IIS Team On Tour

IIS Team Gets In The MIX! Pt. 2 Rich Media Sites

EWoersch — Wed, 02 May 2007 23:16:00 GMT

As promised here is the second part of my MIX blog from yesterday. I planned on doing this from my hotel room this morning but I got in too late after the MIX party and had to sleep in a bit. But that is the great thing about MIX; you get to learn about some incredibly interesting technology during the day and then at night, meet and talk with the people building and using that technology.

Delivering a more media-rich experience through your Web site is certainly an interesting technical topic that was popular to discuss at MIX. IIS7 and Windows Media Services can both be a big part of your site’s media solution and since I work on both of these technologies, I tried to attend as many sessions as I could on the topic. The media session I got a chance to attend on Monday was DEV13 - Creating and Delivering Rich Media and Video on the Web with Silverlight, Microsoft Expression Studio, and Windows Server Codename "Longhorn" (Check back on this link, there should be a video recording of the session there in a few days).

The session actually has three speakers covering three different sets of Microsoft technologies for media Web. First, Brad Abrams, Group Product Manager for the UI Framework & Services (ASP.NET AJAX + some other cool stuff) discussed using a Silverlight player for video and an ASP.NET AJAX enhanced site for great user experience. Then, Chris Knowlton, the Program Manager for Windows Media Services explained different options for delivering media over the Web, including progressive downloads via IIS7 and streaming via WMS, both in Windows Server Codename “Longhorn” Beta 3. Lastly, James Clarke, a program manager on the Expression Media team, talked about using Expression Media to encode user generated content on the fly.

I want to mostly discuss what I learned about streaming media, WMS and IIS7 in Chris’s part of the talk, but I should give some recognition to Brad and James’s parts of the talk, since they were excellent. Brad went into detail on ways to use ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight to deliver a compelling Web user experience that customers will find engaging enough to get emotionally connected with the site. Little client-side things can go a long way, like using the UpdatePanel feature to make the site more responsive or using an auto-suggest search box to help users know what to actually search. If you want to take a closer look at these features, Brad’s got the entire demo site on his blog to download now. James showed off Expression Media for encoding but what I was most impressed with was his Windows Live Writer add-on for injecting video into a blog post. I have got to try this out on my next post.

So to finally talk about Chris’s section; it really helped me understand the different options customers have for delivering media through their sites at the lowest cost possible. Before setting up any servers you should think about if outsourcing is right for you. Silverlight Streaming, just announced at MIX, is a free Windows Live service for storing up to 4GB of video, cached on edged servers for strong performance anywhere around the world. You can also use CDN (Content Distribution Networks) like Akamai or a Peer To Peer service like Skinkers. Chris also shown some new data that illustrates how media is growing in importance on the Web and how cost effective Windows Media is vs. some other solutions out there.

If you’re going to do it yourself, you can stream with WMS or you have customers progressively download pre-recorded content from IIS7. Both are available in Windows Server Codename “Longhorn” Beta 3. You can download WMS and Beta 3 with IIS7 today and put both of these technologies into a production environment under the IIS7 Go Live license. Either way, you are going to want to keep your bandwidth costs down by throttling your bandwidth according to bit rate of the media you are delivering. You don’t want to transmit video to your customers much faster than they can watch it because you pay for sending those bytes whether they watch them or not.

Bit rate throttling is not new to WMS in Longhorn Server, but it will be for IIS7. The team is working on a new media pack for IIS7 with a module that will deliver this functionality complete with an add-on to IIS Manager for configuring it. Besides twice the scalability of WMS in Windows Server 2003, WMS in Longhorn Server has a bunch of great new capabilities for streaming media. WMS can deliver instant-on/always-on streaming for broadband users and dramatic improvement in the streaming experience for live users.

WMS also supports live streaming straight from an encoder (e.g. Windows Media Encoder, the new Expression Media encoder). Finally, Chris explained how WMS in Longhorn Server supports caching media content on proxy servers. This is great when you want to transmit video in a distributed work environment and have a proxy server relay the video to a bunch of users at a branch office without having to have each of the users pull down the video directly from the source.

Each of the speakers covered way more than I could comment on in this blog. If you are delivering video over the internet or are considering implementing this, I highly suggest you watch this session. It’s quite an impressive solution these technologies can offer when you use them together.

And with that I will leave you with a picture of the speaker himself (left) at dinner with me and Alex (right) in Vegas on Monday night…

IIS Team Gets In The MIX! Pt. 1 IIS7 for Devs

EWoersch — Tue, 01 May 2007 22:03:00 GMT

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.

