The Official Microsoft IIS Site

How To: Collect a Crash dump of an IIS worker process on IIS 7.0 (and above)

WebTopics — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:17:00 GMT

Web server Administrators have been using the Debug Diagnostic 1.1 to troubleshoot crash\hang issues on IIS 5 and 6. The Debug Diagnostic tool needs no introduction. It is a great tool and it provides you a lot of flexibility in collecting crash dumps for any user mode process running on a server. But as of now, the Debug Diagnostic tool is *not* compatible with Windows Server 2008 and it is recommended that you not use it on a Windows 2008 server because you may get unexpected results. The...(read more)

IIS SEO Toolkit – Crawler Module Extensibility

CarlosAg Blog — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:55:00 GMT

Sample SEO Toolkit CrawlerModule Extensibility In this blog we are going to write an example on how to extend the SEO Toolkit functionality, so for that we are going to pretend our company has a large Web site that includes several images, and now we are interested in making sure all of them comply to a certain standard, lets say all of them should be smaller than 1024x768 pixels and that the quality of the images is no less than 16 bits per pixel. Additionally we would also like to be able to make...(read more)

IIS SEO Toolkit Extensibility

CarlosAg Blog — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:46:56 GMT

The IIS SEO Toolkit includes a lot of functionality built-in such as built-in violation rules, processing of different content types (like HTML, CSS, RSS, etc) and more, however it might not do all the things that you would need it to do, for example, it might not process a set of documents that you use, or it might not gather all the information that you are interested in while processing a document. The good news is that it includes enough extensibility to let you build on top of its rich capabilities...(read more)

Slides for IIS – Web Application Gallery presentation at DevConnections

CarlosAg Blog — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:55:44 GMT

Two weeks ago I presented at DevConnections the talk "AMS10: Developing and Deploying for the Windows Web App Gallery", here are the slides. Download the Web Application Gallery Talk slides here. A few final links: Microsoft Web Platform: http://www.microsoft.com/web/ Download Web PI: http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx Submit your Applications at: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/developer.aspx...(read more)

Lot’s of new software for IIS, ASP.NET, AJAX and PHP this week

bills — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:13:44 GMT

Wow, what a week of innovation for the Microsoft Web Platform. This week we released a ton of new software which, if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out. Here is a quick overview:

IIS Search Engine Optimization v1 final release!

The IIS team shipped the final release of IIS SEO toolkit which makes it easier to optimize your Website for search engines. It acts like a mini-search engine on your computer, scans your site and then provides useful tips for how to improve the relevance of your site to search engines. This tool is now out of beta and available for download through Web PI.

ASP.NET MVC 2 beta!

The ASP.NET team has been hard at work on the second release of MVC, which is now available to beta test. Phil has a great blog post on the release with links to the download page, readme notes and the source code. There are a bunch of new features in MVC 2 including AsyncController, expression based helpers, improvements with client validation, all new areas support, and more. Read more on Phil’s blog.

ASP.NET AJAX Library beta!

The ASP.NET AJAX team also has some exciting news with the release of the ASP.NET AJAX Library beta. James has a terrific blog post with the news This is the first project accepted into the new CodePlex Foundation! (more on that later) The ASP.NET AJAX Library has a new portal at www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary with tutorials, samples, and more. Read James’ post about the news and check it out!

IIS Application Request Router 2 final release!

The IIS team also released the final version of the IIS Application Request Router v2. This is a super powerful module that provides routing and load balancing capabilities for Windows and IIS. It makes it easy to create and manage an entire cluster of Web servers. Mai-lan has a lot of info on the release in her blog post and you can download ARR v2 using Web PI today.

PHP WinCache module final release - faster PHP on Windows!

The PHP team announced today the final release of the Windows Cache Extension for PHP, or WinCache for short, which makes PHP run much, much faster on Windows. The iBuildings guys released a benchmark showing how the WinCache extension speeds up PHP by as much as 2x over standard PHP. The other exciting part of this announcement is that the sources for the extension are now available under an open source BSD license and the source code is maintained and host on http://pecl.php.net/packages/wincache/ If you install PHP using Web PI, you automatically get WinCache.

Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP Released

Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : PHP — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:40:00 GMT

The Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) team announced today the release of Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP , a PHP accelerator that is used to increase the speed of PHP applications running on Windows and Windows Server. This is a production-ready release that is provided under an open source BSD license , with the source code hosted and maintained here , and the documentation hosted on php.net . You can find more details on this release on IIS team Product Unit Manager Mai-lan Tomsen...(read more)

Final RTW version of WINCACHE 1.0 released

don.raman — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:19:39 GMT

I am extremely proud to announce that we have released the final RTW version of WINCACHE 1.0. Please look at the forum announcement of the same at http://forums.iis.net/p/1162808/1925444.aspx#1925444 which contains all the details about the release. I would strongly recommend everyone running Beta/RC version of WINCACHE 1.0 to upgrade to the final RTW release. If you installed WINCACHE 1.0 RC from Microsoft Web Platform Installer, you can use the same to upgrade to RTW. Upgrade from RC to RTW is supported through WPI. If you have installed WINCACHE 1.0 RC/Beta manually, you will need to install the new binaries manually. Here are the steps:

Download appropriate bits from http://windows.php.net/downloads/pecl/wincache/

If you are running PHP 5.2.* you will need to download 'wincache52.exe'
If you are running PHP 5.3.* you will need to download 'wincache53.exe'

Run the executable from the saved location. If you are on Vista+ OS, I would advise you to run the executable as an administrator. Right click on the executable and click 'Run as administrator' button as shown below:

If you are prompted with UAC dialog, click 'Yes' to proceed.
Accept the license agreement.
Extract the files to choice of your location.
The folder will contain 4 files as shown below:

If your server is running, please stop it before you continue copying files.
Replace the old 'php_wincache.dll' with the new one.
Replace the old 'wincache.php' with the new one.
Start the server.

There are some good enhancements in this release. The 'wincache.php' file has been enhanced to support:

A brand new chart showing the state of cache memory consumption
Supports all different kind of IIS authentication
List of files displayed now in sorted order

There has been many critical bug fixes in the DLL itself. There were people who reported crashes and that to random crashes in WINCACHE DLL. All these crashes were happening because of the scavenging logic. WINCACHE on every request checks if there are stale files which need to be removed. There has been nasty bugs in this code path which has been fixed. If you are seeing WINCACHE crashing in event viewer or otherwise, most likely cause was scavenger not working properly. We believe the final RTW release will have all these issues fixed.

We have also addressed a situation where WINCACHE was making PHP bail out. This was happening because exception were not being handled properly from the extension. A detailed release notes can be found here.

WINCACHE is now also an open source from this release under BSD license. Extension source code can be found at http://pecl.php.net/package/WinCache. All the documentation about WINCACHE can be found at http://us3.php.net/wincache/. If you are having problem running WINCACHE please visit our forum at http://forums.iis.net/1164.aspx. If you have found a bug, you can report it at http://pecl.php.net/bugs/report.php?package=WinCache. We will be more than glad to help you.

In case you are interested in some performance benchmark regarding how WINCACHE competes with some of other available caching solution on Windows, here are the links (They are all published by our users/customers):

It has been a lot of hard work and sweat in the past 6-7 months when we started this project and now that we are done with version 1.0. I hope you all will like this. I would personally like to thank all of you for helping across different milestones in finding bugs, requesting feature enhancement and doing all little things which matter to us.

And yes, there is a future for WINCACHE and we are going to start working on V2 soon. We are totally committed here to make PHP work the best on IIS. So do drop all your ideas/suggestion and we would love to incorporate those in early stages.

Hopefully this release will help you running PHP on IIS faster. Thanks for patient reading and good bye.

Don.

Windows Cache Extension for PHP (aka, “WinCache”) 1.0 General Availability Today

mailant — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:21:59 GMT

Today we announce the general availability of the Windows Cache Extension for PHP 1.0 (affectionately known as “WinCache”), which is an open source built-for-Windows caching extension to the PHP engine. You can view, contribute and download the source code for WinCache at the PHP repository for extensions (http://pecl.php.net/package/WinCache), where we have joined other Linux-based PHP caches.

I wanted to thank Pierre Joye for his invaluable help in helping connect the IIS product team with PECL, and for agreeing to host the WinCache binaries on http://windows.php.net.

We cordially invite the PHP development community to join us in development of this caching extension for PHP on Windows. We already have gotten one contribution from the community in our pre-release mode and are very excited to have others join this new PHP on Windows caching community. The IIS team at Microsoft is going to start off the v2.0 development by adding a user cache and lazy class loading to the opcode cache, file cache, and relative file cache that is available today in WinCache 1.0.

