Mai-lan's Blog : Developers

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

mailant — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:21:59 GMT

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

mailant — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:06:19 GMT

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

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

mailant — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:08:00 GMT

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

mailant — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

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

mailant — Mon, 18 May 2009 16:47:00 GMT

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

mailant — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:17:00 GMT

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)

mailant — Mon, 04 May 2009 21:31:00 GMT

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)

mailant — Sat, 02 May 2009 05:13:00 GMT

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)

mailant — Sat, 02 May 2009 03:46:00 GMT

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.

Videos of IIS sessions at MIX 2009

mailant — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:13:00 GMT

If you are interested, you can check out the videos of the three IIS sessions at MIX. The sessions were 75 minutes long. I will be posting some shorter videos soon on IIS.NET for demos of how different IIS extensions work, starting with Web Platform Installer and IIS Database Manager.

Please put up with my "ums". :-) Thomas' session rocked as always. Definately check out John's media session too -- it will surprise you what you can do with streaming media now with IIS!

Questions and feedback are always welcome.

IIS At MIX 2009: 10 New IIS Server Extensions, Windows Web Application Gallery, Web Platform Installer 2.0 beta

mailant — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:18:00 GMT

Today, at the 2009 MIX conference in Las Vegas, the IIS team rolls out a whole new set of releases...ten (yes,10) new free Web server extensions with a new end-to-end story for installing popular community applications like WordPress, Acquia Drupal, and DotNetNuke on IIS.

We started releasing free IIS extensions on IIS7's extensibility platform a year ago, when Windows Server 2008 launched. We shifted focus on these free Web download extensions because it gives us the ability to ship fully supported Microsoft software in 12-16 month cycles, including multiple pre-release versions. (We also continue to ship in Windows Server releases.)

Today, we announce the release of the these new extensions and extension packs:

Application Request Router (ARR) 2.0 beta, with disk cache and cache proxy support for edge configurations the IIS HTTP load balancer. ARR can be used as a complement to existing hardware load balancers, or as a standalone proxy.
FTP 7.5 RTW, with extensibility support for developers who want to customize this IIS7 FTP publishing service.
WebDav 7.5 RTW, with support for both shared and exclusive locks to prevent lost updates due to overwrites.
Advanced Logging beta for monitoring and measuring media and Web browsing experiences, rich and flexible data collection, client-side logging and real-time logging capabilities.
Administration Pack for IIS7 RTW, with IIS Manager support for management of FastCGI, Request Filtering, ASP.NET authorization and custom error settings, and HTTP request filtering, and Configuration Editor for easier config management.
IIS Snap-in for Windows PowerShell RTW, for management of the IIS configuration system through Windows PowerShell, along with 60 cmdlets for common management tasks in Powershell.
Web Deployment Tool RC, which is a platform for Web deployment of IIS servers and applications that run on servers. This extension provides a foundation for administrators who want to synchronize and migrate Web servers in a web farm. Developers use Web Deployment Tool to deploy applications to a server or integrate with the new Windows Web Application Gallery.
Database Manager RC, providing Web database management support for local and remote databases from within IIS Manager.
Media Services 3.0 beta, which introduces the world to live streaming on IIS with multiple extensions extensions, including Smooth Streaming and Advanced Logging. Our media extensions bring high quality media delivery to IIS customers as well as CDNs like Akamai.
Web Platform Installer 2.0 beta, which installs community applications and its dependencies on Windows computers. See Introducing the Web Platform Installer for more details.

In addition, we have launched Web properties that showcase IIS technologies:

Windows Web Application Gallery, a destination for users to discover and install community applications that deploy and run well on IIS. See Introducing the Windows Web Application Gallery for more information. We are launch with Web Deployment Tool integration with a great set of partners including WordPress, Acquai Drupal, Gallery 2, SilverStripe, DotNetNuke, SubText, DasBlog, Umbarco, ScrewTurn and BlogEngine.NET. A big thanks to these communities and the dedicated developers who participate in building these great apps!
New www.iis.net content for PHP support on IIS and media, as well as a new section in Learn that talks about the Web Application Gallery and Web Platform Installer.
New IIS server Web page on microsoft.com

That's a lot of releases! Let's break it down what we do by customer.

As a Web developer (our focus here at MIX), I would want URL Rewrite 1.0 RTW, which released late last year for search engine friendly URLs. I have to manage databases as part of my Web application, so the Database Manager for IIS would help me do basic CRUD for my app database from within the same IIS Manager console. The Web Deployment Tool helps me package up and move applications from development to staging to production environments, which simplifies the final mile for getting my apps out there.

Today we launched the Windows Web Application Gallery, where users can discover and install popular community applications like WordPress, Acquia Drupal, SilverStripe and Gallery 2 on IIS. Clicking Install on Web Application Gallery launches Web Platform Installer 2.0 beta to handle the install of the application and its dependencies -- including community PHP 5.2.9-1. Web PI's support for handling pre-requisites really simplifies getting apps up and running. You will have set up MySQL if you need it using this walkthrough.

