeks that followed, I was contacted by my old friends at iWeb Technologies to help them automate their ASP.NET setup. I spent a couple hours creating the required scripts and I thought I'd post my real world example here!

By the way, iWeb is an exceptional web hoster (1TB of space, unmetered traffic, unlimited domains, $3 a month, and excellent technical support; what more could a web developer want?). I've been with them for nine years already!

Scripting the creation of a new website and configuring it for ASP.NET

Task: Given a domain name (lavablast.com) and a network/local path (\\fileserver\hosting\www.lavablast.com\web\ or c:\inetpub\wwwroot\www.lavablast.com\web\), setup IIS so that ASP.NET works on the root of the domain.

1. Create an application pool
2. Create a web site and associate it to the application pool
3. Ensure both that the www subdomain works (www.lavablast.com and lavablast.com should load this website)
4. Enable ASP.NET v2.0 on this website.
5. Give ASP.NET read/write access to the folder.
6. Add default.aspx to the default documents.

I ended up using the ADSUTIL.VBS script for most of these tasks. I used the iisweb command to create the web application, but it doesn't support network paths. I create it using a temp local path and end up using adsutil to change it to a network path. 

My googling skills are what made this task so short. Here are some of my references:

• Batch file syntax reference : I hate batch files but this site helped me creating something without having to resort to a real scripting language.
• Creating an app pool
• ASP.NET Permissions
• IIS Metabase Explorer: You need this to figure out what you're trying to change using adsutil

Finally, the IISBatchUtils collection of scripts provided the most help. Here's why. 

I have created batch files to make adding new websites to the server very quick and easy. The only tricky part about setting up new websites from batch file (or the command line) is that Microsoft's ADSUTL utility does not correctly add host headers like it says it does- rather than appending the new headers, it blindly sticks them in and possibly covers existing host headers that might already be set up.

I used both the original adsutil, Josh's modified adsutil, and some of his code to extract the site id from the IIS Metabase by using the site name.

The script

See the actual script for the variable definitions.

:Create

REM Step 1 - Create Application Pool

CSCRIPT //nologo %IWEB_ADSUTIL% CREATE w3svc/AppPools/%IWEB_DOMAIN% IIsApplicationPool

REM Step 2 - Create WebServer

iisweb /create %TEMP% %IWEB_DOMAIN% /d %IWEB_DOMAIN% /ap %IWEB_DOMAIN%

REM Step 3- Find new SiteID for further scripting. 

cscript //nologo iisbatchutils/translate.js "%IWEB_DOMAIN%" > siteid.txt

for /f %%I in (siteid.txt) do SET IWEB_SITEID=%%I

REM Step 4 - Add www. to site URL - uses their own custom adsutil because of bug in the normal one. 

cscript %IWEB_ADSUTIL2% append w3svc/%IWEB_SITEID%/serverbindings ":80:www.%IWEB_DOMAIN%"

REM Step 5 - set various website permissions. 

cscript //nologo %IWEB_ADSUTIL% set w3svc/%IWEB_SITEID%/accessread "true"

cscript //nologo %IWEB_ADSUTIL% set w3svc/%IWEB_SITEID%/accesswrite "true"

cscript //nologo %IWEB_ADSUTIL% set w3svc/%IWEB_SITEID%/root/AppFriendlyName %IWEB_DOMAIN%

cscript //nologo %IWEB_ADSUTIL% set w3svc/%IWEB_SITEID%/root/path %IWEB_Path%

cscript //nologo %IWEB_ADSUTIL% set w3svc/%IWEB_SITEID%/root/DefaultDoc Default.htm,Default.asp,index.htm,Default.aspx,index.asp,index.html

REM Step 6 - Cleanup

del siteid.txt

GOTO End

What about setting up IIS to use ASP.NET v2.0?

I did find a link showing me how to change the ASP.NET version from v1.1 to v2.0 using regiis, but later discovered that this stopped & restarted all websites... something catastrophic to do in a production environment. All the hosted websites (not only the new one) would lose their session state, for example. Fortunately, I found that you can change the root website and any new websites created afterwards will inherit the default ASP.NET version. Run the following once:

@echo off

echo WARNING: THIS WILL CHANGE THE DEFAULT ASP.NET VERSION FOR ALL NEW SITES TO V2.0

pause

REM will propagate to new sites. 

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis -sn W3SVC/

REM does not propagate

REM cscript %IWEB_ADSUTIL% set w3svc/accessread "true"

REM cscript %IWEB_ADSUTIL% set w3svc/accesswrite "true"

Scripting the deletion of a website

Deletion is much simpler, as you can see below.

:Delete

iisweb /delete %IWEB_DOMAIN%

CSCRIPT //nologo %IWEB_ADSUTIL% DELETE w3svc/AppPools/%IWEB_DOMAIN%

GOTO End

Conclusion

I had a fun time perfecting my scripting skills while creating a concrete example that solves someone's problem. I discovered that the devil is in the details, but that numerous people have worked on similar problems in the past. I ended up creating another script which runs this one numerous times, according to actions found in a local text file. Simply put, iWeb's PHP system appends operations to a file (create this site, delete that one, create this other site) and mine performs the operation and empties the task list. That way, the script can be run periodically and all the PHP coders need to do is append to a particular file.  

