Last week, I was in Las Vegas demoing IIS7 at HostingCon, the major education and networking conference for anyone working in the Hosting space. Microsoft was represented by its own large pavilion area complete with 8 demo booths, a big screen presentation area and an XBox 360 station for practicing for Project Gotham Racing tournaments. Free Xbox 360s weren’t the only thing attracting attendees to the pavilion, many came over for a full demo-based drilldown on IIS7.
I had spent the weekend before preparing a fairly elaborate demo, combining pieces of old presentation demos that worked well before. I won't go into the gory details but to summarize it, I used a Virtual Earth mashup (thank IIS PM, Thomas Deml) as the example site that I would enhance by adding forms auth and custom modules and handlers. The demo also highlighted the new IIS Manager GUI which I used to demonstrate IIS7's remote delegated administration. The best part though was debugging a hanging page by viewing the currently executing requests and setting up a failed request trace in the IIS Manager GUI.
All in all, IIS7 was big hit with the hosters I met at the conference. They loved that tracing is built right in and that they can easily trace failed requests. Attendees were also excited that there is finally an API (RSCA) that details request processing information. They commented that the IIS Manager GUI would be much better for managing a large number of sites, for example they liked being able to “search” for their site by any of the site properties from inside the tool. Few of the attendees I met with were very familiar with web.config files ASP.NET but all agreed it was great that future site deployment will be more of an "xcopy" experience with file based configuration.
I'll be the first to admit there are still a few kinks in Windows-based hosting for the IIS team and related teams like the ASP.NET and CLR teams to work out. But judging from the reaction we got last week, I think hosters see that Microsoft is continuously innovating in this area. Takeshi(above) from DiscountASP certainly does.
One more thing, if you have any demo or presentation ideas you'd like to suggest, please don't hesitate to post a comment to this blog. We are always looking for exciting new ways to showcase the powerful capability of IIS7.
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