Andrew Westgarth's Blog

Last night Alan Dean came up to VBUG in Newcastle to speak on ASP.Net MVC Framework.  One of the discussion points we had was any potential issues for hosting sites on IIS due to the routing and url rewrite elements of the MVC Framework.  I wasn't clear on the implications, and I hadn't seen much traffic personally on the issue.  So with a task of downloading ASP.Net MVC Framework Preview 5 so I could have a good look at it and understand it all as an alternative to Webforms, and looking into the implications and workarounds for hosting within versions of IIS I went of in search of information.

In IIS6 when creating a virtual directory it was possible to set the virtual directory to actually add as a redirect to another page or site.  In IIS7 this is still possible however it needs to be achieved slightly differently.  Lets take an example.  Say you have a website and you are running a number of offers and would like to offer users the option of navigating to them through a short path such as domain/offer1, domain/offer2 etc then you would have in IIS6 set these Virtual Directories up with dummy Physical Paths, e.g. the root of the parent site, and set the option to redirect to a URL.

This afternoon I received an email from Microsoft telling me that I've been awarded the 2008 Microsoft MVP award for my efforts in the Internet Information Services Community over the past year.  This is a great honour to be classified in the same group as the many other great MVPs who do great work throughout the community.  I hope I can continue in the same way in the coming months and years.

On the evening of Wednesday 2nd July 2008, I'll be presenting a session on IIS 7.0 for ASP.Net Developers at Black Marble's Community Evening in Bradford.  This event is part of a full day of sessions which Black Marble are hosting.  In the morning they're hosting a session on Overview of the current and future states of Microsoft’s Real World SOA and Business Process Automation platform and in the afternoon they are hosting a TechNet in the North session - Microsoft's Vision for Unified Communications - delivered by James O'Neill and then I will be completing the day with the community element.

Steve Schofield, IIS MVP, recently set up a new site - http://www.appcmd.com - which is a great resource for commonly used appcmd scripts.  Appcmd is the new command line administration utility for IIS7.  I've used the Tech Preview of the PowerShell provider for IIS and I use the IIS7 Manager a lot but I still like to work with APPCMD an awful lot and this new site is definitely going to be top of my list for daily checks to see any new content.  Go take a look and let Steve know what you think.  Also if you have any favourite APPCMD Scripts also let Steve know and they may get posted.  Thanks for starting this site Steve, it's a great resource.

I've been taking a look at the web stats from my blog over the past few days and have noticed a lot of hits on a previous post - FrontPage Server Extensions for IIS7 and thought I would follow that up with a link to a great series of blog posts which Robert McMurray has been writing recently about Life after FrontPage Server Extensions  Hope this post helps anyone searching for info on IIS 7 and FPSE and the ways forward.

After announcing I would do this shortly after my session at IMTC, unfortunately I have only just managed to get round to actually completing the page and putting it live.  I have written a page and added it to my blog listing all of the blogs and IIS Resources I use to research and keep up with developments on IIS - IIS 7 Resources.  I hope you find this useful and I'll keep adding to it as I find new and interesting ways and resources in my quest to stay up to date.  One thing I must stress is that the first point of call should always be the excellent IIS community site - www.iis.net.

Recently I blogged about the new IIS7 PowerShell Provider, and this was picked up by the people behind the PowerScripting Podcast - who commented on the post to say they would be included in the next PowerScripting podcast.  Well that podcast has now been released - Episode 23 - IIS7 Special and includes a great interview with Thomas Deml, Senior Program Manager on the IIS Team, who goes into more detail on the roadmap and features for the IIS 7 PowerShell Provider.  Check it out now it's a great listen and if you're interested in PowerShell as a whole, why not subscribe to the podcast?