Mai-lan's Blog

Windows Cache Extension for PHP (aka, “WinCache”) 1.0 General Availability Today

2009-11-19T21:21:59Z

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.

I wanted to thank Pierre Joye for his invaluable help in helping connect the IIS product team with PECL, and for agreeing to host the WinCache binaries on http://windows.php.net.

We cordially invite the PHP development community to join us in development of this caching extension for PHP on Windows. We already have gotten one contribution from the community in our pre-release mode and are very excited to have others join this new PHP on Windows caching community. The IIS team at Microsoft is going to start off the v2.0 development by adding a user cache and lazy class loading to the opcode cache, file cache, and relative file cache that is available today in WinCache 1.0.

I am proud of the WinCache project for many reasons, including:

WinCache solves a real customer problem. WinCache provides a Windows PHP caching extension that is free and part of the PECL extension library, and can accelerate the performance of all PHP applications on Windows.
WinCache is our first big open source contribution to the PHP on Windows community. The IIS team has made several code contributions (big fixes) to the PHP 5.3 release, as well as provided support for the Windows Installer for PHP community (John Mertic rocks) and the Windows documentation on the PHP website. This WinCache release is a substantial amount of code that we are open sourcing on the PECL extension library. We hope others join this new community to help accelerate PHP performance on Windows.
WinCache represents a series of “firsts” for Microsoft…first time Microsoft has contributed to the PECL repository, first Windows-based PHP cache, first joint community project between Microsoft and the PHP development community, first BSD license for the IIS team….and the list goes on. The WinCache feature team of Ruslan, Kanwal and Don are incredibly passionate about PHP on Windows, respond to their blog and forum comments, and lurk on the PHP on Windows mailing list if you want to connect with them.

Here’s some more information about WinCache.

What is WinCache?

WinCache is actually a collection of three caches:

An opcode file cache, just like the one that APC provides to cache compiled PHP code
A file cache to help when your PHP scripts run on remote servers. This is net new functionality that is not available in other caching modules at the time of this blog.
A relative file cache to cache relative file paths for when you are running PHP scripts on remote servers.

WinCache itself was designed, written, and tested by the IIS engineering team that also brings you FastCGI, the core PHP hosting platform in IIS. We are planning to add more caches to WinCache in 2010.

What is the WinCache license?

WinCache is licensed under BSD.

How do I get WinCache?

You can compile WinCache as part of your PHP compilation from the PECL library.

If you download any PHP application from Web Platform Installer and/or the Windows Web Application Gallery (WordPress, Moodle, SilverStripe, SugarCRM, Acquia Drupal, Gallery 2, and any other new PHP app in the Web App Gallery), you will automatically get WinCache installed on your IIS computer as part of the PHP application install. We want to make sure that your PHP application deployment and hosting experience is great on Windows.

How do I learn more about WinCache?

You can learn more about WinCache’s features and how to get started on the http://php.iis.net community site. You can also check out the blogs for the feature team (Kanwal, Ruslan, Don) or visit the community forum which is supported by the feature team and WinCache community.

How much faster is it to run WinCache with my PHP application?

We are seeing quite a significant increase in performance. But don’t take our word for it. Check out the perspective of other members of the PHP developer community:

Cal Evans’ benchmark results
TechPortal at iBuildings.com benchmark results

We hope that others try WinCache and publish their findings as well.

Why is Microsoft investing in making PHP run faster?

IIS is all about making apps run at their finest on IIS. We have a built-in advantage with ASP.NET apps because we can walk down the hallway in our building here in the Seattle area to talk to the ASP.NET team about how to make the ASP.NET on IIS experience better. But we also care deeply about the PHP experience on IIS – there are some amazing applications like WordPress and Drupal that form the foundation of many a Web site on the Internet. We are committed to making those applications run great on Windows, which is the primary motivation for our WinCache project.

How do I learn more about WinCache?

To learn more about WinCache, you can check out:

The PECL documentation on WinCache
The PHP on Windows feature team (Kanwal, Ruslan, and Don) blogs
The WinCache community forum
The IIS.NET documentation on WinCache
The source code of WinCache on PECL, licensed under BSD
How to file bugs on WinCache in PECL

Thanks,

Mai-lan

IIS SEO Toolkit 1.0 Final Release Available Today

2009-11-17T23:06:19Z

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).

The IIS SEO Toolkit installs and runs on IIS 7.x, which is the Microsoft Web server shipped as part of Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

If you are a site administrator, you will love using the IIS SEO toolkit because you don’t have to write code to improve your Web site’s “searchability” by Bing, Google and other Web sites, and you can directly impact the quality of your Web site. You can find and fix-up site issues by running reports that:

analyze everything from broken links to load times on Web pages
discover common browsing paths through your Web site taken by customers
duplicate files and other issues with site quality

If you are a developer, you will be interested in the IIS SEO toolkit because it can simplify your development process for new Web sites and help you maintain existing sites. You can use the same Web server administration console that you use for managing your site to:

run reports to report on broken links across your Web site
control robots crawling behavior on your site
build custom site analysis reports for site administrators
add and edit sitemaps and sitemap indices

One of the most powerful features in the IIS SEO toolkit is the built-in site analyzer that lets you run detailed reports on web sites that are hosted on external Web sites or your localhost environment.

