Drew's IIS Blog : IIS

Great Screencast on IIS7 and PHP with FastCGI

drobbins — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:03:00 GMT

Scott Hanselman produced an awesome screencast on configuring IIS7 and PHP with FastCGI. He also does some live performance testing of the Qdig application using CGI, FastCGI and the new kernel-mode caching in IIS7.

From Scott's blog:

You can watch the video/screencast on the new Hanselman Silverlight Player (thanks Tim!) or download the WMV directly. If you guys want more IIS7 videos in detail, give me feedback in the comments and I'll see what we can do about putting together a series over on http://www.iis.net.

Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Screencast HowTo: IIS7 and PHP with FastCGI

If you are interested in configuring PHP and FastCGI on IIS7, there's a walkthrough in IIS.net: Using FastCGI to host PHP applications on IIS7

Windows Server 2008 for ASP.NET Developers

drobbins — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:38:35 GMT

Today I spoke at the Heartland Developers Conference on why ASP.NET developers should care about Windows Server 2008. If you were at the session or just want to know more about what's in store for you as an ASP.NET developer, check out the following resources.

Windows Server 2008 Developer Training Kit - this set of Hands-on-Labs and PPT files demonstrate several of the features you can take advantage of on the Windows 2008 platform. There are labs for Transactional NTFS, Windows Eventing 6.0, Powershell, IIS and the .NET 3.0 framework technologies. The IIS lab will help you build a managed-code module to extend the IIS pipeline as well as an UI extension for the new IIS Manager. There are additional examples on IIS.net for developer extensions for IIS and manager.

If you are interested in the self-hosting capabilities of IIS7, there is an article in the MSDN library called Creating a Hosted Web Core Application. In addition, there is an API reference. One example of why you want to do this is to create isolated testing configurations for your web applications including all of the managed and native pipeline modules.

IIS Technical Evangelist

drobbins — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:57:00 GMT

Hello, my name is Drew Robbins. I just started as the IIS Technical Evangelist focused on developers who build web applications that use and extend our platform.

On this blog, I'll be covering topics like the following:

Taking Advantage of IIS7 as an ASP.NET Developer
Using technologies like PHP, ColdFusion, Rails, Python with IIS7 and Windows 2008
Creating Managed Extensions to IIS7
Hosting Web Services in IIS7
Programming Windows Media Services
Highlighting People/Companies Creating Great Apps for IIS7

To give you a little background, I've been developing web applications since sometime in college. I started out writing applications in PERL before I was introduced to some of the popular frameworks at the time. I had a lot of fun coding in various environments such as Cold Fusion, PHP and ASP. I've spent the last 5-6 years focused primarily on ASP.NET, while still keeping an active interest in other frameworks.

I value using the best tool for the job, while not reinventing the wheel every time new technology arrives. That's how I arrived at this role. IIS is an exciting technology, because it is not only a great web server, but it enables you to combine the technologies that make sense for your organization or project. With IIS7, I can use both .NET and PHP together. I can even pull in tools like BlueDragon and integrate CFML.

I'm not a big proponent of mixing a lot technologies into a single project, but I do get excited when you can download a great PHP blog application like Wordpress and integrate it into your existing ASP.NET site using the built-in membership providers (Mike recently did just that). That saves a lot of time so you can concentrate on creating new functionality.

Feel free to contact me via this blog or email. My alias is drobbins at Microsoft.