November Events Pt 2: TechEd Developer (11/7-11/10)

EWoersch — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 04:54:00 GMT

Your second chance to meet the IIS team this November will be in sunny Barcelona! TechEd Developer is also next week (11/7-11/10) at the Centre Convencions Internacional (CCIB) in Barcelona Spain. Eric Rudder, the SVP for Technical Strategy, is giving the keynote speech on how the launch of Windows Vista and Office 2007 is ushuring in a new wave of technologies that will enable Developers to create more compelling solutions. For Web developers, this means ASP.NET AJAX and of course, IIS7 in Windows Vista.

The IIS team is sending Program Manager, Thomas Deml, and SDET, Kanwaljeet Singla to the event. Kanwal will be attending to meet with the Developer attendees and show them product demonstrations at the IIS7 booth. Thomas Deml will be giving several presentations on IIS6 and IIS7. Thomas is really a top expert on the team so I expect all of these sessions to be excellent. Here’s the lineup -

First on Thursday afternoon, Thomas is going to present DEV232: Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0: End-to-End Overview of Microsoft's New Web Application Server (Thu Nov 9 13:30 - 14:45 Room 117). This talk should give Web Developers good glimpse at how they can use all the new capabilities of IIS7 while they develop, test, deploy and manage Web applications.

Next, Thomas will do a second breakout on Friday afternoon, DEV002: DEMO: IIS 7.0: The New .NET Extensibility Interfaces (Fri Nov 10 13:30 - 14:45 Room 115), which will be all about the many ways you can extend IIS7 with your own custom functionality. In his demos, he’ll most likely extend the Web server request process, the configuration schema and the IIS Manager tool.

Finally right after that breakout, Thomas is delivering a Whiteboard discussion entitled, DEVWD25: IIS 6.0 Programming Interfaces and Architectural Drill Down (Fri Nov 10 15:15 - 16:30 Room 131). Here, expect him to dive into the request processing model and most important APIs to help Web developers build applications that perform better when running on IIS6.

If you don’t get enough IIS from Thomas, check out Matt Gibb’s two part talk, DEV229&343: ASP.NET: End-to-End - Building a Complete Web Application Using ASP.NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and Internet Information Services (IIS) 7 (Thu Nov 9 10:45 - 12:00 & 15:45 - 17:00). It is based off of a Scott Guthrie talk that audiences have scored very high in the past.

Well that’s all we got for this event. It’s actually quite a lot considering we’re only sending two team members. Once again, if you are attending this event, let us know you’re coming to see us. We love the chance to talk to our customers so stop by the booth or go to the talks and say hi to the team.

November Events Pt 1: DevConnections (11/6 -11/9)

EWoersch — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:02:00 GMT

Once again, the IIS team is on tour and that means once again, you have a chance to meet the team and ask questions. This post is the first of a three part series on the three upcoming events in November that the team will be presenting at.

So the first event, ASP.NETConnections, is next week (11/6-11/9) at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas. Scott Guthrie of ASP.NET fame, will be delivering the keynote speech for the event. This event is geared toward Web developers and it is perfect timing too because IIS7 in Vista is about to launch for Web developers.

Our lineup for this event includes your truly, Eric Woersching, presenting AMS309: Web Development on IIS7: Integrating IIS7 into the ASP.NET Web Development Process. This talk will cover all the great ways you can take advantage of IIS7 in Windows Vista.

We also have our new Group Program Manager, Andrew Lin, presenting AMS310: Web Server Extensibility: Building IIS7 Modules to Enhance ASP.NET Web Applications. This talk is a deeper dive into IIS7's broad extensibility to teach Web developers how to build their own custom Web server modules.

In addition to our presentations, both Andrew and I will be hanging out at the ASP.NET booth passing out the latest edition of the IIS Resource Kit and talking to customers. If you're attending this event, please let us know and come by our talks to say hi!

Recovered Pictures of IIS Team in Spain

EWoersch — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 18:43:00 GMT

Just over two months ago, the members of the IIS team were in Madrid presenting to Spanish Web administrators and developers. The event was 9th stop in our 10 country Web Administration Summit roadshow and it was very successful. IIS Program Managers, Alexis Eller and Chris Adams could deliver their presentations in their sleep by this stage so the everything went very smoothly.

Everything except one thing. Two nights prior, while trying to take a picture of the sun setting over the Mediterranean at the beach in Herzylia, I dropped my digital camera in the sand with the lens out. Stupid, stupid. Camera stops fucntioning properly. Then, after having a delicious seafood dinner, I leave the disabled camera at the restaurant. Stupid, stupid, stupid. So I don't have a camera to take pictures in Madrid or Amsterdam and even if I did it wouldn't work anyway.

