Mai-lan's Blog

In my last blog on MaxESP, I talked about how Web hoster MaximumASP uses the free Application Request Routing IIS Web extension to power “elastic” scale for the MaxESP shared hosting service. As a Web server platform, IIS plays a role in many different types of Web hosting -- shared, dedication, and virtual dedicated.

We’ve had millions of ASP.NET and PHP community application downloads from the Windows Web Application Gallery and Web Platform Installer since we launched a year ago. Once a user selects “Install” from the Web App Gallery, Web Platform Installer (WebPI) orchestrates the deployment experience for all of the Web applications (here’s a 7 minute video on how downloading an app from the Windows Web App Gallery works).

If you are looking for an easy-to-use powerful way to control the behavior of URLs on your Web site without cracking the code of the Web app, you need to download and try URL Rewrite 2.0. URL Rewrite 2.0 is an IIS7.x server extension, which means that you can download it for free for your IIS7/Windows Server 2008 and IIS7.5/Windows Server 2008 R2.  Once you run URL Rewrite setup program, URL Rewrite appears as a feature in your IIS management console.

Today we announce the general availability of the Windows Cache Extension for PHP 1.0 (affectionately known as “WinCache”), which is an open source built-for-Windows caching extension to the PHP engine. You can view, contribute and download the source code for WinCache at the PHP repository for extensions (http://pecl.php.net/package/WinCache), where we have joined other Linux-based PHP caches.

Today, IIS launched the IIS SEO Toolkit 1.0, a free, fully supported extension to IIS7 that makes it easy for you to build and maintain Web sites optimized for search engines and site quality. In a world where thousands of new Web sites appear on the Internet every month, it is more important than ever to provide a Web destination that is easily discoverable by search engines. Users have a tremendous amount of choice on Web sites today, and poor site quality, like slow response time and broken links, will end up costing you site visitors and visits. Developers and site administrators can download the IIS SEO Toolkit today using Web Platform Installer or directly from the Microsoft Download Center, and start optimizing any Web sites on Windows (ASP.NET, HTML, ASP, or PHP).

I am very pleased to announce the final release of Application Request Routing (ARR) 2.0, which provides a powerful load balancer and caching solution for free download onto Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2. As with all the IIS Web server extensions, ARR is built by the same engineering team that brings you the IIS Web server, fully supported by Microsoft Customer Support, and will soon be localized in French, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, Spanish, German, and Japanese.