Download the code.

Welcome to part two of our three part series describing the various lessons we learned during our first year of a software startup.  You are encouraged to read the first part if you haven't already!

Problem Statement

In Part 1, we described our business' context and how we eat our own dog food. Indeed, we use the software we produce on a daily basis, helping us create quality products. A parallel can be made with our distributed team's communication patterns. Simply put, we're not all at the same central office, talking to each other all day. Our structure resembles that of a franchisor with franchisees distributed a several physical locations. The main reason we are distributed is to keep costs down while we develop our core infrastructure, but it does have the interest side-effect of forcing us to use the same communication tools a franchisor would.

Not only do we not work in the same building, we're not even in the same city! Because we work in independent offices, we have a greater control over our environment, which increases our productivity. Spolsky often talks about how developers should have private offices because outside disturbances kick us out of our zone. You can respond to your email every 15 minutes, but you can't make someone wait at your door for 15 minutes while you polish off a complicated algorithm.

In any case, given the fact that most geeks are not social creatures, you probably think that doing the majority of your interactions over the Internet is great, right? In reality, it's not always convenient  but we've started to become really creative (and efficient) with the tools we found to maximize our interactions.

We spend most our time chatting coordinating on Google Talk and move to Skype when voice conversations are required. Over time, we discovered some pretty nice software to communicate and we want to share these tools with you in this article.

Problems:

• How do we talk to each other and with people outside our company?
• How do we exchange files?
• How do we manage our requirements?
• How do we demo our software, how do we program in pairs?

Lesson 4) Talking to People

Carrier pigeons might have played a vital part in WWII communications, but we're using more modern techniques.

Skype

Skype is the obvious choice for voice communication over Internet.  Don't tell us that you haven't heard about this tool before!  Because we are four partners in LavaBlast, we often need to have conference calls. All our meetings are done online via Skype conference calls, at no cost to us. Furthermore, we can call up a client on their regular phone using SkypeOut.  SkypeOut will call the client's real phone and will connect them to our conversation, at very affordable rates. Indeed, for $3 a month, we obtained unlimited outgoing calls to Canada and the US. Setting up a conference call is really easy and the quality is good (most of the time).  You simply need a good microphones and you're good to go.  In addition, if you have a webcam and a good Internet connection, the video quality of Skype is just amazing especially compared to MSN.  Talking to someone who also has a good webcam and a good Internet connection is almost lag free, in my experience.

Having a central phone number for a distributed office

Since we have a distributed office, we need to have a central phone number.  The most affordable solution that we found was Skype for business.  Basically you simply need to register a SkypeIn number anywhere in the US (not available in Canada yet) and when people call this number, it calls you on Skype.   The cheapest way to get your incoming phone number is to purchase Skype Pro (at $3/month) and purchase the number for $38 a year (and it was operational within minutes of purchase!). You can forward calls to another user or normal phone and even get voicemail with Skype Pro. Optionally, you may install the business version of the Skype program for additional functionality. Therefore, all the incoming calls go to our main salesperson and, if more technical details are required, the call can be forwarded to us.  Skype for business has a nice business control panel to control Skype credit purchases, phone number assignments, and much more. Additionally, because the phone number is associated to the company, we can redirect it to a new person if an employee is replaced or if someone is on vacation. We could have a 1-800 number, but I don't think we have the kind of call volume that would justify having one just yet.

We found the perfect phone number for LavaBlast: 1-201-467-LAVA (5282).  SkypeIn personal has a nice interface to check if a number is available, but the business panel interface doesn't.  If you want to purchase a specific number, I wish you good luck because you have to generate the numbers one by one!  We wanted a number that ended either with BLAST or LAVA;  we found the number with the SkypeIn personal interface and then tried to regenerate it, one number at a time, in the business panel.  We finally found one that ended with LAVA but couldn't find one that ended with BLAST.  The best way we found to generate multiple numbers was to press Ctrl and click like crazy on the generate button to open new pages in new tabs.  We eventually found the number we wanted!

Lesson 5) Exchanging Files

There are lots of cool startups focusing on better ways to exchange files and we're keeping an eye on them. For now, here's what we're using.

Subversion

As software developers, we obviously use source control to manage our code. No surprise here. We even deploy our web applications using Subversion.

FranchiseBlast

We've developed a document repository in our franchisee/franchisor collaboration solution. We post our user manuals and a few other documents on there; it is our distribution center for completed documents.

Microsoft Groove

We use Microsoft Groove which is a party of Office 2007, as our main internal document management tool. Groove is much more than a document repository, but we only use this feature.  Groove is simple to use and install because it distributes the files on all the peers instead of having to setup a complex server. Furthermore, it is better than a shared network drive because it has change notifications plus it can be accessed even when you are offline. There are a few drawbacks, but in general, it's a good simple solution for the low volume of Office documents we work on. 

Lesson 6) Requirements Engineering

The first post on the LavaBlast blog was related to requirements engineering and how we managed our pile of requirements written on the back of (sometimes used) paper napkins. More seriously, we've found it very beneficial to collaboratively define our software requirements with our clients. Constant feedback is the key to writing good requirements, and using collaboration tools is a must.

Wikis

We've been playing with ScrewTurn wiki as our main wiki over the last year, for both for our internal use and to interact with our clients during the requirements engineering process. It is very easy to install (trivial) and it is very very fast. Editing a page is very pleasant because it is nearly instantaneous when you save a page... it just feels blazingly fast. Furthermore, because it is a free and open source project, you get to spend money on Super Mario Galaxy instead.

During our software engineering capstone project, we used TWiki as our primary requirements engineering tool, a couple years before the strategy was discussed in IEEE Software. Although we've enjoyed ScrewTurn's simplicity during the last year, I think we're ready to revert back to the more feature-rich TWiki. Installation is a pain (less now than before), but the syntax much more natural. Furthermore, we already have the infrastructure in place (using page meta-data) to let us manage our requirements.

Lesson 7) Desktop Sharing

Today, sharing your desktop is an essential operation for any software startup. You can easily demonstrate applications to potential clients or perform pair programming, without having to be at the same physical location.

Lotus Sametime Unyte

Trying to explain something to someone over Skype is not always fun, especially when the client is not a technical person. Because a picture is worth a thousand words, showing software is much quicker!  During most of our first year, we used Unyte to do just that.  With Unyte, you simply have to start the application, decide which window to share (or share the entire desktop) and then send a link to the person (or group of people) that need to see it.  Recipients click on a hyperlink and load up a browser-based Java applet to see the shared windows. It's as simple as that.  The client doesn't have to install anything and it's fast! The host will receive an alert when the viewers can see his screen.  Unyte, used in conjunction with Skype, is really a great mix for meetings and sales demonstrations. We used the version for five people and it worked well, until we found Microsoft SharedView.

Microsoft SharedView

A few weeks back, we discovered Microsoft SharedView while it was still in beta. SharedView is similar to Unyte, but 15 people can participate in a shared session.  The only big drawback is that everyone has to download the software.  So if you want to quickly present something to a client, it's a little bit more complicated if they have to install it.  However, SharedView does allow any participant to share their desktop for the others to see (only one person can share at any given time). During a software demo, we used this capability to have the client show us their current point of sale! Additionally, the software gives other people the possibility to take control of the session and perform operations on the computer that is sharing an application. You can also share documents pretty easily with everyone and send chat messages, but we still use Skype for voice communication. We now prefer SharedView to Unyte when it is a possibility to install software on every participant's computer.

Lesson 8) Blogging!

We've been able to connect with tons of great people thanks to our blog, and have lots of fun perfecting our writing skills. We find that figuring out what to say (and what your audience is interested in hearing) is the hardest task when you start a blog. We still don't know if we should focus on giving away code or writing more experiences pieces like this one. Let us know!

BlogEngine.Net

Our blogging software, BlogEngine.Net, is simply terrific.  Free, fast, really easy to theme, has some good extensions and integrates really well with Windows Live Writer.  One of the main advantages for us is that it is open source and it is written in .NET, allowing us to perform minor behavior changes as needed.   It still has a few bugs that can be annoying, but from what we have seen so far, it is performing really well.  It supports multiple authors, an important feature for us because we have two people posting on the blog.

Lesson 9) When not to use communication tools

The most important lesson we learned during our first year of operations as a distributed development team wasn't a revelation but rather a confirmation of our expectations. Communication and collaboration tools are great, but technology doesn't solve conflicts. We're a closely knit team and have worked together for a number of years, greatly reducing the number of conflicts we may have. The conflicts we have are generally superficial, but as an example, let's consider an architectural decision where the two decision makers have divergent opinions on the best solution. Although instant messaging is great for efficiency reasons, it is not the best medium to argument on the merits of your solution. Indeed, we've all seen the politically incorrect "Arguing on the Internet is like running in the Special Olympics; even if you win, you're still retarded". The main problem is related to the lack of emotional expressiveness of concise instant messages or emails and since it is discussed in great lengths by very good authors, we'll leave a detailed analysis of the situation to them! As a side note, firing people via email might have seemed like a good idea for RadioShack, but we at LavaBlast shall stay away from such brilliant strategies!

Conclusion

Communication is the most important part of starting a business. Even if you're the only person in your company, you still have to communicate with your customers! We hope that you'll discover at least one cool collaboration tool today! Remember to come back next week for Part 3 of our series.

Jeff Moser's recent post on becoming a grandmaster developer was very inspiring. I'm now consciously forcing myself to work on different, harder, problems on a daily basis. Today, I wanted to tackle a nasty memory leak on FranchiseBlast that had been bugging us for months. Actually, it only made the ASP.NET application restart twice (which has no impact because our session state is kept in the state service), but we've been postponing this bug for months :)

The bug was simple to reproduce. Simply refresh a particular page a hundred or so times and observe the worker process' memory usage continuously increase. dotTrace was not very useful today, because most of the memory was consumed by Strings.

I landed on the If broken it is, fix it you should blog. Reading the blog post and noticing how Tess knows much more than I do about debugging .NET applications, I figured I'd improve my .NET debugging skills by playing with WinDbg. My guess is that many of you haven't played with WinDbg either and that's why I thought I'd write this post. With no previous experience with the tool, I managed to learn enough to be able to solve my bug within a couple hours (learning time included). However, this is a situation where I am grateful to have had the chance to play with the low-level details (assembly language / computer architecture) during my undergrad software engineering studies.

WinDbg Installation

The article says simply run "!dumpheap -min 85000 -stat" to figure out which objects are using over 85k memory. Vaguely remembering doing something similar in VS.NET, I tried the command window, to no avail. After some googling, I understood we wanted to launch WinDbg with the SOS extension (Son of Strike.. not Summer of Sam :)). I managed to get everything running (installed WinDbg, attached to w3wp.exe, ran ".loadby sos mscorwks") and later found setup instructions on the same blog, which would have made my life easier. I still haven't remembered (nor have I looked) how to load SOS inside VS.NET instead of the external tool, but I'm pretty sure it can be done.

Playing around

I played around with various strategies found on the same blog, such as figuring out how much I was caching.  I didn't think caching was my problem, but wanted to play around with the tool.

Attempting to run an interesting command found on the aforementioned blog post, I ran into a syntax error:

.foreach (runtime {!dumpheap -mt 0x01b29dfc -short}){.echo ******************;!dumpobj poi(${runtime}+0x3c);.echo cache size

Of course, this was a blog formatting issue, as the real command was:

.foreach (runtime {!dumpheap -mt 0x01b29dfc -short}){.echo ******************;!dumpobj poi(${runtime}+0x3c);.echo cache size:;!objsize poi(${runtime}+0xc) }

It didn't teach me much :) One command that appeared to be very interesting to me was !dumpaspnetcache. This appeared to be exactly what I was looking for. However, the command is only available in SOS for .NET 1.0/1.1 and I'm trying to debug a .NET 2.0 application. I did lose some time unloading the current SOS and loading the one in the clr10 subfolder (which offers !dumpaspnetcache), but it complained that the command didn't work for .NET 2.0.

The main lesson learned here is that !dumpaspnetcache does not work on .NET 2.0. There is a workaround listed in the comments of the blog post, but I didn't try it out.

Solving a problem

1. I identified that most of my memory was consumed by strings using !dumpheap -stat.
2. I ran !dumpheap -min 85000 -stat to a view only the largest strings. I observed only three strings (out of approximately 400,000) and that, in total, they accounted for less than 10% of the memory used by my strings.
3. I ran !dumpheap -mt 790fd8c4 -min 85000 to view the memory locations of these strings (where the MT 790fd8c4 was in the results of step 2).
4. I ran !dumpobj 0c6800c0 to display the contents of one of the strings (where the address 0c6800c0 was in the result of step 3.)
5. I saw the string was a simple ASP.NET AJAX script built by the framework. Repeating for the other objects, I didn't find anything interest. In addition, these were only 3 of my 400,000 strings.
6. I ran !dumpheap -min 10000 -max 85000 -stat to get a feeling of how many objects were of a particular size. I repeated the exercise for various ranges and ended up discovering that 90% of my strings were under 100 bytes (50% of the memory usage).
7. I ran !dumpobj 17386ce8 on one of the random 100 byte strings and discovered a country name. Interesting. This means I have a country name in here that is not getting disposed. I only have country names in my address editor, which uses a SubSonic DropDownList.
8. I ran !gcroot 17386ce8 to look at who was referencing this string and confirmed that it wasn't getting collected by the garbage collector (see below).
9. I looked at the handles and noticed that I had a user control which was listed as an event listener. Therefore, I discovered that we were registering the UserControl to listen to an event but never broke the link when we were done with the UserControl.
10. Looking at the code, I saw we were adding the event listener in the Page_Load but never removing it. I now simply remove the event handler during the Page_PreRender event, when listening to events it is no longer necessary in my scenario.
11. I repeatedly loaded the page and saw memory go up but back down again after the garbage collector does its job. Problem solved! (knock on wood)

Here's the result of my !gcroot command.

