BillS IIS Blog : Extensions

Microsoft Web Platform Installer v1.0 Released!

bills — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:03:49 GMT

I’m excited to announce the immediate availability of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer v 1.0. The Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a simple tool that makes it very easy to download and install Microsoft's entire Web Platform in one step, including IIS, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework. Using the Web Platform Installer’s user interface, you can choose to install either specific products or the entire Microsoft Web Platform onto your computer. The Web PI also helps keep your products up to date by always offering the latest additions to the Web Platform. Web PI 1.0 supports Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista and of course Windows 2008.

Auto-update your Release Candidate build!

One of the cool new features we put into the Release Candidate is the ability of Web PI to upgrade itself. Try it today – if you installed the Web PI RC release in November or December, simply launch the tool again and you will see a prompt indicating that a new release is available. Say “yes” and Web PI will automatically download and install the final release version, and launch it for you!

Install clean

Been waiting for the final product? Wait no longer… if you haven’t tried Web PI yet, today is your lucky day…simply visit http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/WebPlatformInstaller.aspx and click the “Install Now” button. It will download and install Web PI in one click and away you go. Even if you think you already have IIS and ASP.NET installed, **get this tool** I can almost guarantee you there will be new features available for IIS or ASP.NET that you haven’t seen before..and if there aren’t today, there will be soon.

Get Ready for MIX…

If you think Web PI v1.0 is cool….just wait for MIX. ;)

Microsoft Web Platform Installer Release Candidate – Now works with XP and Windows 2003!

bills — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:32:00 GMT

I’m excited to announce the availability of the Release Candidate version of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI). **Update 1/20/2009 - the final v1.0 release is now available!**

Web PI is a free tool that makes it simple to download and install the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including IIS, ASP.NET, Visual Web Developer Express and SQL Server, along with a lot of cool IIS extensions like URL rewrite and ASP.NET MVC.

Web PI offers a simple experience for downloading and installing the entire stack through a single installer to help you obtain the software you need to build and run a complete Web solution on the Microsoft Web platform, whether you are using Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Windows Server 2008.

Run Web PI to get started, and then run it again anytime to check for new extensions to the platform. Every time Web PI is run it checks online to ensure the most current versions and new additions to the Microsoft Web Platform are downloaded. Give Web PI a try today!

IIS7 Request Routing and Load Balancer Release Candidate Available for Download

bills — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 03:38:03 GMT

I’m excited to announce that IIS has released a Release Candidate of the new IIS7 Application Request Routing (ARR) extension! ARR enables Web server administrators to easily scale-out Web applications and improve reliability through HTTP-level, rule-based routing and load balancing. Read more about the cool new features in this new release and check out the updated documentation.

Download the RC release:

For those who are new to IIS7’s ARR module, here are the benefits it provides:

Balance loads more efficiently across servers to maximize resource utilization

By taking advantage of Application Request Routing, administrators have the ability to create powerful routing rules based on URL, HTTP headers and server variables to determine the most appropriate Web application server for each request. ARR makes request routing decisions at the application level, and can be used in conjunction with hardware load balancers as an added layer of control over HTTP requests. For example, using the Application Request Router, administrators are able to route all *.aspx requests to a dynamic group of dedicated Web application servers, which can scale up and down based on traffic demands, while requests for video content, images, javascript and other static content can be served from the ARR machine, or a separate group of servers.

Increase Security and Scalability of Application Servers

Administrators can use IIS7 and the Application Request Routing feature on a reduced-footprint Windows Server core machine(s) to handle incoming requests, and then place traditional Web Application Servers on a middle tier of machines, which can protected behind additional firewalls and not exposed directly to the internet. This protects feature-rich Web application servers from being directly exposed to internet hacking attempts, and enables to scale-out cpu-intensive Web application servers independently.

Manage and monitor multiple server farms more easily through IIS Manager

ARR lets administrators create, manage, and apply load balancing rules to server farms in IIS 7.0 Manager. Administrators can then easily add or remove servers from a server farm to match demand without impacting application availability. ARR also includes live traffic and URL test monitoring capabilities to determine the health of individual servers and configuration settings, while allowing administrators to view aggregated runtime statistics in IIS 7.0 Manager.

Optimize and scale server capacity through client and host name affinity

Administrators can use ARR to route all requests from a specific client to a specific Web application server in a server farm by creating an affinity between the client and server. ARR includes the ability to differentiate clients behind Network Address Traversal (NAT) firewalls and hardware load-balancers, so each client is treated independently. Host name affinity lets hosting providers optimize resources per server and offer scaled solutions by routing requests to servers based on host name.

