Mike Chamberlain's questions

I have a custom HTTP module for an ASP.NET MVC3 website that I'm loading from web.config:

<system.web>
    <httpModules>
      <add name="MyModule" type="MySolution.Web.MyHttpModule, MySolution.Web" />
    </httpModules>
</system.web>

The module is loaded correctly when I run the site from within the VS web server (the break point in my Init method is hit) but when I host it in IIS it seems to be ignored (the breakpoint is missed and the module's functionality is absent from the site). I have tried it on two separate IIS boxes with a similar result.

What am I doing wrong? Is there a setting I have to flick in enable IIS to load modules from a site's web.config?

We currently have our backups managed by a third party company. There are a bunch of agent jobs created that take full backups (4 times a day) and transaction log backups (4 times an hour).

We now want to manage our backups in house, but don't want to disable the third party's jobs until we are sure that we have everything configured correctly internally

So I am proposing to have a short period (say, a couple of days) where backups are being taken both by the old and the new system.

I am wondering what the ramifications of having these two different systems both manage backups, and the potential pitfalls of having backups taken simultaneously. Is this even supported? If so, and bearing in mind that the system can cope with one backup without any noticeable performance degradation, is it fairly logical to assume that it should be able to cope with two simultaneous backups?

Currently the load on the server is fairly light and it rarely struggles.

Any advice is appreciated

What are my options for achieving a warm backup server for a SQL Server Express instance running a single database?

Sitting beside my production SQL Server 2008 Express box I have a second physical box currently doing nothing. I want to use this second box as a warm backup server by somehow replicating my production database in near real time (a little bit of data loss is acceptable). The database is very small and resources are utilized very lightly.

In the case that the production server dies, I would manually reconfigure my application to point to the backup server instead.

Although Express doesn't support log shipping natively, I am thinking that I could manually script a poor man's version of it, where I use batch files to take the logs and copy them across the network and apply them to the second server at 5 minute intervals.

Does anyone have any advice on whether this is technically achievable, or if there is a better way to do what I am trying to do?

Note that I want to avoid having to pay for the full version of SQL Server and configure mirroring as I think it is an overkill for this application. I understand that other DB platforms may present suitable options (eg. a MySQL Cluster), but for the purposes of this discussion, let's assume we have to stick to SQL Server.