BillS IIS Blog : Misc

Where do I go for IIS Support?

bills — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 05:03:00 GMT

This is a question that I'm surprised doesn't come up more often. I guess, like many of you, I take pride in figuring things out on my own. I hate asking for help and admitting I don't know the answer. And we've all had the unfortunate experience of calling a support line for help and getting someone who we just *know* is even more clueless than we are. :)

The IIS Forums are a great place to start - many members of the product team hang out there, and our top-notch MVPs. But when you just can't find an answer on your own, remember that your time is valuable, and probably worth a lot more than the few hundred bucks you'd spend letting Microsoft research the issue and figure it out. So the next time you get stuck on a problem, don't hesitate to pick up the phone and give the Microsoft IIS support team a call. Here are a few tips that may be helpful:

Who is the IIS support team?

The IIS support team rocks! We are lucky enough to have a support engineer sit directly in our offices as a liaison to help escalate issues - from both sides - and communicate our ongoing development to our support team. In addition, I have the opportunity to sit down with the support leadership team once every quarter to review support trends, hot issues, and customer satisfaction. Every time we meet I'm impressed with how smart and serious they are and how much they care that you are happy with the product. They definitely watch the stats carefully, and they are constantly championing for you to get things fixed in the product so that someday, if we do our jobs perfectly, you'll never have to call support. Too bad we're not perfect. :)

The IIS support team is filled with engineers who are dedicated to help you research the problem and do whatever it takes to find the resolution. Not convinced? Read this blog entry by Doug Hughes about his support experience. PSS engineer Rohan stuck with it until the case was solved. From the comments on the blog, it appears he isn't alone in enjoying great results from the IIS support team.

Where do I call for IIS support and how much does it cost?

If you work for a large business, chances are that you already have a support contract in place with Microsoft. If you aren't sure, ask your IT manager. If a support contract exists, there is an existing way for your company to work with our support team under the agreements of the contract.

If you don't have a support contract, you can just as easily reach our support team directly. Check out this Web page for more information on support options, including information on email support as well as phone support. Email support starts out at $99.00 per request (with 1 business day response time). You may also call support during business hours for $245 per request or $490 per request for business-critical after-hours support. It doesn't take much of your time lost trying to find a solution on your own for this to pay for itself!

How long will it take to solve my problem?

How long it takes to solve your problem depends on a lot of different factors including the nature of the problem itself. Hangs and intermittent performance problems can sometimes be the hardest to reproduce and solve. The type of applications and third party products installed also make a difference. It is more difficult to troubleshoot applications where third party products are involved, but our support team will work with you - and the vendor if their component is installed - to pinpoint the issue. Since the IIS support team makes it their business to provide support, they have a huge database of issues they can comb through to find resolutions rapidly - in some cases on the first call you make. Other times, especially with problems that are more complicated or hard to reproduce, it may be necessary for you to gather more diagnostics data (which they will help walk you through how to do) and iterate on the problem with them over several days. No matter the length of time it takes, one thing is for sure: you will get an answer.

What do I do if I'm not satisfied with the support I'm receiving?

Tell us! If you're not happy with the support you are receiving, or with the resolution once your support case is over, please let us know so that we can continue to improve. On your first contact with an IIS support engineer, you'll receive an email with their contact information, and the contact information for their manager. If at any time during the support process, or after, you aren't satisfied, be sure to use that contact information to give us feedback. The sooner you give us feedback, the better we will be able to respond to your needs and make sure you get a satisfactory answer.

hope this helps -

bill

IIS7 Wallpaper and Fun

bills — Wed, 24 May 2006 05:18:00 GMT

If you've ever seen me talk about IIS7, you may have noticed non-standard wallpapers on my desktop. I like to change my desktop image with every major conference or presentation I give. It keeps life interesting. Over the past year or so I've collected my wallpapers, and decided now would be a good time to share them out here: http://wallpaper.iis7.org.

