One of the "enjoyable" parts of running a web hosting company is dealing with the changes that appear in new releases of products. I run exclusively on Windows, but I only use a few of the Microsoft family -- Windows Server, SQL Server, and Virtual Server.

The other day, I was trying to pull a file off the server with some generic extension, like .dat. The server kept insisting that the file wasn't there, which seemed strange. I could see it in the folder, could see it with FTP, but I couldn't download it.

It turns out that IIS 6.0 introduced a new feature that only lets the server send files that have "defined" extensions in the MIME map inside the IIS console. <a href='http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;326965' class='text'>Click here</a> to read the Microsoft KB article discussing the feature.

It would be nice if there was a complete list of these sorts of changes that affect how you do normal business. It's like when XP SP 2 came out...nothing but problems because they turned on lots of features that most people didn't want. Microsoft does this for "security" reasons, but honestly, sometimes security should be tempered by the loss of productivity trying to undo those features. In my case, it broke my ability to do Visual Studio .NET debugging, which isn't the easiest thing to set up in the first place. Took me weeks to find a solution to the issue related to XP SP2.

Luckily, Windows 2003 Server SP1, which also included some of the same features, didn't automatically turn those features on. Perhaps Microsoft learned from the issues with XP SP2 and decided not to irritate the folks who are paying most of the bills at Microsoft.