DOMAIN(0E68E998):HANDLE(Pinned):ed712f0:Root:0a646bd0(System.Object[])->
17cd3dc4(System.EventHandler`1[[LBBoLib.BO.Utility.GenericEventArgs`1[[System.Web.UI.Page, System.Web]], LBBoLib]])->
161a6630(System.Object[])->
173c8e18(System.EventHandler`1[[LBBoLib.BO.Utility.GenericEventArgs`1[[System.Web.UI.Page, System.Web]], LBBoLib]])->
1736abe4(ASP.usercontrols_content_searchpanel_ascx)->
1626d460(ASP.users_aspx)->
1736e234(ASP.usercontrols_content_users_usereditor_ascx)->
1736ff4c(ASP.usercontrols_shared_user_accountinformation_ascx)->
1737d558(ASP.usercontrols_shared_user_addressselectionpanel_ascx)->
1737d974(ASP.usercontrols_shared_user_addresseditor_ascx)->
1737e044(SubSonic.Controls.DropDown2)->
173866dc(System.Web.UI.WebControls.ListItemCollection)->
173866ec(System.Collections.ArrayList)->
173894b8(System.Object[])->
17386d0c(System.Web.UI.WebControls.ListItem)->
17386ce8(System.String)

Conclusion

In total, I only spent a couple hours fiddling around with WinDbg but I am very happy to have a new tool in my tool belt (and to have solved my bug). I strongly recommend reading the various tutorials on Tess's blog. I also found a WinDbg / SOS cheat sheet, which you might find interesting.

Jennifer, one of my high school friends living in Montreal, recently started her own hair salon. Her employees live in Boston and Florida whereas her biggest customer is located in New York. The previous declaration makes no sense given the industry, but it does make sense in ours! Software can be produced anywhere and delivered to customers worldwide via the Internet. Furthermore, our increased connectivity helps businesses target very specialized niches which would not be viable on the local market. (For an overview of the subject, please refer to the excellent The Long Tail.) We're pushing it one step further with LavaBlast, which we started about a year ago, because our team is distributed. We can be categorized as a bootstrapped MicroISV (less than ten people producing software products with no outside funding), and we'd like to share some of our experiences.

We love to read about other startups and why they succeeded, such as Jessica Livingston's Founders At Work, but we're even more interested in companies that failed. On one side, it is very motivating to ready books such as Founders At Work and learn how the guys behind Hot Or Not started it all and got lucky with a very simple idea. On the other hand, knowing more about failures helps you learn from other people's mistakes. Books like Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering helped, but were are not start-up focused. If you're considering starting your own software startup, do take the time to read up on why startups fail, even if it is not the subject of today's post.

I hope you'll enjoy reading this series of posts and will be unable to resist posting comments and starting interesting discussions. Part 1 focuses on the basics, Part 2 revolves around communication, and Part 3 talks about what we've learned concerning marketing, sales, and growth.

Our Context

LavaBlast Software was started by two recent graduates from the software engineering program at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada. After the bachelor's degree, Etienne moved to Montreal because of an attractive employment opportunity while Jason completed his master's. Both have been programming since their early teens on a wide variety of software systems in their various positions at companies of all shapes & sizes. From tiny web design shops, to medium-sized software firms in the electric industry, to second language schools for civil servants, to large Government departments, the founders had the chance to play with software from two perspectives. One one side we have small software companies who live and breathe software and on the other we have large-scale businesses in which most people are not necessarily computer-savvy (except for the IT departments). Additionally, we sidelined as male strippers at bachelorette parties, to pay for our university studies.

It did not take long to discover that we were so passionate about software that we wanted to start our own software company, not work in corporate Dilbert-reading sweatshops. Of course, this is simply caricature, as we worked on very interesting/challenging systems while in larger companies. There's nothing wrong with working in IT departments, but it wasn't a fit for our entrepreneurial drive. On top of that, we love working on projects where we get direct feedback from our customers, instead of internal company tools.

It was clear we were to start a software company, but did not know what nor when. The original plan had been acquire experience and a monetary cushion to allow us to start working on the next big thing. Before taking the plunge and leaving our day jobs, we wanted to have a good idea. We considered various ideas, but being recent graduates with student loans, going out on a limb and working with no revenue on a magical idea for an undetermined period of time was not a very attractive solution. However, we did find a very attractive business opportunity with people with whom Jason had been working for almost three years, on various web development projects. These partners have franchised their business and have acquired precious experience over the years. They are very knowledgeable and have a clear vision of the various business processes from the point of view of franchisors. After 20-some years in the business, they know what software is required, what to focus on, and how to support it.

Discussions ensued, and LavaBlast was formed. We produce industry-specific software solutions for franchisors. All our products are integrated via FranchiseBlast, which cuts down franchisor/franchisee costs at the same time as favoring re-use from a software engineering aspect. We have a base product offering which we tailor to our customer's specific business processes. In a sense, we sell software products with a side order of software services.

In summary:

• No outside funding.
• Small distributed team.
• A mix of products and services.
• We eat our own dog food.

Lesson 1) The Great Idea

Simply put, chances are you won't think of the next big thing. Even if you do, you probably won't have the resources, experience, or contacts, to turn your idea into billions. We were not expecting miracles but were on the lookout many months in advance. One thing we learned while reading Founders At Work is that many software startups are formed without the faintest clue of what the product/service will be. The most important part of the company is not the idea but the people. A small and closely knit team of people who've worked together in the past is a recipe for success, regardless of the idea. Indeed, execution is key! Partnering with people who have a track record of bringing ideas to reality is, in our opinion, the most important part of the business.