I am proud of the WinCache project for many reasons, including:

WinCache solves a real customer problem. WinCache provides a Windows PHP caching extension that is free and part of the PECL extension library, and can accelerate the performance of all PHP applications on Windows.
WinCache is our first big open source contribution to the PHP on Windows community. The IIS team has made several code contributions (big fixes) to the PHP 5.3 release, as well as provided support for the Windows Installer for PHP community (John Mertic rocks) and the Windows documentation on the PHP website. This WinCache release is a substantial amount of code that we are open sourcing on the PECL extension library. We hope others join this new community to help accelerate PHP performance on Windows.
WinCache represents a series of “firsts” for Microsoft…first time Microsoft has contributed to the PECL repository, first Windows-based PHP cache, first joint community project between Microsoft and the PHP development community, first BSD license for the IIS team….and the list goes on. The WinCache feature team of Ruslan, Kanwal and Don are incredibly passionate about PHP on Windows, respond to their blog and forum comments, and lurk on the PHP on Windows mailing list if you want to connect with them.

Here’s some more information about WinCache.

What is WinCache?

WinCache is actually a collection of three caches:

An opcode file cache, just like the one that APC provides to cache compiled PHP code
A file cache to help when your PHP scripts run on remote servers. This is net new functionality that is not available in other caching modules at the time of this blog.
A relative file cache to cache relative file paths for when you are running PHP scripts on remote servers.

WinCache itself was designed, written, and tested by the IIS engineering team that also brings you FastCGI, the core PHP hosting platform in IIS. We are planning to add more caches to WinCache in 2010.

What is the WinCache license?

WinCache is licensed under BSD.

How do I get WinCache?

You can compile WinCache as part of your PHP compilation from the PECL library.

If you download any PHP application from Web Platform Installer and/or the Windows Web Application Gallery (WordPress, Moodle, SilverStripe, SugarCRM, Acquia Drupal, Gallery 2, and any other new PHP app in the Web App Gallery), you will automatically get WinCache installed on your IIS computer as part of the PHP application install. We want to make sure that your PHP application deployment and hosting experience is great on Windows.

How do I learn more about WinCache?

You can learn more about WinCache’s features and how to get started on the http://php.iis.net community site. You can also check out the blogs for the feature team (Kanwal, Ruslan, Don) or visit the community forum which is supported by the feature team and WinCache community.

How much faster is it to run WinCache with my PHP application?

We are seeing quite a significant increase in performance. But don’t take our word for it. Check out the perspective of other members of the PHP developer community:

Cal Evans’ benchmark results
TechPortal at iBuildings.com benchmark results

We hope that others try WinCache and publish their findings as well.

Why is Microsoft investing in making PHP run faster?

IIS is all about making apps run at their finest on IIS. We have a built-in advantage with ASP.NET apps because we can walk down the hallway in our building here in the Seattle area to talk to the ASP.NET team about how to make the ASP.NET on IIS experience better. But we also care deeply about the PHP experience on IIS – there are some amazing applications like WordPress and Drupal that form the foundation of many a Web site on the Internet. We are committed to making those applications run great on Windows, which is the primary motivation for our WinCache project.

How do I learn more about WinCache?

To learn more about WinCache, you can check out:

The PECL documentation on WinCache
The PHP on Windows feature team (Kanwal, Ruslan, and Don) blogs
The WinCache community forum
The IIS.NET documentation on WinCache
The source code of WinCache on PECL, licensed under BSD
How to file bugs on WinCache in PECL

Thanks,

Mai-lan

WinCache Extension 1.0 for PHP – Release to Web

RuslanY Blog — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:01:05 GMT

The Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP – RTW is available for download. This is a final, production-ready release that is provided under an open source BSD license with the source code hosted and maintained on http://pecl.php.net/packages/wincache/ . Install the Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP – RTW To install the Windows Cache Extension for PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3, use the download links at the extension’s home page at http://www.iis.net/expand/WinCacheForPhp . The installation...(read more)

IIS SEO Toolkit - New Reports (Redirects and Link Depth)

CarlosAg Blog — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:33:00 GMT

In the new version of the IIS SEO Toolkit we added two new reports that are very interesting, both from an SEO perspective as well as from user experience and site organization. These reports are located in the Links category of the reports Redirects This report shows a summary of all the redirects that were found while crawling the Web site. The first column (Linking-URL) is the URL that was visited that resulted in redirection to the Linked-URL (second column). The third column (Linking-Status...(read more)