The “dashboard” for the Site Analysis Report gives you a summary of violations and other built-in reports like pages with the most violations, or sort by violation categories or levels.

If you want to take a different “view” of your Web site, you can look at your site by content, performance or links. The query builder that comes with the Site Analysis tool lets you set up custom queries to get a detailed view of the content you care about. In this example below, you can see all the links to images on your site.

The IIS SEO toolkit is part of the IIS7 mission to provide the best Web application hosting platform for developers and administrators. We hope you enjoy using this extension and look forward to hearing your suggestions in our SEO Toolkit forum!

For more information, check out these sources:

Carlos’ blogs with many a post on the SEO toolkit
The public forum, monitored by the IIS product team, for SEO Toolkit
The SEO Toolkit extension page with a summary of features and links to more detailed articles

Download a powerful load balancer and caching solution free on Windows Server 2008 or later with Application Request Routing (ARR) 2.0

2009-11-09T19:01:00Z

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.

ARR only installs on IIS 7.x, which means Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. ARR can be used to load balance requests to Windows Server 2003 and even other types of servers like Java in a Web farm but ARR itself has to be installed on a Windows Server 2008 or later server.

Once you download ARR (use Web Platform Installer for an easy install), you will see a new node called “Server Farms” appear in the left tree-view of our IIS Manager administration console. With ARR, we are adding Server Farms as an IIS Web server concept on the same level as Sites, Servers, and App Pools. ARR gives you the ability to load requests, monitor and manage servers and requests, set up proxying services, establish routing rules (using our URL Rewrite extension) and set up affinity relationships between servers and requests.

One of the innovative Web hosting providers that we work with, MaximumASP, has rolled out a new service called MAXEsp which provides high availability for shared hosting using ARR on top of Windows Server 2008 R2. This type of new offer is exactly what we like to see being built on our IIS platform of Web server + Web server extensions –-- customers either making money or saving money using Windows Server 2008 or later with IIS 7.x and our library of Web extensions.

In this second version of ARR, we introduce support for managing cache hierarchies, which is a requirement for ARR to manage requests in the data centers for Content Delivery Networks (like Akamai). ARR is an integral part of the IIS media hosting platform for high definition media delivery over HTTP. We introduce the ability for ARR v2 to be used on the edge of the network either as a parent node or a child caching node in a data center that can be geographically distributed. Pretty powerful stuff – and it’s free on Windows Server 2008 or later, fully supported by Microsoft and coming soon in 9 languages for international customers.

To learn more about ARR, check out these blogs:

Don has put together a nice collection of links to detailed documentation and walkthroughs to get started.
Eric provides a good summary of ARR on the Windows Server blog with a neat link to case studies for using ARR to replace SQUID.

How You Can Use IIS7 as Web Front End to Java App Servers

2009-10-22T12:32:00Z

Ask many server administrators if Microsoft’s IIS Web server can be used with Java servers, and you will probably hear a quick “No way!” with an optional sniff or chuckle, depending on your server preference. Starting with Windows Server 2008 and later, you can set up IIS7 as the Web serving tier in a three-tier deployment to IIS or Java servers on the backend.

Customers are taking advantage of this functionality today if they have an existing Java investment:

Front-end IIS Web server delivering requests to backend WebLogic server running a Deltek time entry system
A major insurance provider using an IIS Web server to deliver requests to TomCat application servers.

The key component is IIS Application Request Routing (ARR), which we ship as a fully supported, free Web extension for Windows Server 2008 and later. If you have Windows Server 2008 or later, ARR 1.0 gives you:

IIS as an option in a three-tier configuration with WebLogic and TomCat backends. It should work with WebSphere too – if you try it, blog about it and let us know!
application load balancing that you can configure easily using rules
dynamic scale your Web app to different servers in a server farm, based on memory and other factors
rules-based ability to bind client requests to specific servers with cookies
centralized configuration management and health monitoring for nodes in a server

In the next few weeks, we will release ARR 2.0, which adds advanced support for Edge serving to distributed cache hierarchies. ARR 2.0 as a pre-release has been running in production for several major content delivery networks as a high-performance Squid alternative on the network Edge.

Useful links:

More information about ARR in general
More information about ARR in a 3-tier configuration with Java app servers
ARR public forum, monitored by the ARR engineering team and ARR community

General availability of Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2, with IIS 7.5

2009-10-22T07:22:00Z

As of today, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 is generally available for purchase. This latest release of the Windows operating system contains IIS 7.5, which provides a set of enhancements and new functionality on top of the IIS 7 Web server platform.

Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2 also marks the first release of a Windows operating system release that includes Web extensions built and refined in our rapid innovation model. See the IIS Web Extension library for the new functionality which ranges from an application request load balancer/proxy to URL rewriting to a deployment platform for Web applications and server.

If you are an administrator looking for a simplified but powerful management experience, IIS 7.5 brings you:

built-in, brand new FTP server and WebDav support that we initially shipped as Web extensions, revised with customer feedback and added to IIS in the Windows operating system
new management console support for administering request filtering rules, FastCGI settings, and ASP.NET settings, part of an Administration Pack that we initially released as a Web download that also includes…
a rich IIS configuration editor built-into the management console to simplify configuration management and generate administration scripts for automated configuration management
integration with Windows Server 2008 R2’s new Best Practice Analyzer with IIS-specific best practice rules
a Windows PowerShell snap-in for IIS, with a library of task-based and lower-level commandlets for IIS administration – shipped first as a Web download and now incorporated into the IIS server in the operating system.
quality enhancements -- otherwise known as bug fixes :-)
config tracing so you can audit changes to the IIS configuration system
application “pre-load” where you can decrease the response time for first requests to an application by pre-loading worker processes, using a Web extension called Application Warm-Up.

If you are a developer wanting to understand the implications of targeting an IIS 7.5 server, consider:

the Server Core installation option in Windows Server 2008 R2’s new support for applications built with the .NET framework 2.0, 3.0, 3.5.1, and 4.0. Your ASP.NET applications can run on the reduced footprint of Server Core installation option
implement IIS trace calls in PHP code, which is hosted via our FastCGI support, so you can used IIS request tracing for diagnostics.
Hostable Web Core, which you can use if you want host IIS in your own process without the full IIS server.
new delegation support for custom errors so that server administrators can give you control over custom error development for your site or app
the change we made to switch the default identity of the IIS app pool from Network Service to Application Pool. This change, driven by our commitment to providing the most secure Web server on the planet, has some implications for developers using SQL Server Express; see here for more information in a KB.
built-in support for .Net 4.0 for your ASP.NET applications

We hope you enjoy this release! We are hard at work now on adding new functionality to the IIS Web extension library for you to download onto Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Stay tuned for more free, fully supported downloads from the IIS server team that you can use to extend the functionality of IIS 7 and IIS 7.5.

New IIS Web Extensions for Web Site Developers and Web Server Administrators

2009-09-24T20:08:00Z

I am very proud to announce our September 2009 release of IIS Web extensions! This September launch includes the RTW release of Web Deploy 1.0, Web Platform Installer 2.0, and IIS Database Manager 1.0, as well as the pre-release versions of Application Request Routing 2.0 RC and Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) Toolkit Beta 2.0. We are also releasing international support for a number of IIS extensions and the Windows Web Application Gallery. Along with these engineering releases, we are proud to make available Website Spark, a business program that makes it easy and affordable for Web development professionals to use the Microsoft Web platform.

Quick Start to What Important For You In This September Release

As a “quick start” to the IIS September 2009 releases, if you are…

A Web developer, you will be interested in Web Platform Installer to easily get the Microsoft Web stack as well as free community applications from the Windows Web Application Gallery, Web Deploy for application deployment and migration, the Search Optimization Engine (SEO) Toolkit for improving site discoverability and quality, and IIS Database Manager for managing remote or local databases. You may also be interested in our new language support for Web Platform Installer 2.0, Web Deploy 1.0, Database Manager 1.0 and URL Rewrite 1.1.
A Web server administrator, you will be interested in Web Deploy for server and application migration and deployment, and Application Request Routing (ARR) for load balancing and cache/proxy support. Web Platform Installer will help setting up servers with the right Microsoft Web stack. We also have international language support for URL Rewrite 1.1 and ARR v1.

As you may know, IIS7 in Windows Server 2008 was a major release for the Microsoft Web server. Among its many changes are a brand new extensibility model that lets third parties (and the IIS product team!) use a rich API to innovate on the core Web server. And that's exactly what we've done over the last two years as you can see from our IIS Extensions.

With this release, we are not only continuing to expand the scope and features of our IIS extensions, but we're also providing localized versions in different languages for customers. All of our IIS Web server extensions released via Web download are fully supported by Microsoft for the support lifecycle of the underlying operating system.

Inside The September 2009 IIS Release

Web Deploy 1.0
Web Deploy 1.0 is the migration and deployment platform for IIS Web servers and applications. Web Deploy provides:

A solution integrated with IIS Manager for creating, exporting and importing Web application packages. You can package up a Web site, which also pulls in app resources (registry, COM, DB, etc), and use our built-in remoting in IIS Manager to export the application package to a remote IIS server. Because of its IIS Manager integration, you also get built-in delegation support for administrators to authorize local and remote users to perform tasks like creating a Web site that previously required admin-only permissions.