We are very happy that we did not wait on having a brilliant breakthrough idea and started our company immediately. We evaluated opportunities and picked the one that made the most business sense, knowing we can adapt along the way. Having made the plunge early in our careers, we felt we didn't have anything to lose because we didn't have that many constraints such as leaving a high paying job, a mortgage and student loans to pay, kids to feed, etc. The more acquainted you get with stable employment, the harder it is to leave. Still, it is worth mentioning that while we were very comfortable with our technical skills, our network of contacts is not as large as it would have been if we had been under someone else's employment for 5-10 years. On the bright side, we don't have 10 year of accumulated bitterness to carry around and we're in the best phase of our development careers (from a production standpoint).

Simply put, talk to people around you and reflect on what pieces of software would scratch your itch. There are business opportunities all around you... all you need to do is decide on what's the best fit for your current situation! Are you smart and can get things done? Are you able to adapt to your environment and pursue different opportunities when they present themselves? If so, don't wait for an idea that may never come and enjoy the ride!

Lesson 2) Eating your own dog food

It's been said time and time again, you need people using your software in order for its quality to reach high standards. Here at LavaBlast, we're fortunate to be able to develop UsWare because we're involved in our partner's the day-to-day franchise operations. As developers, we proactively solve problems before anyone reports them because we feel like we are part of the franchise. Furthermore, since we built our infrastructure to be re-usable, we recently launched SupportBlast as a clone of our FranchiseBlast solution. SupportBlast is basically our mini-CRM and we've integrated our software registration and license key generator in there. Although the strategy does have its limitations, using our own products helps us boost our software quality. Furthermore, for our kind of software, it would have been impossible to develop anything coherent without actual customers.

It takes ten years to build a great software product and it also takes ten years to become a software grandmaster.  You understand that quality takes time and effort and you'll only discover your software's weaknesses by listening to critique. It's better to be harsh on yourself than listening to someone scream over the phone, don't you think? 

Lesson 3) Mix of products and services

As stated previously, our company has currently received no outside funding (nor have we invested millions from our personal fortunes). We doubt angel investors or venture capitalists would be interested in our company because we're not aiming for a 100:1 return on investment. We could change our strategy and go for an all-or-nothing gamble, but we're more interested in growing our company organically. We know our company can be profitable using our current strategy, but we understand that we are not going to be the next FaceBook and my guess is that your company might fall into this same category. More importantly, we agree with Spolsky's model of company growth, and aim to be profitable from day one.

The main question for our type of company is how can we pay the bills while developing our product? The holy grail for return on investment in our business implies no additional work on the developer's part to support a new customer. Microsoft doesn't need to make adjustments to Word to sell it to a new customer and FaceBook allows its users to change the content of their personal pages themselves. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a good web design firm will create interfaces from scratch, adjusted to the needs (and tastes) of each of its clients. In the end, we want to be a product company but we need to build good products (and accumulate a critical mass of customers) before it pays the bills. We wanted to start our business immediately, not work on it on weeknights and during weekends for a couple years. Because of this, we decided our main interest was our product line but we'd perform services on the side as short-term an income generator.

We were open to external contracts, but did not end up doing any work outside of our product line. We're very happy of this fact because the solution managed to sustain its development without having to dilute our efforts with side-contracts (such as bachelorette parties).

Conclusion

Have fun but expect a bumpy ride. If you're not happy in your own company, doing what you want to do, you have a problem. Still, as with anything, you'll have some good days and some bad. In a startup, expect a roller coaster of emotions because you'll certainly get very excited by a certain situation but crash & burn when it doesn't materialize. In addition, not all work is exciting. You're starting a company and you have to do everything yourself. Doing accounting at 11PM on a Saturday night is not my idea of fun. Generally, however, it is very gratifying to build your own company from scratch and if you're fit for the challenge, I encourage you to try it out! The worst thing that can happen is that you will fail, lose some cash, gain valuable life lessons, and go back to working for someone else (or start over with a new idea :)).

Come back next week for part 2!

Over the past month, I've been working hard on our business plan's second iteration. We've accomplished a lot in our first year and things look very promising for the future.  Writing a business plan helps an entrepreneur flesh out various concepts, including one's core competency and niche market. We illustrate in great detail what makes LavaBlast such a great software company for franchisors and the process of writing it down made me wonder about what made improved my software engineering talents, personally. Luckily for you, this post is not about me personally but rather an element of my childhood that impacted my career.

I don't recall exactly how old I was when I received an 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) for Christmas, but I do remember playing it compulsively (balanced with sports like baseball, soccer and hockey!). The first game I owned was Super Mario Bros but I later obtained its successors to augment my (fairly small) cartridge collection. For the uninitiated, the NES does not incorporate any functionality to allowing saving the player's progress. Countless hours were spent playing and replaying the same levels, allowing me to progress to the end of the game and defeating my arch-nemesis, Bowser.

