Architect in a new age of IT

Performance counters are strange beasts but can be quite useful in order to keep an eye on how custom code is performing in a production environment, and can be invaluable to support staff or infrastructure teams in diagnosing potential causes of system resource issues. There are a few 'gotchas' though and I will try to list as many of them as I can recall: Creating a new performance counter category should ideally be done by a separate utility as the new category cannot be used by your custom code directly after it has been created. Also the process creating the counter categories must have write access to the registry. Counter values will expire after the allotted time interval, so for example an AverageTimer counter type needs to be populated at least once every second otherwise you end up with zero values (and an ugly chart when using perfmon). Choosing the correct counter type is important, and remember that a lot of the hard work is done for you all you need to do is sup...

Investigating an ongoing problem where a Web Application configured with Claims Authentication (with NTLM) occasionally causes users to re-enter credentials through a pop up dialog. We have been looking into this issue for a long time with no clear-cut answer as to why it is happening, and more confusingly it only happened in our Live environment and not on our development or test servers. So we decided to set up a new environment (1 APP + 1 WFE) and configure it to run the same site collection, but this time configured to use Claims with Kerberos as the authentication method. After carefully configuring everything (including SPNs), everything seemed to be running smoothly until it was unleashed on our tester. Within the first hour he was presented with a login prompt, so I had a close look at the ULS logs and found a few unexpected error entries corresponding to Claims Authentication: 09/20/2011 15:11:25.20 w3wp.exe (0x03E0) 0x1ABC SharePoint Foundation Claims Authentication bz7l Medi...