Web Application Gallery integration involves adding a couple manifest files to their existing ZIP package and following the Web Application Gallery Principles. The manifest files give Web Deployment Tool the information it needs to unpack the application for install on IIS. Once the application is added to Web Application Gallery, the app goes into an ATOM feed that is then consumed by the Web Platform Installer and participating control panel vendors who implement control panel integration like DotNetPanel. The application developer owns the distribution point; Web PI will go out to the link provided by the application developer to pull down the Web Deployment Tool-enabled package. As a developer, I would also download the Web Platform Installer 2.0 to keep track of the latest in the Web stack and browse/install apps from the Web App Gallery directly in one tool.

If I am an administrator of a Web farm, I would care about migrating and replicating servers between machines (Web Deployment Tool) and setting up Level 7 application request routing to complement my hardware load balancers (Application Request Router (ARR). If I support Web publishing for my customers, I would likely want the latest, secure WebDav 7.5 support on my IIS servers and secure FTP 7.5 publishing. If I am a command-line geek, I would use the IIS Snap-in for Windows PowerShell as well as the Administration Pack's Configuration Editor to automatically generate scripts that I could reuse in my day-to-day management of the Web server. I might also be interested in using the Dynamic IP Restrictions beta (released earlier this year) to help prevent denial-of-service attacks on applications running on my server. I would use the Web Platform Installer 2.0 to actually FIND and install all those extensions.

As a Content Delivery Network administrator, I would be particularly interested in the Media Services 3.0 beta, combined with Application Request Router (ARR) 2.0 beta 2 for its new hierarchical caching support. I would use Advanced Logging to help track usage on the client and aggregate that data on the server for reporting.

We have gotten a ton of great feedback during our pre-release cycles, in many cases with customers deploying RC candidates in production because of the demand and quality of what we ship. We're also working hard right now to localize our extensions in four languages (French, German, Japanese, Spanish at minimum) for release this summer.

We've got a whole new ball game going on over here! Stay tuned to all the new things that the IIS team is building by downloading the Web Platform Installer 2.0 today.

IIS7 in Windows Server 2008 R2

mailant — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:24:00 GMT

Windows Server 2008 R2 includes new additions to the IIS7 Web server, adding fit, finish, and a few extras to the best IIS platform ever.

For the last year and a half, the IIS product team has been working hard on building IIS extensions on top of the IIS7 platform, releasing betas, RCs and RTWs that add new support for optimizing media hosting, web content publishing, site and server administration, deployment and migration, and request handling. We would not be able to innovate and build production-ready, fully supported MS software in 12-18 months like this without the architectural changes we introduced in IIS7 in Windows Server 2008. Now with Windows Server 2008 R2, we have added some improvements, fit and finish to that IIS7 platform.

Highlights of the main IIS7 improvements in the Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta today:

Integration of Content Publishing Extensions (FTP, WebDav) into the Windows Server OS
We started development on a complete rewrite of the FTP server and our WebDav implementation well before the Windows Server 2008 release. Early last year, we released the new FTP Publishing Service as a Web download for Windows Server 2008 with features like secure publishing of content using FTPS, IPv6 support, integrated management of FTP/HTTP sites using IIS Manager, and more powerful logging and authentication support. Like all of our extensions, the FTP Publishing Service for Windows Server 2008 is fully supported by Microsoft product support with rich forum support provided by expert users and our own product team. What we have done in Windows Server 2008 R2 is to integrate the FTP Publishing Service into the server OS.

From a customer perspective, that means:

With the FTP Publishing Service installed on Windows Server 2008, you had to uninstall the old FTP server before installing the new one, which is a complete replacement of the old and outdated FTP. With Windows Server 2008 R2, you can install the new FTP server as part of the IIS component install. The IIS setup will replace your old FTP server and even upgrade the new IIS7 FTP publishing service if you have installed it on Windows Server 2008.

You can take advantage of bug fixes that we have made since the release of the FTP Publishing Service in February 2008.

You can use newly added extensibility for authentication, logging, authorization and the home directory that will be documented on MSDN.

We will also ship an updated FTP Publishing Service for Windows Server 2008 for Web download on www.iis.net in May 2009 so that those customers can also take advantage of the bug fixes and extensibility. In other words:

(Web May 2009 release of FTP Publishing + Windows Server 2008) == (FTP Publishing feature in Windows Server 2008 R2)

With the following exception:

FTP Publishing Server for Windows Server 2008 is always installed with a Web download, whereas FTP is now integrated into setup for Windows Server 2008 R2 and later.

Same thing with WebDav, which released in July 2008. WebDav for Windows Server 2008 provided a brand new implementation (to spec) of the WebDAV extension to the HTTP protocol. We have included WebDav in the setup/installation for Windows Server 2008 R2, which means that you can install WebDav as part of Windows Server 2008 R2 setup. The big new feature for WebDav is support for locks. We will also ship a new version of WebDav for Windows Server 2008 that has locking -- look for this release in May 2009 as well. Same model applies:

(Web May 2009 release of WebDav + Windows Server 2008) == (WebDav Publishing feature in Windows Server 2008 R2)

With the following exception:

WebDav for Windows Server 2008 is always installed with a Web download, whereas WebDav is now integrated into setup for Windows Server 2008 R2 and later.