Well, for all of you who attended that event and for all of you eager to put somes face to some of the names I've been writing about, I have some photos from the event for you. One of the local coordinators recently informed me that he took some pictures that I could post. So here they are, check them out. I will be writing another post soon about two exciting events the team will be at in November, so watch for this.

Here is Chris starting to present on Debug Diagnostics.

Here is our awesome audience.

Here is Alexis presenting on Managing ASP.NET 2.0 on IIS6

Finally, this is Chris and Alexis with Sergio Vasquez Martin, from the Spanish magazine, DotNetMania.

Hosters see IIS7 in Las Vegas

EWoersch — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 22:45:00 GMT

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.

Amazing IIS Users in Israel!

EWoersch — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 09:51:00 GMT

Israel was AWESOME!

We presented on IIS6 and IIS7 in Israel on Monday and it was fantastic, the customers there are amazing. All the events have been great but this is definitely the highlight of our tour. Sady, in the excitement, I left my camera at the event so pictures won't come until next week, but just take my word for it - it was truly a gratifying experience to connect with so many enthusiastic customers.

Right away, we knew the event was special. We had over 200 attendees and had to present in the Musical Arts center nearby. They ask questions right from the start, before we even kicked off. Chris started the day with the IIS Authentication and got hammered with questions ranging from Kerberos delegation to ASP.NET impersonation. Then he presented on Enterprise management and couldn't finish the whole talk because he got questions on every script he showed off. We really had no breaks because between talks we answered questions from a crowd of attendees up on the stage.

There is nothing wrong with this though, we love questions. It shows the audience cares and that our presentations are truly stimulating. At the end of Enterprise management, there was a break for lunch. Alexis was prepared and grabbed food before the talk ended but I had to wade through it to try to get Chris something to munch on while he answered more questions straight through lunch.

As a Product Manager, I am typically not acting as our PSS rep at events but even I had to answer the technical questions. Sitting in IIS talks all day for three weeks has sharpened my technical competency. One customer wanted to redirect to a unique ASP.NET pages containing dynamic content based off of information pulled from the URI. So I recommended he build a custom module for ASP.NET using the IHTTP Interface to implement this. I suppose an ISAPI filter could also work here.

After lunch (aka Q&A with food), Alexis presented on Log Parser. This is our fourth stop on this part of the tour so demos are all running smoothly. She had a lot of great questions. They asked about the log parser's file size capacity, how to parser several files at once and how to log to a UNC share. This tour has shown to us that log parser is a very popular topic. Few customers seem to be using it but all customer are very interested and see the value. If you can understand your logs, you can understand a great deal about what is going on with your Web server. This can decrease troubleshooting and down time.

Chris presented on Debug Diagnostics next. As you can imagine, this talk had an especially large number of questions as everyone wants to know why they have problems and if Debug Diag can diagnose them. We finished the day with IIS7 which was very well received. If I have any complaints at all about this event, it would be that it was very difficult to stay on schedule with all the questions. Next time we will have to shorten the talks to account for this.

In general, our time in Israel was just too short. We were staying in a very nice hotel on the beach in Herzilya. The food was a blend of mediteranean and middle eastern and all together delicious (with the exception of the salted Herring). Most of all, the people are amazing in Israel, so friendly, open and eager to meet you and learn more about your background. We actually went to dinner with an attendee and his friend the night after the talk. The ultimate example of the hospitality of the Israelis during our visit was the customer who asked to get his picture taken with us at the end of the day. (I promise when my camera arrives that I will repost this entry with that picture.) We have gone to Madrid and left already but I won't post an entry until people get a chance to read this one. So be patient :)

Next Roadshow Stop: Moscow!

EWoersch — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 15:53:00 GMT

Almost done! This has been so much fun. We've been to Milan and Zurich and now we just finished up in Moscow and Israel. I started this blog entry from the airport in Istanbul as I waited for the flight from Tel Aviv. Unfortunately, our internet situation was Israel was spotty at best so publishing this one has been a bit delayed. Alright with apologies out of the way, let me tell you about the weekend we had in Russia.

On Friday we joined a Microsoft Russia event, WebDevCon '06 that had started the day before. It turned out to be a very hard day for the speakers. With the traffic in Moscow, the ride to the event took an hour and it was over 30 C (86 F) so Chris and Alexis were HOT. Chris even had to ditch the MS event shirt when he wasn't presenting. MS Russia didn't have headsets for the speakers so they had to hold a microphone to their face all day. Many of the attendees only spoke Russian (who would have guessed?) and even though the translators were champs, this still made it more difficult to handle questions.

At least we got questions though. Non-native English speakers can be very reserved with the questions. Alexis presented on ASP.NET, Log Parser and IIS7 again, like in Zurich. Despite the heat, she did very well. This picture is from her Log Parser talk. We really can't believe how few IIS Admins over here use Log Parser. I am quite glad we included this session in the agenda. From my last post I promised to get more details on her killer log parser demo.

What she was showing was how she can have an email sent detailing significant events most recently written to the IIS logs. This is different from her other demos which use log parser to extract data from an entire log file. Log parser’s CheckPoint feature allows you do incremental parsing, i.e. grab only data that has not been parsed before. You have to create a CheckPoint file to stores the log parser state for that file. Then it is simple to use log parser to create an html report, then use a batch file to periodically run that query and email you the report.

Despite the heat, Alexis got through her log parser talk and got a break during lunch. The above picture shows Renat Minazhdinov (right) our MS contact in Russia who organized this event. Renat was amazingly helpful and fun.

After getting fed, Chris wrapped up his day with the Debug Diag talk. The session was 15 minutes shorter at this event which made it harder to get all the demos completed on time. Debug Diagnostics needs time to analyze memory dumps and when you are up on stage with less time than normal, it is brutal to have the analysis take more time then normal. Chris is our demo pro so he presented on the memory leaks section while the analysis finished.

He got quite a few questions about the tool which should come as no surprise; he just resolved a crash, a hang and a memory leak in under 60 minutes. All we had left was Alexis’s IIS7 talk. She did great the only problem she ran into was an AppCmd command that seemed to not execute. It was really a silly misstep - she had some text in the command line window selected so when she hit enter to execute, the command line was just hanging out waiting for her to do something with the text she had selected. She got it working and had a lot of questions about IIS7 afterwards which we generally take as a good sign.

When we got done, it was time to go to dinner. It was still very hot and this cab ride took pretty long as well since traffic in Moscow is awful. On the flipside we got to see a lot of Russian monuments which was very cool. The dinner was excellent. All the new meals we get to try are both fascinating and delicious. I had the Wild Deer (sorry Bambi).

Saturday in Moscow was fantastic. Poor Chris was sick so it was just Alexis and I on our tour of Moscow. The pictures below are some of the highlights. I will blog another post later tonight about how Israel went on Monday. Stay tuned, we’re almost home now.

EMEA Roadshow Update - Swiss Admins and Italian Hooligans

EWoersch — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 16:29:00 GMT

So where did we leave off? Oh right, I was telling you all about how IIS program managers, Alexis Eller and Chris Adams, and I had arrived in Zurich to spend Wednesday teaching Swiss Web administrators best practices for managing Web applications on IIS6 and what to expect once IIS7 is released.

After Milan, we all became very confident in front of the non-native English speaking audiences. I was much more comfortable MC'ing this event than the one we just finished in Italy, so after delivering the kickoff, the audience was ready to get right into it. I know I'm from Microsoft marketing but I really try not to start the day with a lot of marketing fluff. We want to just get the logistical event stuff out of the way and cover over IIS7 release dates and key features in a quick and general way. Then we dive right into sessions.

This audience had a good mix of administrators and developers. The event is called Web Administration Summit but developers are definitely invited as well, and not just because they are interested in IIS from that development perspective, but because many times at their shop, they either manage IIS or teach an IT guy how to better manage IIS.

The first talk Efficient Deployment and Management of ASP.NET 2.0 Application on IIS6, was led by Alexis and it seemed to be a good topic because the audience was very engaged and they asked a lot of questions. One attendee in the front claimed he's running both versions of the .NET Framework on his servers and after installing .NET 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0 applications deployed and ran properly without him doing anything extra. This seemed simply not possible after we had just explained that you needed to set up different app pools for each version of the CLR. Alexis knows her stuff *very* well but we consulted with Chris and realized this customer's implementation is behaving completely normal. When you install the.NET Framework 2.0, IIS makes .NET 2.0 the default framework to be selected for all newly created app pools.

But that is why it is great to have more than one speaker on these roadshows. The extra perspective and experience (especially from an old dawg PSS guy like Chris) is so useful. The speakers don't have completely overlapping backgrounds so they have been supporting one another and learning from one another throughout the tour (though I have probaby been learning the most). I sat in Chris's Enterprise Management talk again and learned many new things I didn't pick up the first time around. The scripts and tools he shows off in that talk are some of the most popular features of the event. Because they can simplify management so much, they really excite the audience, and when all demos work (like they did this time) it can create quite a magical moment. Imagine watching all our hard work from over an hour of configuration and tweaking, be blown away when Chris restores IIS6 to its orignal install state. Now imagine, running one IISBack.vbs script and bringing it all back to life in an instant. It can be that easy if you know how to use the right tools.

