Tomorrow IIS.NET will unveil a plethora of new content and features to celebrate the Beta 3 milestone of Windows Server Codename "Longhorn." One of these new site features that has been planned and developed for many months but always seemed to get postponed, is the IIS7 Developer Center. The new DevCenter will aggregate together in one place all the IIS7 articles, videos, samples and downloads that could be relevant to Web Developers.
Why does IIS.NET need a DevCenter?
IIS7 is the most developer-friendly Web server Microsoft (and perhaps anyone for that matter) has ever released. For starters, IIS7 actually ships in the client OS (Windows Vista) as a full featured Web Development server. Arbitrary restrictions in IIS 5.1 for XP (1 Site, 1 Connection) have been abolished in favor of usage restrictions that make sense – a limit of 10 simultaneous requests.
Furthermore, .NET is deeply integrated into the major systems of IIS7 including its configuration, management tools, diagnostics and processing pipeline. ASP.NET services can be used against any kind of Web content, not just ASPX. This is especially cool since with the new FastCGI module, IIS finally becomes a scalable Web serving platform for PHP and other CGI applications. Lastly, but probably most importantly, IIS7 has a modular architecture, built on public extensibility APIs and thus, is completely customizable. Developers can build new HTTP processing modules or add-ons to the management stack, easily in native OR managed code.
With all these great enhancements for developers in IIS7, it’s critical that developers can find all the learning materials they need to get up to speed quickly. The screenshot below gives a preview of what you’ll see tomorrow.
Use the navigation on the left to quickly find guidance in key areas.
The content lists distinguish items by their content types, e.g. video or article or download, etc.
What else can you expect from the new IIS7 Developer Center?
You can expect a TON more great content, that’s for sure. We’re pretty close to releasing a whole new set of IIS7 tutorials specifically geared toward real world tasks that ASP.NET developers will frequently run into. We also have a bunch of extensibility samples for Developers who want to learn how to add new functionality to IIS7. These samples will come complete with an MSI setup for quickly demoing the add-on, plus full source code in a VS project for tearing into the sample and personalizing it quickly. All code will be free use and reuse under the Microsoft Permissive license.
So in short, there is a lot of new stuff coming on IIS.NET specifically for Web developers. Check out the new Developer Center tomorrow, but make sure to come back frequently over the next 2-3 months for updates. We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
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