I enjoyed the time during which I played video games and it irritates me to hear people complaining about how video games will convert their children into violent sore-loser bums. In any case, I'd rather focus on the positive aspects of playing Super Mario Bros and other video games during my childhood. Just like mathematics develops critical thinking and problem solving skills, I strongly believe these video games influenced my personality to a point where they are probably defined my career. Disclaimer: I don't play video games that much anymore, but over the last year, I did purchase a Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS Lite because I love the technology and the company's vision.

Quality #1: Persistence

Some people say I am a patient person, but I would beg to differ. I have trouble standing still intellectually, and although it is a strength in my industry, it isn't the best personality trait :) However, I am VERY persistent. I will attempt solving a problem over and over until I find a solution. Although I don't experience many painful programming situations on a daily basis, I very rarely give up on any programming problems. If I can't solve the problem immediately, it will keep nagging at me until I find a solution. A direct parallel can be traced with playing the Super Mario Bros series where the whole game had to be played over and over again to make any progress. (Anyone else remember trying to jumper over a certain gap in the floor in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game only to fall in the gap and have to climb back up again?) The games helped me train my persistence, a tool which any entrepreneur must use every day.

Quality #2: Pattern Recognition

Software engineering is all about pattern recognition. Refactoring the code to increase reuse, extracting behavioural patterns inside the strategy design pattern, creating object inheritance trees, or writing efficient algorithms based on observed patterns. I feel pattern recognition is one of my strengths, since I can easily see commonalities between seemingly different software problems. I believe this skill was refined by playing various video games, because the the player must observe the enemy's behaviour in order to succeed. In some games, agility doesn't really matter: it's all about knowing the pattern required to defeat the enemy (to the point where it sometimes become frustrating!). The most challenging parts of video games is when the game deliberately trains you to believe you'll be able to stomp an enemy by using a particular technique but, to your surprise, the technique fails miserably. You need to adapt to your environment, and think outside the box.

Quality #3: Creativity

Mathematicians and software engineers are creative thinkers, more than the uninitiated might think. I see software as a form of art, because of its numerous qualities that are hard to quantify. Software creators are artists in the sense that regardless of their level of experience, some will manage to hit the high notes while others could try their whole lifetime without attaining the perfect balance of usability, functionality, performance, and maintainability. Playing a wide breadth of video game styles lets you attack different situations with a greater baggage. I'm not totally sure how putting Sims in a pool and removing the ladder or shooting down hookers in Grand Theft Auto helped me in my day-to-day life, but it was still very entertaining :) The upcoming Spore game is very appealing to me because it combines creativity with pattern recognition, thanks to generative programming.  If you haven't heard about this game, I recommend you check it out immediately!

Quality #4: Speedy reactions

At LavaBlast, such as in many other software startups, it is critically important that all developers be fast thinkers. Indeed, when your core expertise is production, as opposed to research and development, you need to be able to make wise decisions in a short period of time. Personally, I can adapt to the setting (research environment versus startup environment) but my strength is speedy problem solving and I consider myself a software "cowboy". By combining my knowledge of of how to right reusable and maintainable code with my good judgement of what battles are worth fighting, I can quickly come up with appropriate solutions, given the context. In video games, the player needs to react quickly to avoid incoming obstacles while staying on the offensive to win the game. Of course, the mental challenges we face in our day-to-day lives of developing software is much more complex than what we encounter playing video games (which trains physical reaction time), but there is still a correlation between the two tasks.

Quality #5: Thoroughness

What differentiates a good software engineer from a plain vanilla software developer is their concern for quality software, across the board. Software quality is attained the combined impact of numerous strategies, but testing software as you write it, or after you change it, is critical. For the uninitiated, a popular methodology is to test BEFORE you write code. In any case, this talent can also be developed by video games such as the classic Super Mario World (SNES) where the player tries to complete all 96 goals (72 levels) by finding secret exits. Reaching thoroughness requires the player to think outside the typical path (from left to right) and look around for any secret locations (above the ceiling). Finding secret exits is akin to achieving better code coverage by trying atypical scenarios. 

Quality #6: Balance

Playing Super Mario Bros as a child helped me develop a certain sense of balance between my various responsibilities (school) and entertainment activities (sports, games, social activities). If you're spending 16 hours a day playing World of Warcraft or performing sexual favors in exchange for WoW money, your mother is right to think that you have a problem. Launching a software startup is a stressful experience, and it helps to be able to wind down with a beer and a soothing video game. A quick 20min run on a simple game before bed can work wonders! Of course, it is no replacement for sports or social activities, but it sure beats dreaming about design patterns.

What's missing? 

In my opinion, there are two major qualifies that video games don't impact. Having these two qualities is a requirement to becoming a good software engineer. First, video games do not help you interpret other people's needs. Second, video games do not help you communicate efficiently. What does? Experience, Experience, Experience. Being able to deal with people on a daily basis is mandatory, and the video games I played as a child did not help. However, this statement may no longer be true! Today, many massively multiplayer online games require good collaboration  and organizational skills. Furthermore, the new generation of gaming consoles are using the Internet to allow people to play together. 

