First real day of TechEd begins, bright and early 8:30am. We arrived early at the booth to test our demos and prepare for customers. We were very glad we did because they came with questions and didn't stop coming. Some of these conversations were a bit difficult at first because we had some buggy beta software issues. When it was resolved, I was pleased to know that it wasn’t IIS7 but a different piece of beta software breaking some of the demos (some Orcas components that shouldn’t have been put on the box).
For many of us, the morning was all about the booth and demonstrating IIS7 to inquisitive customers. It was a really fun time though because IIS7 has so many cool enhancements that admins and devs alike are really excited about, that every customer had a positive experience and was genuinely impressed with what they saw. Or it maybe it was the IIS7/www.iis.net tattoos we were giving out that made it so much fun? In any case, the morning went by fast.
After a *very* brief lunch, we got to check out the first IIS7 session of the day because we (myself + MVP Ken Schaefer from Avanade + MVP Scott Forsyth from OrcsWeb) were finished with our booth shifts. We rushed from the meal hall to the room where program manager, Alexis Eller, was presenting her talk, IIS 7: An In-Depth Look into Web Application Administration. We got there just in time which wasn’t easy since the convention center is huge.
Her talk focused on three key areas of Web administration: deployment, management and troubleshooting of applications. Alexis provided a great deal of useful advice like suggesting to use the ABO Mapper tool for ensuring your ADSI scripts from IIS6 are compatible with IIS7. All of her demos worked properly which was great since some of them were new things we haven’t shown customers before like writing a WMI script for enumerating app domains and another for unloading app domains programmatically.
She also showed off our new command line tool, AppCMD, listing currently executing requests, filtering them by site and then utilizing a Powershell script to list all requests that are hitting 100% CPU. All in all, it was a solid talk, she will score high and if you didn’t catch it, come back to IIS.net in a few weeks when we’ve got it from the TechEd coordinators and we’ll stream it to you. After the talk, Alexis and the rest of us answered a bunch of questions from excited IIS6 admins and then we headed back to the TLC for the two IIS7 chalktalks of the day.
A few weeks back, we wrangled with our track owners to get these two chalktalks scheduled right after Alexis’s talk because they are both about IIS7 administration. First, dev lead, Andrew Lin, lead a group discussing how to write code against the Microsoft.Web.Administration API to administer IIS7 programmatically in managed code. Pretty cool stuff you can do there and its very simple too, check out this article we posted here a couple weeks back. There was another chalktalk, I couldn’t attend on the IIS Manger tool in IIS7 by SDE, Carlos Aguilar Mares. I was sad to miss it since it drew a large crowd but I have to say I had a good time explaining to some Web devs from Sprint how to implement custom handlers for IIS7 in managed code. Their “No way, you can do that!?!” made it all worth while.
