Dave's Blog Posts

Why does the IIS7 UI limit certain characters?

One of the impacts of moving to a fully XML friendly configuration is that many characters can no longer reliably be used for website, virtual directory and application names. IIS has two basic constraints for these "path-sensitive" characters The first...

IIS and Twitter? Yes, we do tweet a bit.

At least some of us on the IIS team are starting to get up to speed with twitter ... it's a fascinating way to interact in a very public way with other folks in a massive stream of consciousness. As a test lead on the team, I find it a great way to find...

What is administration.config for IIS?

One little known feature of IIS7 is that it's UI is entirely extensible! This means that anyone can write a C# assembly and get it displayed through the IIS Manager UI. The possibilities here are endless, anything from someone writing a new certificate...

Where are my InetMgr UI Code Download assemblies?

The IIS Manager UI has a lot of capabilities, one of which is the ability to download new UI modules from a server when connecting remotely. This means I can open up any IIS Manager, connect to a server and get all the UI modules you need. Seems magical...

Exporting a web site from IIS with the Web Deployment Tool

With the recent release of the Web Deployment Tool , we made it super easy to export a server configuration, or an application configuration (by using the IIS Manager UI and using the "Export Server Package..." or "Export Application..." actions items...

Under what context does my code run on IIS?

Following up on my last two blogs, we continue to notice that folks have difficulty properly configuring IIS in a secure manner, because they tend to over-open the security of their system, giving privileges to both the "request identity" and the "process...

Who is my IIS application process identity?

Over the versions of IIS, we have changed our process model in some ways with each release. Each of those changes required administrators to change the way they set up permissions for "code" to run properly on IIS. It also requires application developers...

Who is the anonymous user?!

Many questions that we get on the forum's are around which users need which permissions for what resources ... isn't that how life goes? :) Anyways, to make this more complicated, we have changed "who" the "anonymous" user is in different versions of...

Where is gacutil.exe ?

As we write walkthrough's on how to do various things with Web Deploy or other tools, we often say to try this or that with gacutil.exe but I always forget where the tool lives. Since I re-image test machines all the time with various things installed...

How to download IIS?

A lot of folks ask us how to "download" IIS; since other web server offerings are available for download on a multiple of platforms, it's an obvious question for the Microsoft web platform stack as well. The answer "for now" is that you can't download...

Compression testing on Windows 7 & WS08 R2

So I've done some recent testing on Compression and in the process I thought I should write up a short blog on how to configure adding new scheme's to compression as well as configuring the compressionLevel for each scheme. (I assume that static and dynamic...

Where is Execute Permission in the UI?

A lot has changed in the IIS7 UI from IIS6, sometimes it can be hard to find out where to set certain things such as the execute permission for CGI's and ISAPI's. Yesterday, I was trying to get a CGI to execute, but couldn't find where to set it. In IIS7...

Accessing custom properties at runtime through managed modules (part 2)

Ok, now I want to do something in my managed module during runtime that will only read from my custom configuration properties. I need someplace to start ... like a starter kit! :) http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&i=1302&g=6...

Accessing custom properties at runtime through managed modules (part 1)

Following on my last post in developing my module for app-building week, I want to talk about how I wrote the code for my managed module (C# code). So far, I have custom configuration schema that could be accessed through various built-in tools and I...

Adding simple custom schema to IIS Configuration

Let's see if I can get 2 blog posts written in the same month! :) As I was talking last post, our team had an app-building week (everyone will see the results over the next couple months; there were some VERY cool tools that I'm excited for people to...

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