A critical tool that this audience did not seem to be using was Log Parser. You can use log parser for mining data from many kinds of logs but if you run IIS you should really take the time to learn this tool before the next time you dig through your IIS logs. Alexis explained the tool well during her log parser talk here. We didn't have the talk in Italy so I was curious to see how it would be received. You do lose some people after lunch, five sessions can be a long day, but Alexis's good demos seemed to keep everyone engaged. She did this one where she writes a log parser script that leverages an SMTP server to mail the admin different kinds of alerts depending on the errors or warnings listed in the logs. It is really cool and I will have to get her to explain it to me in greater detail so I can blog all about it.

Anyway, it was a great day and as you can tell from the pic above we were having fun. Does Chris really think he can take down the Master Chief? Maybe if he's completely rested and energized. He seemed pretty tired after Wednesday's event and almost didn't come out to dinner with us. But we made him come and hopefully that will help preserve his zest.

We went to a place called Rosali's in the Zurich city center. Marcel, our host from MS Switzerland, reccomended it, but not just for the food and wine, which we did throroughly enjoy (can you believe one of us ordered fillet of foal? I'll let you guess who thought that would be funny). Rosali's is right next to a large outdoor theatre/beer garden that has been set up to watch the world cup matches.

The football hooligans came out to their "football garden" en force. Holland and Argentina were playing and the place was packed. With World Cup going on Europe has been extra fun. So far we've watched matches with the locals in each country we've visted.

This time we did remember to commemorate the occasion with an IIS7onTour pic. If you have seen Thomas Deml's IIS7 extensibility talk then you will totally understand what I'm talking about. Basically, we get a DVD of IIS7 in a picture where ever we go and then use it in the PictureDirListing module demos. Very cool stuff in that demo, but I can't go into it now. Italy just won their match and the cars are honking so much here that I can't concentrate any more. Stay tuned to IIS tour, this weekend we'll be reporting back from Moscow!

First Post, the IIS Team goes to Italy...

EWoersch — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 15:22:00 GMT

This is the first "official"post to the IIS Team On Tour blog which is the blog we are using here on IIS.net to tell the commmunity about all the places we are going to, in order to meet, educate and learn from our customers. The team members On Tour this time are program managers, Alexis Eller and Chris Adams, along with me, Eric Woersching, the IIS product manager.

As the title and pictures suggest, we have been in Italy. We arrived in Milan on Saturday to start the second leg of the Web Administration Summit roadshow. The weekend before the event was a good time. We all watched the US-Italy world cup match Saturday night in a restaurant with a bunch of a Italians. Alexis and I went out for a delicious Italian dinner on Sunday. Chris stayed in and worked on his 3 talks for the next day - Authentication, Enterprise Management Tips, DebugDiag. But come Monday, it was all business.

Here we have Alexis and Chris looking over some IIS7 demo issues before I kicked off the event in Milan. Organizing these events is a lot of work and its usually my job to do it. But I do get help from our partners in the European subsidiarys such as Tom Presotto shown below in the next picture.

But the planning and preparation is just the half of it. The real work and value of these events comes from the speakers we send. Chris is awesome to have because his animated presentation style and backcountry colloquialisms keep the audience very engaged. I just have to make sure not to overwork him. The guy just got married and he still agreed to do five weeks on the road in May and June.

At this event, Chris gave most of the talks. He carried the weight of the event and really made it a success. We found that the topics we chose this time were dead-on what these customers were needing. For example, very few members of the audience have a strong understanding of the different IIS6 authentication methods so this talk went over very well. These customers absolutely loved the Enterprise Management talk Chris gave as it explains about 10 tools and scripts they should be using to make their lives easier while managing IIS.

Chris and I stay in the auditorium after each session to take questions. After a year with the team, I am finally able to answer some of them. Chris is really their IIS guru though. I think every single attendee grabbed one of his cards to email additional questions.

Alexis was great to have on this trip as well because she has a lot of speaking experience and is a fun travel companion. Her IIS7 talk was well received and the brave audience asked a number of questions in English afterwards.

Watching the talks is a great learning experience for me. I know so much more just from sitting in. Chris watches as well so he can give speaking feedback and just be ready to answer questions. We can't always sit in because sometimes we are getting demos prepared or handling logistical matters such as making sure Chris gets a plate of food after he's answered questions through most of lunch.