And what better way to do that than a real live production IIS7 web site running my custom directory listing module? (If you've ever seen me demo, you've probably seen it in action too!) I added output caching support to the module, to help performance in sending all those thumbnail and image previews. .NET is so cool.

Note: if you hit the site and it appears down, it is probably because we are 1) debugging a failure or 2) upgrading to a new daily build. This is what we call 'dogfooding' here at Microsoft. We run our own software with the goal of trying to make it break, which is sometimes counterproductive to keeping sites up. :)

The Original IIS7.JPG file is the first IIS7 logo I think I made (successfully) and turned into one of the more popular t-shirts we've ever had on the team. Funny how sometimes simple is better.

For a while, I must have had world domination on my mind, or maybe I was just impressed with Google Earth, because I put out a couple earthly themed desktops.

Eric Deily, a PM on my team, LOVES lens flair. He loves it so much I had to make him some special desktop wallpaper, during my lens flair period.

As Beta 2 drew nearer and nearer, I was inspired to create several Beta 2 themed desktops.

At one of the team meetings a few months ago, I wanted to focus on pushing the quality of IIS7 up. Inspired by the Dodge Ram commercials, I came up with a new motto for IIS7 at the meeting.

And last, but not least, I entered the brushed metal phase. You can find this wallpaper on the VirtualLabs.IIS.net site.

I registered the iis7.org domain a while back, and have it hosted at WinISP - a small team here at Microsoft that runs a hosting datacenter for Microsoft employees. They are an awesome group and live on the bleeding edge, testing beta and pre-beta versions of every kind of software Microsoft makes.

Speaking of bleeding edge, I got a call from Apple today. No, not the company, the store. And if yesterday was Christmas Eve, today was Christmas! :) They had just received the 17" MacBook Pro I was interested in. What better way to celebrate the Vista Beta 2 and IIS7 release than to get a cool piece of hardware to run it on? So I installed Vista Beta 2 on it tonight and it run great, using these instructions. It runs faster than my IBM Thinkpad T43p, by a mile. Does this mean I'm the first person in the world to run IIS7 on a Mac? :)

Just Like Christmas Eve

bills — Tue, 23 May 2006 07:05:00 GMT

It's officially past midnight, and we're five minutes into May 23rd, 2006 - the day on which IIS7 will officially ship as part of Windows Vista Beta 2 our first public Beta release. I've just finished putting the final touches on the http://www.iis.net site which will launch in the morning, and now it's time for the obligatory first post to my new blog. I figure a few introductions are in order:

About Me
My name is Bill Staples. I've been a Web geek for more than ten years now, although I've always been more interested in the guts than the g l o r y. Even though I've always thought high-performing, multi-user, application-hosting infrastructure is a fascinating subject, for one reason or another it seems the Web server hasn't been in vogue since before Microsoft DNA. :)

I got my start in the Web business working at a start-up internet service provider in early 1996, after graduating from the University of Utah. Back in those days, we ran a variety of Web servers on Solaris (Ultra 2!) including Roxen, Zeus, and Apache, along with a slew of mail, news, authentication servers, and modem banks. I enjoyed the Web stuff the most, so I ended up spending a lot of my time selling, designing, building, managing, and troubleshooting Web sites for our customers. Back in those days I thought ColdFusion was the bomb, because it made seemingly complex things simple. At some point I got my hands on the NT4 option pack (can you believe it is still available for download!) beta and started writing spaghetti code like the best of them thanks to classic ASP. Now that was real fun. Sometime in 1998 I convinced the company I worked for that the world needed a simple way to 1) create forms 2) publish those forms to a Web server 3) hook up the data from those forms into any ODBC compliant backend database and 4) configure simple workflow. Because I was a developer first, and a businessman second, I insisted that we build it rather than borrow it, which is how I got my hands dirty building a Web server, dynamic scripting language, and workflow engine from scratch. GroupLink's Web Forms was born. Every time I see other products solving the same age-old problem, I have to smile. (Of course, they all solve it better than we did - I think Web Forms died a horrible death after I left the company to come to Microsoft).