Figure. Application Packaging in IIS Manager using Web Deploy

A command line tool that can be used to migrate and synchronize IIS 6 and IIS 7.x Web servers, as well as to package and deploy applications. This tool greatly simplifies the process of upgrading IIS6 servers to IIS7, and to sync IIS servers across Web farms. It can also be used for application packaging and deployment.

A platform for other tools and apps to use for migration and deployment. For example, the upcoming release of Visual Studio uses Web Deploy as the underlying platform for packaging Web applications and their resources. Web Platform Installer uses Web Deploy as the platform for reading text-based manifest files from zip packages of community applications in the Windows Web Application Gallery, and creates sites from open source applications like Umbraco and WordPress.

Learn more/download Web Deploy.
Read the Web Deploy blog.
Get free, best effort forum support on Web Deploy from the community and IIS product group.

Web Platform Installer 2.0

Supported on Windows XP and later, Web Platform Installer (Web PI) provides a central location to find and install the Microsoft Web platform and applications from the Web Application Gallery.

Web PI checks your computer for installed software and environment variables and then presents an up-to-date list of Web components that you can install.

Figure. Web Platform Installer “Web Platform” tab

You can learn more about the products themselves in a details page, add multiple products to a list, select a product or two and Web PI will handle the installation of your choices, including pre-requisites, reboots and rollbacks.

Once you make your choices, Web PI downloads the installers to your computer and then runs the installation silently so that you don’t have to click through multiple screens across multiple products. Web PI intelligently caches the product installers on your computer, so you also don’t have to pay for the bandwidth to get the installer on your computer multiple times.

You can also browse free community Web applications from the Windows Web App Gallery. Web PI uses XML feeds to provide access to the latest of the Web product stack and apps from Web App Gallery – and also supports reading custom XML feeds so that hosters and other users can add other products to the Web PI experience. Web PI uses Web Deploy as the underlying app deployment platform to install and deploy the free app so that you end up with a working Web site based on the app after a few simple screens.

Learn more/download Web Platform Installer.
Check out free community Web Applications on the Window Web Application Gallery.
Get free, best effort forum support on Web PI from the community, IIS product group, and partners.

Database Manager 1.0

The IIS Database Manager lets you manage your Web application’s databases (SQL or MySQL) from IIS Manager, the same unified management console that you use to manage your Web application.

Figure. Database Manager Via IIS Manager

With Database Manager, you get:

The ability to manage local and remote database tables, views, stored procedures and data as well as running ad hoc queries.

Built-in delegation support for administrators to delegate access to remote and local users

Support for Microsoft SQL and MySQL databases

A rich provider model that allows developers to add new data sources including XML.

Local and remote backup and restore for SQL databases.

IIS Database Manager gives Web app developers and administrators the ability to manage a key resource of the Web application – its database – in a single integrated experience through IIS Manager.

Learn more/download IIS Database Manager 1.0
Get free, best effort forum support on IIS Database Manager from the community, IIS product group, and partners.

Application Request Routing 2.0 RC

Application Request Routing (ARR) provides a load balancer for Web farms and an edge caching solution as a Web extension for IIS. In this RC release for the second version of ARR, we are increasing the performance of intelligent, rules-based routing of HTTP requests in Web farms by providing disk based caching. With ARR, you can see how our new extensibility model in IIS7 lets us open up production-grade new scenarios like load balancing and proxy/cache…all built on Windows Server and freely downloadable to IIS 7 and later.

ARR’s intelligent load balancing transforms the Web server into a dynamic environment for routing requests based on rules that allow the administrators to control traffic to sites based on site or client affinity. We introduce the concept of "server farms" in ARR as well, allowing you to dictate which server in a cluster that you want to handle a request.

Figure. Introducing Server Farms in ARR

Hosters like MaximumASP can use ARR to create new hosting offers. MaxESP, a new offer from MaximumASP, provides customers with load balancing and redundancy using ARR on the server without requiring any application changes.

In ARR 2.0, we expand the capabilities of ARR into edge caching. ARR plays a critical server component role to our end-to-end rich media delivery solution (check out IIS Smooth Streaming in action!), where ARR can turn an IIS server into a cache node in a CDN/ECN environment. In a hierarchical caching environment, ARR can be used as an edge/child cache node or a parent cache node, dynamically compressing content for maximum caching efficiency.

As with all our IIS extensions, you can use the same familiar IIS management tools like IIS Manager to quickly set up ARR as a load balancer or cache in a hierarchical environment.

Download ARR v2 RC (note that ARR v1 and ARR v2 can’t be installed side-by-side since ARR requires a dedicated server – pick the version that addresses your business needs).
Learn more about ARR v2 RC.
Get free, best effort forum support for ARR v2 RC from the community and IIS product group.