Good demos are critical for this sort of thing. Above anything else, you don't want the audience to lose interest. Plus you have to show off the product. IIS7 is just too cool. We were blessed with having all of the demos work too. The picture above shows Alexis demo that explains how to migrate ASP.NET 2.0 apps from ISAPI mode to Integrated Mode in IIS7. In any case, when the demos are good and they work, everyone is happy and we go out to dinner in a good mood.

Here we are at Celanto eating with Italian IIS MVPs. Our host from MS Italy, Tom Presotto, chose this place. He knows the owner very well and she made sure we ate every bite of our 3 delicious courses. Each part of the meal offered a new dish we had never heard of before. I think Chris just wanted a steak though.

In keeping with Italian customs, we had to celebrate the occasion. In case you are wondering that is a glass of Grappa in my right hand : )

While its fun, this trip has not just been a party for us. Preparing and presenting is a lot of work and it seems like our minds are never really off of the business at hand. For example, we spent the meal discussing IIS and other MS server technologies. We learned from the MVPs what MS could do to engage the community in Italy. And we made some valuable friends like, Donatella shown below.

All in all, Italy was fantastic. The food, wine, culture and people are exceptional. The event could not have gone better for us or the customers. We are in very high spirits as we spend our first night in Switzerland getting ready to present tomorrow.

Stay tuned, blog returns Thursday to tell all about the differences between Italian and Swiss IIS users and to tell you all about Alexis's turn to present 3 / 5 talks (hehehe).

- Eric

Live From TechEd - Thursday: IIS team finishes strong at TechEd 2006

EWoersch — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 14:34:00 GMT

For this last post, I really want to give you a lot of pictures so you see how much fun we've had this week. I am not able to go to TechEd today as I am flying out to Milan to start a European roadshow over there (darn :) ). Don't worry, we will continue to cover the IIS team at all these customer events. It is very important that our team stays connected with customers because their voice can easily be lost amid the crazy pace of work in Redmond. It's you guys that are actually out there using IIS everyday so it has to be you guys that help us determine what needs to be built into the product. So keep checking out these blogs, I will keep you up to date with the comings and goings of the team that hopefully you feel you're a part of.

So in these pics here we have Chris Adams doing round 2 of his IIS7 overview talk. I think by his body language alone, you can tell how much more comfortable he was this time around. The talk went very well. Chris was all over the stage, actively soliciting questions from the audience. His demos all worked and this time he had no hardware issues. The session still went long which wasn't good especially with the Attendee party starting right afterwards. But I think that with breadth of features he was explaining and demonstrating, it is very difficult to have extra time at the end especially when you are taking questions all throughout the session.

These two pictures were just classics. We were having fun at the IIS booth and the customers who came to see us seemed to be enjoying this. Everyone I spoke with was pretty excited about what we've put in IIS7 and it wasn't hard to get them to smile when you pull out the camera.

Below you will see Chris putting a tattoo on the hand of program manager, Alexis Eller while hanging out in the discussion area near the booth. In the background of this picture, you can see the entrance to one of the chalktalk theaters we presented in. At the time of this photo, I believe the guys from Microsoft.com operations were giving a talk on migrating to 64 bit. In general, these guys were very popular at TechEd so we will need to make them a bigger part of the show next year.

Ok, here are the pictures I promised from the Attendee party at Fenway park. I had never been to the historic ballpark so it was very cool to check it out. The band, Train, played for us but what I enjoyed more was a long conversation with a guy from the IIS Administrators group at Anheuser Busch. He told me his favorite part of the entire conference was learning about the IIS.net site. He was so pleased to have all the resources in one place and a way to communicate to the team about his issues directly.

I did ask him how we could have done better at TechEd. He said he would like to have more opportunities to hear from the guys from operations for Microsoft.com. Next year, we will have to expand their presence so everyone gets a chance to chat with Casey, Stucky, Jeff and George. He also thought we should have more talks on real-world deployment experiences on IIS6. IIS6 is a great web server and a lot of our customers are still migrating to it. It becomes a delicate balance between giving attendees useful tips and best practices on IIS6 that they can go back and use today and giving attendees good previews of IIS7 that help them get up to speed on the new technology. Next year, we will use IIS.net to get suggestions for talks from the community.

Finally, I asked him what he'd like to see in IIS. He was very interested in role based administration. IIS7 allows you to assign Windows/non-Windows users to sites as administrators with a degree of delegated management rights determined on a feature basis by the local administrator. This is a very powerful capability but it could be improved if we implementied role-based administration with users and groups as well as multiple feature delegation policies per site. Hmm, I wonder if this could be implemented as a module released out-of-band (hint, hint, BillS).

