Been looking for something like this in a while to test newly setup or existing SMTP setups for simple server notification or business applications e.g. SharePoint, as it saves you having to install telnet or putty in order to send a quick test email to make sure its not getting blocked somewhere i.e. spam: ## Update ## Just found out there’s an actual powershell Cmdlet for this: Send-MailMessage! $msg = new-object Net.

One of the key things I’m liking with Windows Server 2012, is the new Server Manager. The new version is alot more useful than that of Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 in that it appears to work out of the box, where as the previous involved alot of “tweaking” to get WinRM working. This has a huge impact on the use of Server 2012 Core Edition, which unless you love doing everything on the command line or in PowerShell is pretty annoying to even get started with.

I Have always had a problem with IIS Manager using SQL Aliases when using the built in .Net membership providers (mainly cause its handy to test and setup the initial FBA user) but never managed to get down to the cause of the issue, just took it as one of those things. Luckily it was never really that important to resolve so it got left as specifying the alias in the web.

This one annoyed me for longer than I wish to share… If you are having problems using Windows Authentication on IIS (in particular with the ADFS 2.0 passive federation) where you can login fine with Internet Explorer but Google Chrome simply repeats asking for your login and password then this is for you! IIS has a new feature called “Extended Protection” for Windows Authentication. The appears to have an affect on Chrome but not IE, therefore to disable it do the following: