ASP.NET Core IIS InProcess hosting

Before ASP.NET Core 2.2 was released when hosting an ASP.NET Core application in IIS, what was happening behind the scenes is that ASP.NET Core was running as a separate process using Kestrel as the web server. An ASP.NET Core Module was configured in IIS to behave as a reverse proxy and forward the requests to the Kestrel server. This out-of-process hosting model introduced some extra overhead.

In ASP.NET Core 2.2 this was solved by introducing the InProcess hosting model. If you create a new ASP.NET Core 2.2 application, this is enabled by default. But for existing applications that you want to upgrade to ASP.NET Core 2.2 you have some extra steps to do.

Let’s walk through these steps:

Step 1: Update the target framework version to 2.2

Update the target framework version of your ASP.NET Core app to 2.2.

<TargetFramework>netcoreapp2.2</TargetFramework>

Step 2 - Update Microsoft.AspNetCore.App

Update the Microsoft.AspNetCore.App metapackage to at least 2.2.

< PackageReference Include="Microsoft.AspNetCore.App" Version="2.2.1" />

Step 3: Update your Web.Config file

Inside your web.config file you have to update the modules to AspNetCoreModuleV2 and add a hostingModel attribute with the value set to “InProcess”:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
    <handlers>
     <add name="aspNetCore" path="*" verb="*" modules="AspNetCoreModuleV2" resourceType="Unspecified" />
    </handlers>
    <aspNetCore processPath="dotnet" arguments=".\MyApp.dll" hostingModel="InProcess" />
   </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Remark: If you don't want to create a web.config, you can also enable this by setting the <AspNetCoreHostingModel> MSBuild property to InProcess in the .csproj.

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

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While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...

The art of simplicity

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