But in anycase, being able to have this conversation is why we do events like TechEd. We put in a ton of work for TechEd before and during this week. I am proud of our speakers, especially our MVPs, Ken Schaefer and Scott Forsyth, for working so hard to deliver great sessions. I am also very grateful for our staff who spent the week giving chalktalks and meeting with customers at the booth (thank you Robert, Andrew, Nitasha, Brett, Carlos, Tom and Jeff!). The IIS team will be back in force next year right before the release of Longhorn Server with IIS7 for server. We finished strong this year and have big plans for making the IIS presence even better next year!

A big "Thank you!" to all the customers who attended, all the IIS MVPs and Microsoft people who helped make this happen, and all of you who have been following IIS at TechEd via this blog.

Live from TechEd - Wednesday: Ultimate Session, Ultimate Attendee

EWoersch — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 00:07:00 GMT

Sorry to be reporting "yesterday's news today" but I was not feeling well yesterday (I think my room service was bad). But hey, these are the dangers you face when you have to accept an all expense paid trip to Boston to explore the latest and greatest innovation Microsoft has to offer. For those of you who are worried, extra strength tylenol did the trick and though I'm not feeling 100% better, I am back on my feet, meeting our customers and demonstrating the great new features in IIS7. So here is the word from Wednesday, I will get you today's update after the TechEd party tonight which I'm sure you're dying to here about.

"LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE!!!" blasts throughout the double capacity ballroom. For an 8:30 talk, everyone is very suprised how pumped Chris Adams is to give his IIS7 Overview talk. Our community program manager with his southern twang, starts going over the key enhancements IIS6 before outlining the new features in Security, Configuration, System Management, Extensibility and Troubleshooting. Unfortunately, Chris would soon hit some bumps in the road. His keyboard was acting up and when he tries to edit ApplicationHost.config, lines of zeros start typing themselves into the file. I was pretty disappointed that the TechEd staff hadn't caught this one before his talk but I guess these things can happen to the best of us.

In general, I was a big fan of the talk. Could it have gone better, yes, but Chris gets another chance tomorrow to rock the house. When Chris does these talks, he makes pains to point out all the little things Admins will just love that we normally don't mention such as copying over ApplicationHost.config with a backup which you can't do in IIS6. Chris has a passionate style that many of you are familiar with from the IIS webcast series he has been leading for a few years now. That passion can make a lesser feature like detailed errors (shown above) appear larger and more useful, cool demo even more special. One his demos that went really well was showing how to extend the UI with custom modules. He added in a reporting module that spit out bar graphs and pie charts of the most frequent requests. I'm the IIS product manager and I hadn't even seen this one in action yet. I have to tell you I was blown away by the power of IIS7's extensibility. Hopefully, the customers in the audience were also so blown away that they forgot about the keyboard issues.

After hitting up this early session, we moved downstairs to the IIS booth to talk to customers. We met with a guy from R&D at Accenture who came to TechEd more prepared than any attendee I have met yet. This guy was the Ultimate TechEd Attendee. I'm serious, he had set up a terminal server to his production machines back home and was going around to each of the product groups getting free troubleshooting services from the various program managers and devs on hand. When he reached our station, he wanted guidance on migrating an ASP.NET application to IIS7 and trying to use forms auth to control access to the app. Program manager, Thomas Deml and Dev Lead, Andrew Lin figured out he didn't enable anonymous auth in addition to forms auth. He was so excited when he got it to work. Apparently, we were the last step. The app gets some system support data sent over via a web service in the UK. Then it uses an AJAX interface to populate the data to the page which *now* is securely hosted on an IIS7 Beta 2 box. <sweet!>

Live from TechEd - Tuesday: IIS MVPs rock the house!

EWoersch — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:43:00 GMT

Traffic in Boston delayed our arrival to program manger, Henry Seiler's 8:30 talk on Diagnostics. When we got in he was in the middle of a demo on the Runtime Status & Control API (RSCA). He showed how to write a C# program leveraging the Microsoft.Web.Administration API to display currently executing request information exposed by RSCA. It was a great demo and thoroughly explained but unfortunately IE cached the page Henry was refreshing to generate a request, so he didn't get this demo to work. No one caught it at the time but a few demos later, a customer pointed this out and it helped Henry get his custom trace demo to work.

It is great when customers interact like that, it shows they are paying attention and that means the material we are trying to teach them actually matters. In the future, we want to do this talk with one huge broken app and then debug it using RSCA, Failed Request Tracing, trace extensibility and the rest of the IIS7 Diagnostics features. Also, doing the demos in a Vista VPC is a risky move and we'll make sure Henry and the rest of the speakers use native installs of Vista Ultimate or Longhorn Server if necessary. All in all, Henry delivered a very informative talk.