SEO Toolkit 1.0 Beta 2

In a world of rapidly increasing web sites, every Web site developer wants to make sure that their site is easily discoverable with good site quality. The SEO Toolkit Beta 2 simplifies site quality and searchability from the same management console that you administer your Web applications. The Toolkit provides the ability for developers to do site analysis, which helps you discover broken links and other site quality issues based on validation rules – as well as helps you troubleshoot common problems like duplicate content and poor keywords.

Figure. IIS SEO Toolkit Site Analysis

You can also use the SEO Toolkit to define robots exclusion files using a powerful editor – and then run another site analysis to assess the impact of applying your robots files. The sitemap functionality in the SEO Toolkit makes it easy to author index files that make it easy to discover a physical and logical view of the site.

In this Beta 2, you’ll experience a simplified workflow through the optimization process and take advantage of new features like report exporting into a single consolidated report that you can then compare with previous reports to flags, ability to set credentials that allow the site analysis tool to crawl login-protected pages, and extensibility that allows developer to customize the crawling process to handle new content types or to declare and flag their own violations in existing content types.

Learn more/download SEO Toolkit Beta 2.
Get free, best effort forum support for SEO Toolkit from the community and IIS product group.

New International Support for IIS Extensions and the Web App Gallery

Today marks the beginning of our international rollout of our IIS extensions and Windows Web Application Gallery, so customers all over the world can take advantage of a rapidly innovating IIS.

Figure. Web PI in Russian

Our goal is to provide support for nine primary languages for RTW IIS extensions (not betas) with today’s releases taking us the first step. With this release, we provide the following international support for the following products:

Web Platform Installer 2.0 in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian

Web Deploy 1.0 in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian

IIS Database Manager 1.0 in French, Spanish, German, and Japanese

Application Request Routing 1.0 in French, Spanish, German, and Japanese

URL Rewrite 1.1 in French, Spanish, German, and Japanese.

Web Application Gallery: Support for submitting free community applications in French, Italian, German, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian via a Web App Gallery application submission. All Web App Gallery submissions in any language must follow the Web App Gallery Principles before links to the Web application are added to the Web App Gallery.

Look for more international releases for IIS extensions in the upcoming months as we continue to expand on languages and coverage of IIS released products.

I hope you enjoy the new functionality that this brings to your Web server! I am very proud of the work that we are launching today -- it is a reflection of how deeply we care about building the best Web server on the planet.

Try out the new extensions by installing from Web Platform Installer. If you have any questions or want to talk to our larger community of experts and product team members, try http://forums.iis.net/.

8 New Free ASP.NET and PHP Open Source Apps in the Web App Gallery

2009-07-30T05:00:00Z

It's been four months since we launched the Windows Web Application Gallery, and we've been adding apps to the Gallery steadily. Today saw the arrival of SugarCRM Community Edition (CE), a free customer relationship management PHP open source application with a vibrant community. SugarCRM CE joins seven ASP.NET apps that have been added to the App Gallery, with a healthy pipeline of ASP.NET and PHP open source apps in the proces of review and approval.

All of these apps followed the Web App Gallery Principles and went through the submission process for the Web App Gallery, which is open to any app that adheres to the Principles. We have also added more Web App Gallery integration best practices for developers looking to submit links to their app in the Web App Gallery.

To sum up, here are the apps added to the Web App Gallery over the last four months, listed in alphabetical order:

Amplifeeder: ASP.NET lifestream platform aggregating online activity in one place, published by Amplifeeder.
AtomSite: ASP.NET CMS built on MVC, published by AtomSite.
KenticoCMS for ASP.NET: ASP.NET CMS, brought to you by Kentico.
mojoPortal: ASP.NET content management system, published by Source Tree Solutions, LLC
nopCommerce: ASP.NET shopping cart, published by nopCommerce.
nService: ASP.NET help desk system, published by Avensoft.
ResourceBlender.NET: ASP.NET app that helps you translate an application into multiple languages, published by ResourceBlender.NET.
SugarCRM CE: PHP customer relationship management (CRM) system, published by SugarCRM.

I have been pretty impressed with all the apps! There's a good variety of functionality, themes, templates, and customization modules to let you build your own site or system on top of the apps.

All of these apps are free and open source. If you want to check them out, visit the Web App Gallery and download from the site, or open the Web Apps tab in Web Platform Installer 2.0 and select the apps you want. Web Platform Installer handles all the downloads from Web App Gallery and also can be used as a separate standalone tool -- it makes sure that the right platform dependencies (apps, frameworks, etc.) are installed before laying down the app. For example, if the app requires IIS' URL Rewrite module for dynamic URL rewriting on Windows, like WordPress 2.8, Web Platform Installer will install URL Rewrite before installing Wordpress so you don't have to. Likewise, Web Platform Installer will make sure that the right stack dependencies like PHP or ASP.NET are installed for the app that needs it.