Features

HTTP based routing decisions built using rules that examine HTTP request information
Sophisticated load balancing algorithms to determine appropriate servers to service the HTTP requests
Health monitoring for live traffic and specific URLs to determine the health of servers with a set of configuration parameters provided to calibrate baseline server health
Client affinity to direct all requests from a client to a specific server by using cookies.
Host name affinity to streamline administration for Web servers and to create additional business opportunities.
Management of multiple server farms to enable pilot management and A/B testing scenarios.
Management and monitoring of all configuration settings and aggregated runtime statistics through IIS Manager interface.
Support for Failed Request Tracing Rules

Find New IIS7 Extensions at http://www.iis.net/extensions/

bills — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:55:00 GMT

I’m happy to announce that IIS7 Extensions have found their home at http://www.iis.net/extensions

Every since IIS7 shipped 9 months ago, the IIS team has been cranking away adding new features to the platform. Last time I blogged about how we do this, I realized we didn’t have a single place to learn about all of them, so I kicked off an effort within the team to create this. Now that the pages are up, it is amazing to see how many new capabilities are already available on top of IIS7…which all by itself had more new features than any other IIS release in the history of the product. It is a testament to not only the ingenuity and hard work of the IIS team, but a real validation that IIS7 is not just a Web server, it is a server platform. All of these new features are built on top of public extensibility points that any developer can use, and provide a seamless runtime, configuration and administration experience that looks and feels like they were built into the product to begin with! Here they are:

Landing page: http://www.iis.net/extensions

http://www.iis.net/AdministrationPack

http://www.iis.net/ApplicationRequestRouting

http://www.iis.net/BitRateThrottling

http://www.iis.net/DatabaseManager

http://www.iis.net/FTP

http://www.iis.net/IISManager

http://www.iis.net/PowerShell

http://www.iis.net/SmoothStreaming

http://www.iis.net/URLRewrite

http://www.iis.net/UrlScan

http://www.iis.net/WebDeploymentTool

http://www.iis.net/WebPlaylists

http://www.iis.net/WebDAV

Check out the more than a dozen new features available today! Over the next few weeks we’ll be adding video demos of each feature and more new content. Stay tuned for many cool new features to come!

IIS7 URL Rewrite Extension is finished – download now!

bills — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:04:56 GMT

I’m excited to announce that the IIS7 URL Rewrite extension is finished and available for download. For more information on some last minute features we added, and how to download it, see Ruslan’s blog post here: http://blogs.iis.net/ruslany/archive/2008/11/10/url-rewrite-module-release-to-web.aspx

Many, many, many customers have asked me for URL Rewrite capabilities over the years, and I’m happy to finally provide a high performance, reliable, and fully supported solution from Microsoft. URL Rewrite has many very cool features for Web applications and makes managing URL Rewrite rules easier to create and manage than any other solution out there. If you have IIS7, and you care about having clean URLs that search engines love to index, you need URL Rewrite. Download it today!

IIS’ Web Deployment Tool Beta 2 Released

bills — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:23:29 GMT

The Web Deployment team had a big ‘coming out’ party yesterday at the PDC and announced immediate availability of a new Beta of the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool.

MS Deploy - Fundamentals

If you aren’t familiar with this tool yet, you’re going to want to take the time to browse the documents and give it a try. It is one of the fundamental building blocks that IIS will be building on the next several years. In it’s current beta form, it can be used to:

Migrate entire servers or individual sites from one machine to another (IIS6 –> IIS7)
Sync Servers, Sites, and Applications (IIS6 –> IIS6, and IIS7 –> IIS7)
Create offline packages that can be used as backups, version control, and deployment units

New Beta Features

The new beta has several new and exciting features you’ll want to check out. The new release includes an all-new IIS Manager extension that enables you to create, and install packages from within IIS Manager. Imagine being able to right click on your Web site, create an offline ‘package’ of the site and all of it’s configuration, dependencies, etc., and then roll it out over any number of servers, locally or remote!

The beta also provides support for ‘delegated’ publishing, which enables Administrators to grant control to developers and Web site owners to do the packaging and publishing without being a machine administrator. This is going to be a huge boon for Shared Hosters especially, allowing richer application publishing than ever before. DiscountASP.net, one of our close hosting partners, is offering 2000 free accounts as part of a limited Beta which allows you to try out this new functionality – sign-up today, availability is limited.