Furthermore, I find games like the new Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) very interesting for future mechanical engineers. Indeed, the game presents a three-dimensional environment in an novel way, training the brain to think differently about three-dimensional space. You have to play the game to understand, but because the camera is not always showing Mario in the same angle, you have to get a feeling of the environment even if you don't see it (you're on the opposite side of a planet) or are upside down on the southern hemisphere. I can imagine children and teenagers playing the game today will have greater facility to imagine an object from various perspectives, while in studying physics or mechanical engineering in university.

In conclusion, I admit my whole argument can be invalided by saying that I played these types of games because I was inherently inclined to the software engineering profession, but the commonalities are still interesting to review! What are your thoughts on the subject? What do you think drove you to this profession (or drove you away)?

Legal Disclaimer: Did you know that the usage of the title of "software engineer" is much more regulated in Canada than it is in the United States? Although I detain a bachelor's degree in software engineering, and a master's degree in computer science which focused on requirements engineering, I can currently only claim the title of "junior engineer", as I recently joined the professional order.

Follow up: powerrush on DotNetKicks informed me that I'm not the only one who feels games influence software engineers. 

As an ASP.NET web developer, there are a few tasks that I must perform often for which I am glad to be able to perform via the command line. GUIs are great, but there are some things that are simply faster to do via the command line. Although we do have Cygwin installed to enhance our tool belt with commands like grep, there are a few ASP.NET related commands that I wanted to share with you today. Some of these are more useful on Windows 2003 server (because you can run multiple worker processes), but I hope you will find them useful.

1) Restarting IIS

The iisreset command can be used to restart IIS easily from the command line. Self-explanatory.

Attempting stop...
Internet services successfully stopped
Attempting start...
Internet services successfully restarted

2) Listing all ASP.NET worker processes

You can use tasklist to get the running worker processes.

tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq w3wp.exe"

Image Name PID Session Name Session# Mem Usage
========================================================================
w3wp.exe 129504 Console 0 40,728 K

You can also use the following command if you have Cygwin installed (easier to remember)

tasklist | grep w3wp.exe

w3wp.exe 4456 Console 0 54,004 K
w3wp.exe 5144 Console 0 101,736 K
w3wp.exe 2912 Console 0 108,684 K
w3wp.exe 3212 Console 0 136,060 K
w3wp.exe 852 Console 0 133,616 K
w3wp.exe 352 Console 0 6,228 K
w3wp.exe 1556 Console 0 155,264 K
w3wp.exe 3480 Console 0 6,272 K

3) Associating a process ID with a particular application pool

Should you want to monitor memory usage for a particular worker process, the results shown above are not very useful. Use the iisapp command.

W3WP.exe PID: 4456 AppPoolId: .NET 1.1
W3WP.exe PID: 5144 AppPoolId: CustomerA
W3WP.exe PID: 2912 AppPoolId: CustomerB
W3WP.exe PID: 3212 AppPoolId: Blog
W3WP.exe PID: 852 AppPoolId: LavaBlast
W3WP.exe PID: 352 AppPoolId: CustomerC
W3WP.exe PID: 1556 AppPoolId: CustomerD
W3WP.exe PID: 3480 AppPoolId: DefaultAppPool

By using iisapp in conjunction with tasklist, you can know which task is your target for taskkill.

4) Creating a virtual directory

When new developers checkout your code for the first time (or when you upgrade your machine), you don’t want to spend hours configuring IIS. You could back up the metabase and restore it later on, but we simply use iisvdir. Assuming your root IIS has good default configuration settings for your project, you can create a virtual directory like so:

iisvdir /create “Default Web Site” franchiseblast c:\work\lavablast\franchiseblast\

5) Finding which folder contains the desired log files.

IIS saves its log files in %WINDOWS%\System32\LogFiles, but it creates a different subdirectory for each web application. Use iisweb /query to figure out which folder to go check out.

Connecting to server ...Done.
Site Name (Metabase Path) Status IP Port Host
==============================================================================

Default Web Site (W3SVC/1) STARTED ALL 80 N/A
port85 (W3SVC/858114812) STARTED ALL 85 N/A

6) Many more commands…

Take a peek at the following articles for more command-line tools that might be useful in your context:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/b8721f32-696b-4439-9140-7061933afa4b.mspx?mfr=true

http://www.tech-faq.com/using-iis-command-line-utilities-to-manage-iis.shtml

Conclusion

There are numerous command line tools distributed by Microsoft that help you manage your ASP.NET website. Obviously, the commands listed here are the tip of the iceberg! Although many developers know about these commands because they had to memorize them for some test, many are not even aware of their existence. Personally, I feel that if you write a single script that sets up IIS as you need it to develop, you’ll save time setting up new developers or when you re-install your operating system. Script it once and reap the rewards down the road.