It’s Day 2 of MIX07 and I finally have some time to stop and reflect on the whirlwind of announcements, sessions, dinners, and parties that have inundated us for the last 36 hours or so. In case you aren’t familiar with this conference, MIX07 is an annual event where developers, designers, business people, various technorati, analysts, partners, customers and Microsofties converge on Vegas to have “72 hour conversation” about the technologies and business models delivering the “next web now.”
No surprise, the IIS team has gotten itself involved again this year. I had the pleasure to attend two sessions yesterday by members of the IIS product group covering what developers of Web and media sites can get from IIS7 and Windows Server “Longhorn” Beta 3 today. Since they were both very cool and I have a lot to say about them, I will need to split this into a two part post. You’ll get the second one tomorrow, here’s part 1.
So after the awesome Ray Ozzie/Scott Guthrie keynote announcing Silverlight (please stop reading my blog and watch it here), I headed downstairs to Bill Staples’ talk, IIS7 for Developers. I’m the product manager for IIS7 so I have seen Bill present IIS7 on numerous occasions. This session started with the regular stuff about IIS7 being Microsoft’s first truly modular and extensible Web server, then moving on to how flexible and easy to use the new configuration system and administration stack are. However, there were two things about this presentation that I hadn’t really seen Bill present before.
The first was covering in greater detail the expanded application support for PHP and other CGI applications. Bill discussed why PHP didn’t run well on IIS in the past (single threaded process model vs. multithreaded process model), how PHP should be run now on IIS7. I hadn’t seen this much emphasis on PHP in previous IIS7 for Developer talks so it was really good to see us pushing this new concept that IIS and Windows Server should be every developer’s platform for Web applications.
The second cool new thing was all the wicked new demos Bill pulled out of his hat. In the first set, Bill built this SQL Logging Module from scratch, deployed it into IIS7’s integrated processing pipeline, leveraged config extensibility with some custom schema and then dropped in an example of how to extend the administration tool. He’s posted the code for the SQL Logging Module on his blog here – http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2007/05/01/building-an-iis7-sql-logging-module-with-net.aspx.
The other demo set was all about deploying PHP and showing how it can leverage ASP.NET services like Forms Auth for membership and Output Caching for better performance. I could go into great detail here since I took a bunch of notes and even recorded a video of Bill presenting this part of the session, but I won’t do that because Bill posted a video of the thing on his blog already, so I’ll just let you check that out instead –http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2007/04/28/server-side-mash-ups-php-asp-net.aspx.
Besides Bill’s session and the other session on Media sites that I will cover in tomorrow’s post, I went to a bunch of other cool sessions, I discussed PHP on Windows over lunch with some Microsoft Web Evangelists from the Central & Eastern European region and now I’m about to head out for a second night of dinner and parties. As you can imagine, I’m having a really hard time complaining about my job this week. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s update on what the IIS team has been doing down in Vegas.
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