The Web App Gallery lists customer reviews and other data that you might find interesting. I have seen reviewers of apps list their sites that show the apps in action as a reference point too. I always check out the publisher's site as part of my research process -- all have useful tutorials/docs/videos/etc. to help learn more about the apps.

I just did a demo at an internal Microsoft conference for the MS sales field where I downloaded four different content management systems from Web App Gallery, playing the role of a Web consultant trying to find the right starter app for a small business Web site. I then customized each of the Web apps with a template and a little bit of text...it was amazing to see how quickly I could get a bare bones site up and running with a CMS infrastructure from start (find the app on Web App Gallery) to selection (evaluating which app was the one that worked best for my customer site). As we add more apps to the Web App Gallery, you'll get even more choice. I expect the Content Management category will continue to get the most apps since CMS tends to be the backbone of business sites, but you'll start seeing more in the eCommerce and other categories as our Web App Gallery community expands.

And, of course, both the ASP.NET and PHP open source applications in the Web App Gallery run the best on the IIS7 platform. Our Open Source Lab team here at Microsoft recently published two videos to YouTube that provide a pretty funny take on the entire ASP.NET + PHP app hosting story on IIS. Check them out if you can: "Deployment" and "The Showdown".

Thanks,

Mai-lan

Contributions to the PHP Engine

2009-05-18T16:47:00Z

I am always amazed at the passion and energy that open source contributors put into what is often their “night job” after whatever they do to pay the bills. It is that passion that has driven a vibrant community of PHP open source applications that ranges from on-line learning to shopping carts. Those PHP applications are in turn driving the development of Web sites all over the world.

We want to ensure that Windows Server is a first class platform for those PHP Web sites and applications. We took the first step in this direction with IIS6 and IIS7, which is part of Windows Server and the Windows client operating systems. We provided a critical platform component called FastCGI. FastCGI first shipped as a Web download for IIS6 in November 2007 and is also included as part of the IIS installation in Windows Server 2008 and later. FastCGI provides reliable hosting of PHP applications with better performance than any previous Windows Server operating system. This app hosting support in the Microsoft Web platform was the first step towards making sure that PHP applications could run as a first-class citizen on IIS.

Then we built URL Rewrite to provide developers with the same type of support for canonical host names and control over URL writing as mod_rewrite but with an easier management experience. We also launched the Web Application Gallery and Web Platform Installer, which make it easy for users to discover, download, and install open source community applications (PHP and ASP.NET) with Web Deployment Tool integration on Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. We work with the Windows installer community for PHP so that the latest non-thread-safe version of production-ready PHP configures FastCGI automatically on install. We also include the latest production version of the PHP as an option for users to download and install using our Web Platform Installer so that apps can be installed with the required PHP dependency.

All of these investments in PHP support tie back to our engagement goals, which are:
1. Make it easy to install PHP on Windows Server
2. Make it easy to find and deploy top community PHP apps on Windows Server

We are now focusing an important third goal that we started with our FastCGI support:
3. Make sure that PHP applications run well on Windows Server

The PHP core and extensions started and have evolved on Linux. In the last couple of years, with the support of a growing PHP on Windows Server community led by Pierre Joye and the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center, we have seen the community focus more and more on how that core and extensions run and perform on Windows Server. The fruits of that labor is the first PHP release optimized for Windows Server, PHP 5.3. RC1 which released on March 27th, 2009.

Significant functional and performance improvements specific to Windows Server have been made in the upcoming PHP 5.3 release.

In particular, the community has implemented the following improvements:

Recompiled PHP with Visual C++ v 9.0, which improved the performance of the PHP core significantly.
Both 32bit and 64bit builds (64 bit builds expiramentalexperimental until PHP 5.4/6.0) of PHP have been made available.
Optimized the PHP implementation to take advantage of native Win32 APIs, instead of relying on POSIX emulation libraries
Fixed the standard PHP test suite, which now has a much higher pass rate on Windows Server
All PHP libraries have been fixed to be built from the source code. 10 years old libraries have been updated to newest versions.
Build environment for PHP on Windows Server has been standardized and now it is easy for anyone to rebuild the exact same PHP stack on Windows Server as the release build.

In addition to that, there is greater integration for Windows Server development in the PHP community with PHP on Windows Server is now treated by the community as first class platform. Some specific examples:

PHP versions for Windows Server are released at the same time as other platforms.
Builds are available on the same day as the source releases.
The PHP security mailing list now includes has developers with Windows expertise.

The next step is to focus on PHP on Windows Server Fundamentals – making sure that PHP installs and configures correctly without regressing functionality or performance as part of the transfer on Windows Server. We are focusing on PHP on Windows Server Fundamentals to help the Windows Server on PHP open source community. Our goal with engaging with the PHP Core community is to improve PHP’s performance and integration with Windows Server.

