Brian Delahunty's Ramblings

A few days ago we released the beta of IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. The toolkit provides you with a number of features which can help you ensure that your site follows best practices with regards to how search engines crawl and parse your site as well as providing features for generating robots.txt files and sitemaps.

It’s a bit strange that my “back-to-blogging” post is about a new version of Remote Manager considering that my last post, way back in March 2008 was a Remote Manager post as well (I have a good reason for not blogging since then which you’ll see at the end of this post :-)

A few months back I posted[^] about the RC0 release of IIS Manager for Windows XP, 2k3 and Windows Vista. We've now released the RTM version which works with Windows 2008 (and we've removed the previous installs from www.iis.net).

In my last post[^] I gave a quick overview of how to extend configuration. More specifically I covered extending configuration by adding new sections to configuration. One thing I also mentioned was that you can extending existing configuration sections too - that's what this post is about.

In IIS 7 we introduced a completely new configuration system which is used by the IIS runtime and all our administration tools. The configuration system is based on distributed XML files that contain the configuration for IIS, ASP.NET and other components; flexibility in the configuration system also allows for configuration to be set at a a number of levels including at the server, the site and the application level. Configuration at the site and application level coexists alongside ASP.NET configuration in web.config files.

September 24th saw the release of Windows Server 2008 RC0 and along with that comes the latest release of IIS 7.0. One of the great new features of IIS 7 is the  remote administration support built into InetMgr (the administration UI). The admin UI provides server administrators with some powerful features for enabling remote administration of the server and individual sites and application (both admins and non-admins alike).