IIS SEO Toolkit - Start new analysis automatically through code

CarlosAg Blog — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:00:28 GMT

One question that I've been asked several times is: " Is it possible to schedule the IIS SEO Toolkit to run automatically every night? " . Other related questions are: " Can I automate the SEO Toolkit so that as part of my build process I'm able to catch regressions on my application? ", or " Can I run it automatically after every check-in to my source control system to ensure no links are broken? ", etc. The good news is that the answer is YES !. The bad news is that...(read more)

IIS SEO Toolkit 1.0 Final Release Available Today

mailant — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:06:19 GMT

Today, IIS launched the IIS SEO Toolkit 1.0, a free, fully supported extension to IIS7 that makes it easy for you to build and maintain Web sites optimized for search engines and site quality. In a world where thousands of new Web sites appear on the Internet every month, it is more important than ever to provide a Web destination that is easily discoverable by search engines. Users have a tremendous amount of choice on Web sites today, and poor site quality, like slow response time and broken links, will end up costing you site visitors and visits. Developers and site administrators can download the IIS SEO Toolkit today using Web Platform Installer or directly from the Microsoft Download Center, and start optimizing any Web sites on Windows (ASP.NET, HTML, ASP, or PHP).

The IIS SEO Toolkit installs and runs on IIS 7.x, which is the Microsoft Web server shipped as part of Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

If you are a site administrator, you will love using the IIS SEO toolkit because you don’t have to write code to improve your Web site’s “searchability” by Bing, Google and other Web sites, and you can directly impact the quality of your Web site. You can find and fix-up site issues by running reports that:

analyze everything from broken links to load times on Web pages
discover common browsing paths through your Web site taken by customers
duplicate files and other issues with site quality

If you are a developer, you will be interested in the IIS SEO toolkit because it can simplify your development process for new Web sites and help you maintain existing sites. You can use the same Web server administration console that you use for managing your site to:

run reports to report on broken links across your Web site
control robots crawling behavior on your site
build custom site analysis reports for site administrators
add and edit sitemaps and sitemap indices

One of the most powerful features in the IIS SEO toolkit is the built-in site analyzer that lets you run detailed reports on web sites that are hosted on external Web sites or your localhost environment.

The “dashboard” for the Site Analysis Report gives you a summary of violations and other built-in reports like pages with the most violations, or sort by violation categories or levels.

If you want to take a different “view” of your Web site, you can look at your site by content, performance or links. The query builder that comes with the Site Analysis tool lets you set up custom queries to get a detailed view of the content you care about. In this example below, you can see all the links to images on your site.

The IIS SEO toolkit is part of the IIS7 mission to provide the best Web application hosting platform for developers and administrators. We hope you enjoy using this extension and look forward to hearing your suggestions in our SEO Toolkit forum!

For more information, check out these sources:

Carlos’ blogs with many a post on the SEO toolkit
The public forum, monitored by the IIS product team, for SEO Toolkit
The SEO Toolkit extension page with a summary of features and links to more detailed articles

Announcing: IIS SEO Toolkit v1.0 release

CarlosAg Blog — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:06:21 GMT

Today we are announcing the final release of the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit v1.0 . This version builds upon the Beta 1 and Beta 2 versions and is 100% compatible with those versions so any report you currently have continues to work in the new version. The new version includes a set of bug fixes and new features such as: Extensibility . In this version we are opening a new set of API's to allow you to develop extensions for the crawling process, including the ability to augment...(read more)

Improve Web User Experience with IIS SEO Toolkit RTW and IIS URL Rewriter 2.0 RC

Windows Server Division WebLog : IIS — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Remember the scene in Diehard when he shoots the glass? That was cool. What’s even cooler is now you can fine tune your Web site for the search engine, thus improving the experience for your Web users. Today, Microsoft announced the releases of IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit RTW and IIS URL Rewriter 2.0 RC – both extensions for IIS. Don’t take it personally – I know it can be hard when your significant other tells you how to make improvements on something you worked hard on, let alone...(read more)

Streaming Media West

David Sayed's Microsoft Blog : iis — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:38:41 GMT

This week, I'm at Streaming Media West in San Jose, California. Seeing the sun, blue skies and relatively warm weather is a pleasant change from the rain swept northwest. Today is a special pre-conference half-day workshop on Live Broadcasting with Silverlight and Windows Media , which my colleague Chris Knowlton is running. We're videotaping it for posterity and will get it posted as soon as we can. On Wednesday morning, Marc Whitten, GM of Xbox Live will be delivering the keynote at 9am and on...(read more)