Our engineering team has started to contribute directly to the PHP on Windows code base by helping out with bug fixing functions in PHP 5.3 that work on Linux and break on Windows...specifically, we fixed the _nan() function so that developers can use it to see if a math function returned a proper value or not, and workely closed with Pierre to fix and test the is_readable/is_writeable functions to work with Windows ACLs. These two code fixes are just the starting point for us -- our engineering team will continue working with Pierre and the PHP on Windows community by tuning performance, fixing bugs, and contributing code to improve specific PHP components that have issues running on the Windows Server platform.

We also want to provide specific Windows Server expertise to the PHP app community and to help fix issues with some of the most popular PHP applications that surface on Windows Server. For example, we contributed a fix to WordPress for dynamic URL rewriting for "pretty URLs" with IIS URL Rewrite on Windows Server that was accepted in the WordPress 2.8 code branch.

Our goal with all of these contributions is to help improve the performance of PHP on Windows Server and with other Microsoft Web platform software. We are freely providing all contributions for use with PHP because we believe that PHP running well out of the box on Windows Server means not just happy Windows Server customers, but also happy PHP developers who can now feel more confident about supporting Windows Server for their projects.

You can stay updated on PHP on Windows Server development by checking the IIS PHP portal or the PHP for Windows site.

Real World IIS Videocasts for Community ASP.NET and PHP Application Packaging and Deployment

2009-05-04T22:17:00Z

I just wrapped up a series of videocasts that target developers and users who want to experience a simplified deployment experience for apps and the Web stack on Windows, focusing particularly on ASP.NET and PHP open source community applications.

For developers

make sure that you have the latest Microsoft Web platform tools (including the Microsoft Web server, applications and frameworks, database and tools, as well as PHP), watch the Staying Current with the Latest Web Platform with Web Platform Installer videocast (7 minutes).
add required Web Deployment tool integration for the Windows Web App Gallery and/or simplify installation on Windows, watch Adding Web Deployment Tool Support to Community Application Zip Packages (12 minutes). This video explains how to add Web Deployment Tool manifest files to a community application zip file (WordPress in this case) for easier deployment on Windows.
find a community application that deploys easily on Windows and learn how to re-package that app with customizations for deployment to a rstrongote IIS7 Web server, see the Packaging and Deploying an Open Source Application Using Web Deployment Tool videocast (11 minutes). This video walks through how to find and customize SilverStripe from the Web App Gallery, then re-package and deploy the customized SilverStripe package using Web Deployment Tool to a remote IIS7 server.

For Windows users

try out the Web Platform Installer, start with the Finding and Installing the Web Platform Installer 2.0 videocast (3 minutes). This video showing the different ways to find and install the Web Platform Installer, as well as provides a brief introduction to the Web Platform Installer Tool.
install a free open source community application easily on Windows, watch the Installing a Free Community Application Using Web Platform Installer videocast (7 minutes). This video shows how to install Umbraco on Windows using the Web Platform Installer.

Technologies discussed

As always, HTTP streaming over IIS brought to you by IIS Smooth Streaming. My next set of videos focuses on IIS7 extensions on the server that make it easier to manage Web apps and their databases, and optimize for search engines. Stay tuned!

Real World IIS: Adding Web Deployment Tool Support to Community Application ZIP Packages (videocast)

2009-05-04T21:31:00Z

If you package your application in ZIP format, you can add Web Deployment Tool support to simplify the installation of your application on Windows. Our open source application partners (ASP.NET apps like DotNetNuke and PHP apps like WordPress) add this Web Deployment Tool integration as part of being included in the Windows Web Application Gallery (as defined in the Web App Gallery Principles).

This 12 minute videocast shows you how to:

Start from a WordPress zip package without Web Deployment Tool support from the WordPress community site.
Look at and add manifest.xml, parameters.xml and install.sql files to the WordPress package.
Import the new modified WordPress package using the IIS7 Manager (the new "Manage Packages" action, powered by Web Deployment Tool). This validates that the WordPress app deploys easily and works using the Web Deployment tool integration for the new WordPress package.

HTTP streaming brought to you by IIS Smooth Streaming.

Real World IIS: Staying Current with the Latest Microsoft Web Platform with Web Platform Installer (videocast)

2009-05-02T05:13:00Z

If you have been plugged into what has happened across the Microsoft Web Platform in the last two years, you will have noticed a new focus on delivering free Web releases that extend the core functionality of the Microsoft Web stack. We do this all the time in IIS. We build IIS Web extensions on the IIS7 platform (which ships in Windows Server 2008) to open up new capabilities on the Web server across media, request serving, management and administration, and security.

Customers can download our extensions onto IIS7 (and sometimes IIS6) as a free, fully supported product that expands the IIS7 Web server in new directions. Getting new functionality every three to six months on the Web server is a good thing but it can be hard to track when a new release comes out.

