Jonathan's questions

Our web app has got pretty hefty, and takes a long time to launch on first load. The end-user sees 15-20 seconds of spinning progress bars until the login page. Once the first user has loaded, it's pretty instant to view the login page again.

I want to display a "The website is loading, please wait." in a responsive manner so that the end-user isn't left wondering what's happening.

Someone mentioned that they thought this might be possible with IIS8, but wasn't sure how.

I've not been able to find anything with an internet search, so I suspect it isn't possible, but in theory it should be fairly easy, and the App_Offline functionality exists, so I am still hopeful.

Can anyone confirm or deny whether this functionality is available, and if so, how to get to it?

Whilst trying to find the solution to a problem on one of my UAT servers which prevented IE10 from working with our ASP.NET app, I found an excellent article by Scott Hansleman explaining how to fix it.

One of the developers followed the instructions to fix it in a single project. We tested this, deployed it to UAT and it worked, but Scott's article recommended installing KB2600088.

I don't want to have to install this on any unnecessary machines, so my question is: Do I apply this to each developer's machine, or to my UAT environment?

I have two ISPs at two separate locations, both with separate SMTP servers. Neither SMTP server allows relaying from the other ISP, so when taking my laptop between each location, I have to swap between smtp servers.

I currently edit the /etc/hosts file to override smtp.magichost.com with the IP addresses of the SMTP server I'm supposed to be using, but that is a pain.

Is there a better way to do this?