I joined Microsoft in late summer of 1999. I had really enjoyed working for small companies, but when Microsoft called I decided it was time to see what it was like to work in one of the biggest software companies in the world. I was hired into MSN, but through the twists of fate, I ended up as a Program Manager on the IIS re-architecture team (which later combined with the IIS5 team to ship the IIS 5.1 and IIS 6 products). Seven years later, and I still get a kick each and every day out of working on IIS. Mostly it is because the team is so freaking awesome, and the technology we're building is so much fun and impacts so many people around the world. Who wouldn't love it?

About My Product
Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past ten years, or you simply don't care much about the Web (then why are you reading this blog???) you probably already know enough about the history of IIS. I won't bore you with that. Since this is the debut of IIS7 in public beta form, I will share a little bit about this particular version of the product.

We started IIS7 planning around the time IIS6 shipped, back in early 2003. The basic elements that you see online now, including a modular core web server, a distributed configuration system, a completely new Admin tool were long-time dreams for many of us on the team, and we spent much of the year in various stages of specing, prototyping, debating and planning. In December of 2003, we merged with the ASP.NET and Visual Web Developer teams - bringing together all of the primary technologies of the Web Platform under a single division. We kicked off our first official development milestone on April 5th, 2004 - 111 weeks ago today.

We coded like mad for a solid year, taking a few weeks here and there to stabilize. By April of 2005, we had finished nearly all of the features you find on iis.net today - in their basic form - and we were ready to check-in to Longhorn. We spent 18 weeks moving our sources into Longhorn, and driving to meet the Longhorn check-in criteria, and made our first official check-in to Longhorn the last week of July, 2005.

In the past year, the team has:

Completed more than 30 integrations into Longhorn
Opened and closed more than 4500 bugs against the product
Made 6 Full Test passes
Executed over 100,000 test cases
Held more than eight IIS7 customer labs in Redmond
Designed and developed http://iis.net
...and spent countless late nights and many weekends getting ready for this day.

111 weeks after officially beginning development, and three years since we last shipped a release of IIS, we are on the eve of our first public beta release of IIS7. It feels like Christmas eve, as we can't wait to watch you open our presents. :)

About the Site (http://iis.net)
One of the first ideas I remember ScottGu had, after the IIS/ASP.NET merger, was to start up a community site for IIS similar to www.ASP.net I remember at some point we were brainstorming names for the site: MicrosoftWebServer.com, IISWebServer.com, IISCommunityPortal.com, and on and on. We never seemed to find the right name, or the right time, so the idea got shelved for later. Late last year, I decided it was time to build the site, and what better domain name than iis.net. So we acquired the name and started building the site. Brian Goldfarb recommended we look at Kevin as a designer for the site. Kevin has been involved in several Microsoft site designs, including the ASP.NET starter kits. I think he did an amazing job with the IIS.net site, with great attention to detail, and a lot of patience. He put up with my knit-picky feedback for weeks on end and the result is a great looking site.

The guys at Telligent deserve a lot of the credit for getting it online today. Scott and Alex and Kyle (and probably others who I don't know names for) worked many hours, including some late nights and weekends getting everything just right. They implemented the site in about eight weeks!

Of course, the site wouldn't be what it is without great content. I hope you take the time to browse through the site and check it out. I just finished writing up the FAQ, and I'm amazed at how many frequently asked questions we were able to answer with really great content, samples, videos, etc. This has got to set a new world record - for IIS at least - in terms of having so much content available for a first Beta! All the credit goes back to the product team - the PM team in particular - for writing such great content and patiently working through the many deadline and format changes, all while doing their day jobs. The IIS PM team rocks.

Well, that's enough of the past, and I'm confident you've now heard more about me than you ever wanted to. Future posts will focus on IIS, the technology we build, and the solutions we enable. Hope to see you back soon.