The Web Platform Installer helps centralize a single discovery point for the Microsoft Web Platform -- Web server (IIS), application frameworks (ASP.NET and PHP), database (SQL), and tools (Visual Web Developer).

The Web Platform Installer (Web PI) does the work of checking to see what is the latest available across the Microsoft Web Platform against what is already installed on your computer; you can see what is new and what you haven't yet installed. You can use the Web Platform Installer to learn more about different components and install one or more components in a chained installation, with Web PI handling reboots and logging failures where applicable. It's pretty handy. We use WebPI on the product team to set up new servers and desktops for development and/or demo environments.

This short 7 minute video describes how you can use the Web Platform Installer to stay current with the latest in the Microsoft Web Platform.

HTTP streaming brought to you by IIS Smooth Streaming.

Real World IIS: Packaging and Deploying an Open Source Application Using Web Deployment Tool (videocast)

2009-05-02T03:46:00Z

Many Web site developers start development from an open source application as the base for a custom Web site. There are many high quality open source applications out there that make it much easier to put together a content, ecommerce, social network and/or community Web site. IIS offers a couple features that make your life a lot easier if you want to:

Find the open source application on the Windows Web Application Gallery.
Download and install the open source application on IIS using Web Platform Installer (you can check out this screencast to see a demo).
Customize the app in the way you see fit.
Package your application using the Web Deployment Tool support in the IIS7 Manager.
Connect to a remote Web server from your development computer to remotely administer the IIS7 server using IIS Manager. (Thanks to Chris Morrow at MaximumASP for letting us use one of his dedicated Windows Server 2008 servers for my videocast.)
Import the customized application's package on the remote Web server, which deploys your custom app easily to another server.

In this short video (11 minutes), I walk through how you can use IIS to take these steps with a PHP Content Management System named SilverStripe. (The audio quality is a little lower on this one since I recorded it at the wrong volume...sorry about that.)

HTTP streaming brought to you by IIS Smooth Streaming.

Real World IIS: Installing a Free Community Application Using Web Platform Installer (videocast)

2009-04-30T22:27:00Z

In the 2.0 version of Web Platform Installer (Web PI), we introduced the ability to install free community applications with Web Deployment Tool support from the Web PI directly.

In March 2009, we launched the Windows Web Application Gallery, where Windows users can find and install free community applications easily on IIS. The Windows Web Application Gallery provides links to both ASP.NET and PHP applications and we're seeing strong user interest in both. You can get a Web content management system, blogs, and wikis. We are adding more ASP.NET and PHP community applications every month.

When we add an application to the Web App Gallery, the app gets added to an ATOM feed that is both consumed by the Web App Gallery and displayed within the Web Platform Installer (Web PI). So you can either visit the Web App Gallery web site or use the Web Platform Installer directly to find the same free community apps easily on IIS. You can learn more about Web PI here and Web App Gallery here.

This short video (just under 8 minutes) walks you through how to install Umbraco, an open source ASP.NET community application, from the Web PI.

HTTP streaming brought to you by IIS Smooth Streaming.

Real World IIS: Finding and Installing Web Platform Installer 2.0 (videocast)

2009-04-30T21:39:00Z

The Web Platform Installer 2.0 is a free IIS tool that makes it easy to discovery and install the Microsoft Web stack and free community apps from the Windows Web Application Gallery. It's the "first mile" to get started with the Web Platform and Web App Gallery applications on IIS.

We're seeing thousands of downloads of Web Platform Installer (Web PI) by developers and administrators who use Web PI to discovery and stay up to date with the latest components in the Web stack. (We use Web PI here on the product team to set up and stay current with desktops/laptops and servers.) We also launched the Windows Web Application Gallery last month, which provides a way for users to discovery and download open source applications (ASP.NET and PHP) onto Windows. Every application in the Web App Gallery is download by Web Platform Installer (Web PI), so it's a critical component of the process.

In this 3 minute video, I walk through the different ways that you can find and start using the Web Platform Installer.

HTTP streaming over IIS to you by IIS Smooth Streaming.

"Real World IIS" videocast series

2009-04-30T20:13:00Z

I am starting a videocast series called "Real World IIS" that takes a tour through how to use our free IIS Web services extensions in the type of day-to-day activities that a developer and/or administrator might encounter. These videocasts will be short (always less than 15 minutes) and delivered to you through IIS Smooth Streaming, delivering high quality media over HTTP using IIS.

In the first part of the series, I am going to focus on Web downloads that help make it easy to discover, deploy and manage ASP.NET and PHP applications on IIS7. I think developers and other users will be pleasantly surprised to find out about what IIS lets you do with Web apps today.

In the second part of the series, I will talk about extensions that take the IIS Web server into new territory, from load balancing to media to server migration. We have used the IIS7 extensibility platform to open up the core Web server to all these new scenarios.

Hope you enjoy the series! We've been busy here in Redmond. :-)