Tobin Titus Blog

This topic has been covered many times both by Microsoft and non-Microsoft employees. However, I’ve recently been asked what the main features of IIS 7 are and have seen a great deal of misinformation about IIS security on twitter, blog posts and forums.

OK, so I had intended to announce that I posted a session submission to CodeStock and that voting was open. However, I procrastinated and Shawn Wildermuth beat me to the punch. So in an act of utter creepiness, I am modeling my post after his and invoking his name for extra copy-cat points.

Recently I spoke with someone on Twitter who was having issues running CakePHP on IIS. With all the talk about ASP.NET MVC on IIS, folks forget that the MVC pattern works in other languages as well. CakePHP provides MVC  development on PHP. That said, I wanted to dive in and see what the issues were involved in getting this project up and running on IIS 7. I managed to get it installed pretty quickly, but it does take a little tweaking to get you up and running. I've chronicled my adventures with CakePHP below in case anyone else is having issues. That said, I must first say that I am not an expert working with CakePHP. This was my first experience with the project, so this information is provided "as-is" and should be taken with a grain of salt. With this demo, I’ll be walking through the "Cake Blog Tutorial” offered on cakephp.org, and modifying it as needed to work with IIS 7. That said, let's get started.

For those of you that remember that far back, I released a sample that also filled a need for Windows Vista. Since the original version of Windows Vista did not ship with a user interface for managing logging, and we needed samples of how to build UI modules available to the public, I released the Logging UI module. For some time, I've been hosting that downloadable release on my private web site (Tobin Titus' blog). As I plan to make some major changes to my personal site over the next few months, I wanted to make sure the release was still reliably available. That said, I've now added the source code to CodePlex.

This is likely old ground for some, but I thought I’d cover it again just in case. As you may know Visual Studio allows you to create a new web site on IIS. However, there are some minor steps that you need to complete before it will work appropriately.

Some time ago, I tried to start up the IIS Management Console on my Vista machine and I received an exception. After trying a few quick fixes, I gave up. I had several VPC images that I worked from and I didn't particularly need this machine to work when I had so many others.  However, I've been doing a great deal of development on this machine now, and having IIS working is obviously rather handy. So, I tracked down the exception and solved my problem. I thought I'd go ahead and chronical my adventures for anyone else who is having this issue and needs help.

I know that most of you reading the blogs on this site have already seen how handy the errors are in IIS 7.0 as compared to previous error conditions. This weekend, I was playing with BlogEngine.NET and thought I'd put it on my personal site (tobint.com) to try it out. I downloaded the software and tried setting it up on my server. After following the brief instructions, I hit an error:

I've been working on a series of posts and Webcasts in my "spare time" directed at some of the areas in which I am most frequently asked questions. I am currently working on developing topics dealing with IIS configuration. It seems logical that this would bring me a great deal of questions considering that IIS 7.0 is using a completely different configuration system than it did in previous versions. That said, I wanted to follow up to my Webcast ("Extending IIS Configuration") with an article, and another webcast dealing with accessing custom configuration data at runtime.