I took off at the end of the session and helped out at the booth for the rest of the morning. Today, our IIS Resource Kit DVDs arrived so we had some additional swag to give out to customers besides the tattoos. These kits are pretty sweet, besides a very cool look and feel, there is also new content on these DVDs. The last Resource Kit DVD we put out was the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit DVD and it has grown a little outdated. This new DVD has all the content of the previous one as well has a plethora of new articles, videos, documentation and tools for IIS7. We realize a good chunk of our customers are still on IIS5 and that IIS7 does not release for production servers until late in 2007. Considering this, we are going to continue to update this DVD with fresh IIS6 content as well as new IIS7 resources coming out of the product group.

Since we missed a good opportunity to hand them out on Monday, I brought a box of the DVDs to the afternoon breakouts we had today. First, IIS MVP Scott Forsyth from ORCSWeb gave a killer talk on managing Web Farms on IIS6. I especially liked when he was demoing DFRS in Windows Server 2003 R2 for replicating content across two different servers. At one point he closes one of his servers' VPC (simulating a total server failure), then he refreshes the page and redundancy DFRS provides kicks in, about 20 seconds later, the page is back up but now the ServerName identifier we put on the page shows the server on the other VPC has picked up the load. It wasn't an IIS feature but it was still way cool.

Right now, Scott is scoring pretty high, about a 7.8, but Ken Schaefer from Avanade, is scoring even higher, about an 8.0 with his IIS6 and MOM talk. Ken has a very engaging style that kept the audience captivated. I don't think the Australian accent hurts either. In any case, the talk was straightforward, informative, useful and the demos all worked. Ken's talk focused on the IIS Management Pack and the Web Sites and Services Management Pack for MOM 2005. What really made these talks great was that both Ken and Scott were able to explain concepts and questions with real world experiences from their own careers. In addition to being an IIS MVP, Ken is a consultant who regularly sets up large MOM deployments. Scott works for a company selling dedicated hosting services, specializing in the MS hosting platform. We are truly lucky to have these guys to help us teach customers about the product. IIS.net is planning a special online MVP showcase which we’ll HOPEFULLY have up soon.

Live from TechEd - Monday: Time for talks and tattoos

EWoersch — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 01:00:00 GMT

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.

Live from TechEd - Sunday: Watching the 4 Episodes of "4"

bills — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:44:00 GMT

Wow. TechEd is finally here! The members of the IIS team have been arriving throughout the day, checking into their hotels and then getting into shuttles to check out the convention center. We have secured the IIS demo station in the TLC (Technical Learning Center) and brought in some fun giveaways for our customers - IIS7 pens and removable tatoos. Hopefully we will see some people this week walking around with IIS7 tat's on their arms (or foreheads!).

The demo station was pretty much ready when we arrived so we didn't have a lot of work to do setting up. We weren't free to slack off though. Oh no, there were already eager customers, approaching us with questions about IIS6 and curiosity about IIS7. I had the opportunity to explain the new integrated processing pipeline in IIS7 to a couple customers working in IT for the Washington State legislature. Program Manager, Chris Adams arrived at the booth just in time to answer some questions about diagnosing issues with your SPNs and protocol delegation. (Hint: download the AuthDiag tool, and watch this webcast).

After these guys took off, it was about time for the Bob Muglia keynote. The keynote held a couple of suprises. First, within the first 5 minutes of the big keynote, I hear Bob Muglia stating "and our server platform will deliver major upgrades to the web server as well." While he didn't mention IIS7 directly, it was great to see Microsoft's leadership calling out the great work our product team has put into IIS7 for its Vista and Longhorn Server releases. In keeping with the theme of the keynote, I feel this team has really ensured that IIS7 in these new OS will be completely "people ready." You guys, devs and IT Pros, are those people and I hope after seeing the new enhancements at TechEd, you will agree.

The other big suprise probably overshadowed Bob's brief call-out. "Chloe O'Brian" from 24, (actually the actress who plays Chloe) came on stage to help explain the Bob's four promises. Each promise was introduced by its own episode of "4," an IT-oriented parody of the hit TV show, "24," I know and love. made the keynote a lot of fun. After the keynote it will be time to prepare for tomorrow, the first day of the breakouts and the expo. Check out the Full IIS TechEd Agenda to see what sessions are coming up tomorrow and Tuesday. We hope to see you there at these presentations and in the expo hall at the IIS section of the TLC.