BillS IIS Blog : FastCGI

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!

Running WordPress on Windows '08 Server Core with IIS7 + PHP + MySQL

bills — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:09:38 GMT

Dennis Chung wrote up a great blog post with step-by-step instructions for how to install Windows-IIS-MySQL-PHP on Server Core and get WordPress running. This is a great example of how to use the lowest footprint Windows server EVER together with the leanest version of IIS and rocking PHP performance via FastCGI to run one of the most popular blog engines in the world.

IIS7 in the Community...11/7/2007

bills — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 22:32:00 GMT

The IIS7 community is growing! There have been a number of really cool things going on in the community around IIS7. Here are some of my favorites:

New Web Control Panels for IIS7!

I was very excited to see two new control panels for IIS7 hit the market this past month. I was excited to see the DotNetPanel guys be one of the first to market with an update of their DotNetPanel product for IIS7. They have a demo on their site you can try out now, or go download a copy for free (up to 10 sites!) The reviews on the download page look good. I was also excited when big-name vendor SWSoft released an update to their Plesk product for Windows v 8.3 beta which also supports IIS7. These guys are used all over the place in giant Web hosters, and having IIS7 support pre-launch is a really great sign. You can download their latest beta here.

New IIS7 Administration Tool Add-ons!

Rakki of the IIS/ASP.NET support team has published some really great IIS7 Admin Tool extensions that you may want to check out, including a new backup/restore UI extension, an IISRESET UI feature, and a diagnostics UI Module (called FREBUIModule).

How to install MySQL, PHP and PHPMyAdmin on IIS

With the introduction of FastCGI on IIS, running PHP on Windows is now a great experience. I ran across this great blog post by Shabbir which provides step-by-step instructions for how to get IIS, PHP, MySQL and PHPMyAdmin up and running.

Running 32bit and 64bit Side-by-Side in IIS7

For some odd reason I thought everyone already knew this, but I saw it pop up on blogosphere and quite a few people have cross-posted so I thought I better as well. Yes, it is now possible with IIS7 to run 32bit and 64bit AppPools side-by-side. Check out Rakki's blog for the scoop: http://blogs.msdn.com/rakkimk/archive/2007/11/03/iis7-running-32-bit-and-64-bit-asp-net-versions-at-the-same-time-on-different-worker-processes.aspx

Making PHP Applications Great on IIS7

Wow, this is a killer post by Drew Robbins on IIS7 extensibility in action for a PHP application. He shows off running Qdig, a popular PHP photo applications, using built-in forms authentication and the integrated pipeline, extensible configuration support, and a UI extension. It rocks!

Fun with http.sys caching

This is a great blog post by Rick James, IIS developer, on how the http.sys cache works and the kinds of performance benefits it provides.

Book Review: IIS7 Implementation and Administration

Andrew Westgarth provides a nice write-up of this new book by John Paul Mueller. If you're interested in purchasing a book on IIS7, check out this write-up and the growing list of IIS7 books on Amazon.com. I'm anxiously waiting for my copy of this 700 page monster.

Finding your way around IIS7 configuration sections with AppCmd

Mike Volodarsky writes up a great post on how to figure out the dozens of IIS (hundreds if you count ASP.NET) configuration sections and how to use them.

How to install VMWare Web Management on IIS7

This great post on AngryPets shows how to setup VMWare's Web Management Application for IIS7 and Windows Server 2008.

How to install IIS7 and PHP with FastCGI - ScreenCast

And last, but not least, Scott Hanselman published this great screencast of how to get PHP working on IIS7.

Happy Reading!

Announcing Go Live Beta of FastCGI Extension for PHP hosting on IIS5.1/IIS6.0

bills — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 23:02:47 GMT

Just over ten months ago I announced a technical collaboration agreement between Microsoft, Zend and the PHP community to enable fast and reliable hosting of PHP on Windows and IIS. Since then, more than 14,000 people have downloaded the Technical Preview release! I'm pleased to say that today we make another step forward with that work by announcing the availability of the FastCGI Extension for IIS 5.1 and IIS 6.0 with a free GoLive Beta release.

What does "Go Live" mean, is this ready for production use?

This "Go Live" release is Microsoft lingo for “we think this is ready for production deployment”. Now is your chance to tell us if you think it is ready for the final release. I want to thank all of you who posted your feedback encourage everyone to try out this latest release and post your feedback in the FastCGI forums.

Which PHP applications will work with FastCGI?

All PHP applications that work on Windows today with either the ISAPI or traditional CGI-based PHP hosting should work flawlessly with the new FastCGI Extension. As part of the FastCGI Extension RC0 release, our team has also been doing some basic compatibility testing of some of the most popular PHP applications. To help you get started with PHP and the FastCGI Extension, we've documented the steps needed to get these working with IIS. You can check out this documentation as well as updated information about using PHP on IIS at http://www.iis.net/php . If you have an application you'd like us publish instructions for, send me a message!

Where do I get it?

Go ahead and download the FastCGI Extension Go Live and keep us posted on your experiences. See this article for how to get started with the FastCGI Extension on IIS5.1/6.0.

FastCGI for IIS7?

I should also mention that if you are trying out Windows Server 2008 / IIS7, especially the RC0 release that was also launched today, you do not need to download this FastCGI extension. IIS7 has the FastCGI module built-in. Just install the "CGI" component and you are ready to use IIS with both traditional CGI as well as FastCGI applications. See this article for step-by-step info on how to use FastCGI with IIS7.