The new beta also includes support for SQL Server, enabling you to include SQL databases (Schema + Data) as part of your deployment, both live server <-> sync as well as offline packaging!

And lots of bug fixes, performance improvements, etc. Please note: the last beta was released as a “GoLive” release, which means we felt it was ready for production use. This Beta includes so many new features for the first time that we have not marked it as “GoLive”. The migration and sync features should work as well, if not better than the previous release, but the new features are still under testing and we need your feedback to feel confident they are ready.

Visual Studio 10 Integration!

The team also announced integration with Visual Web Developer Express as part of the upcoming Visual Studio 10 release which will enable developers to create application packages at development/build time, which can then be deployed directly from within VS (one-click publishing to remote servers!) or offline as part of a staging process. Developers and IT Pros can rejoice with that one: no more 10-page instruction-custom-script-manual-deployments, do it all automatically with a perfectly repeatable deployment package created within VS using MSDeploy!

Thanks!

This beta release is a huge next step for MS Deploy, and the team worked very hard (including some late nights and weekends :) to get it ready for PDC. Please give it a try and help us make it better by giving us feedback! Some important links:

Web Deployment Tool forum: http://forums.iis.net/1144.aspx
Web Deployment Team blog: http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/

Downloads

x86 version: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=109365
x64 version: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=109366

Quick Starts:

1. Web Deployment Tool Overview (overview of the features)

2. Installing the Web Deployment Tool (installation and remote service options)

3. Create a Package (creating a package including content, databases and more)
4. Install a Package (deploying the package to a local or remote machine)

5. Configure the Delegation Service (enable deployment to an IIS 7.0 server)

More quick guides can be found at the Web Deployment Tool main page.

New IIS7 extensions available for download!

bills — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:22:10 GMT

One of the best parts of being on the IIS team is shipping great software. First there was IIS7, now you can expect to see lots of great extensions for the best Web server in the world that plug-in seamlessly using the new IIS7 extensibility model. When IIS7 launched, we also shipped several new free extensions which I linked to in my last post. Now we're at it again...the past few weeks we've shipped several more ultra-cool modules free for download. Check out:

Administration Pack for IIS7

This technical preview adds seven new administration features to IIS Manager with some never-seen-before administration capabilities, including:

Database manager, which provides built-in SQL Server management, including the ability to create, delete and edit tables and indexes, manage stored procedures and execute custom queries (just like sql query analyzer). Best of all, it is fully integrated into IIS manager, remotes through the IIS Manager administration services (over HTTP/SSL), and works for local administrators and delegated users alike.

IIS reports, which provides built-in reports that provide fancy charts and HTML reports of your log file data (like popular URLs, status code, user agent, etc. etc.) it let's you filter by date range, print reports or save them to an archive. As a built-in IIS Manager module, it remotes over HTTP/SSL, and works great for delegated as well as local administrators.

Configuration Editor, which provides built-in support for editing ALL configuration sections through a single configuration feature. This power toy is an advanced feature which can even auto-generate scripts based on your configuration changes!

Request Filtering UI, which provides support for the IIS7 built-in request filtering feature.

FastCGI UI, which provides support for the editing the all new built-in <fastCGI> feature which allows for fast and reliable hosting of open source frameworks like PHP.

.NET Authorization rules editor, which allows you to manage the ASP.NET <authorization> section via the IIS manager tool. Don't confuse this with the all-new IIS7 URLauthorization feature.

.NET Errors configuration editor, which allows you to manage the ASP.NET custom errors feature <customErrors>. Don't confuse this with the all-new IIS7 httpErrors feature.

You can download the Administration pack (x86) and (x64) today! Check out the learn.iis.net chapter for more information on each feature.

IIS7 Media Pack Bit Rate Throttling Module

This cool feature is now available in final release form and provides intelligent progressive download of rich media content (audio and video files) for all the popular types including WMV, flash video, quicktime, MP4, and more! If you have media on your Web site, or want to throttle downloads of your large files, this is a must have feature. Scott Hanselman has an awesome post on this feature on his blog.

You can download the Bit Rate throttling module (x86) and (x64) today! Check out the learn.iis.net chapter on media serving for more information!

WebDAV for IIS7

This cool feature actually shipped at the same time as IIS7, but I somehow forgot to link to it. WebDAV provides an all-new implementation of this HTTP standards way of publishing files over HTTP. Read more about WebDAV in Robert's post here.

You can download the WebDAV module (x86) and (x64) today! Check out the learn.iis.net chapter for more information on using WebDAV.

What can I say, the IIS team rocks. ;)