Integration of Administration Pack Extension into the Windows Server OS
We integrated the functionality of the IIS7 Administration Pack into the Windows Server 2008 R2 installation, which provides customers with:

Integrated administration support in IIS Manager for the ASP.NET authorization, custom errors, FastCGI, and Request Filtering features.

Configuration Manager, which gives you a visual editor for managing the IIS7 configuration system. If you want to check it out, Carlos Aguilar Mares, our IIS Dev Manager, wrote a comprehensive blog on the Config Editor's capabilities. My favorite part of Configuration Editor is the script generation functionality -- comes in very handy with demos! :-)

We didn't incorporate the IIS Reports feature into the Windows Server OS, so if you need that particular functionality, you can use it as part of the Web download IIS Administration Pack. As with our usual policy, we will be releasing an update of the IIS Administration Pack for Windows Server 2008 users with the bug fixes and other changes that you see in Windows Server 2008 R2 (except for the setup integration).

The Administration Pack for Windows Server 2008 will release by Windows Server 2008 R2 general availability to keep on par with the Administration Pack functionality in the Windows Server 2008 R2 release.

New IIS7 PowerShell Provider and Commandlet Support in Windows Server 2008 R2
The IIS PowerShell provider, also downloadable for Windows Server 2008, lets users manage IIS, ASP.NET and custom configuration using the PowerShell programming environment. Yes, it's true -- we have IIS:/> for the PowerShell users out there. With our PowerShell support, we have implemented three levels of support:

PowerShell provider: Use the provider if you are familiar with the IIS configuration system and want to adminster config directly in the PS programming environment.

Low-level commandlets: Use our collection of low-level commandlets to manage every IIS setting if you want this level of fine-grained control.

Task-oriented commandlets: Use our many task-oriented commandlets to manage websites (ex: New-WebSite to create a site), backup and restore web server configuration, and other common tasks.

With the integration into Windows Server 2008 R2, you can install the PowerShell provider and 60+ commandlets using Windows Server setup.

As with FTP and WebDav:

(summer 2009 Web release of PowerShell + Windows Server 2008) == (PowerShell feature in Windows Server 2008 R2)

With the following exception:

PowerShell for Windows Server 2008 is always installed with a Web download, whereas PowerShell is now integrated into setup for Windows Server 2008 R2 and later.

Check out Thomas Deml, Group Program Manager and PowerShell guru's blog, for more information about our PowerShell support (http://blogs.iis.net/thomad).

Rich Application Hosting on Server Core
With Windows Server 2008 R2, you can host ASP.NET applications on IIS installations running Server Core. ASP.NET/CLR did some work to refactor and make sure that the managed code environment for ASP.NET pages could work on Server and voila! We have support for not just images, media, PHP, and classic ASP pages on Server Core but also ASP.NET applications.

The PowerShell 2.0 release in Windows Server 2008 R2 handles remote management now, which comes in handy with Server Core installations and our new IIS7 PowerShell provider. So not only can you host all your apps on IIS with Server Core, it is also much easier to administer them locally and remotely using our new IIS PowerShell provider and commandlets. For overall PowerShell mojo, check out the Windows PowerShell blog.

Improvements to FastCGI Support
IIS7 supports PHP hosting through our FastCGI implementation, which we substantially overhauled and improved in IIS7. Enhancements for PHP support on Windows Server 2008 R2 include:

Support in IIS Manager for administering FastCGI settings.

Automatic recycling of php-cgi.exe whenever php.ini changes. In this release, IIS monitors changes to a file for each process pool and recycle FastCGI process for the process pool when a change to the file is made. By default, this feature is turned off. If you turn it on (by setting a property in the user interface), you can specify a file path to monitor changes.

FREB support for FastCGI, so you can troubleshoot PHP and other FastCGI-compliant apps more effectively.

MaxInstance is now dynamic -- if maxInstance is set to 0, IIS automatically detects the system load and adjusts the maxInstances count. This allows us to optimize performance for our PHP support.

New support for controlling FastCGI error behavior based on specific errors.

IIS Core Changes
We have also made a number of changes to our core IIS7 platform, based on customer request and our own development experience for extensions using the IIS7 platform:

Support for custom tracing in the configuration system. This new feature will come in handy for troubleshooting config.

The ability to audit or trace configuration changes through configuration polling -- this was a request from our hosters in particular who want to monitor changes to the configuration system by their customers.

Support for ASP.NET to support different CLR versions (for example, CLR 4.0). With multiple versions of the CLR in use, this feature is important for developers to be able to switch versions. We have also backported this functionality to Windows Server 2008 SP2.

Better control over application pools with the ability to set the CLR setting per application pool and to monitor performance with new Application Pool performance counters.

Delegateable custom errors, which was a top request from developers to be able to change custom errors locally or remotely as a non-server admin.

IPv6 support for IP restriction list.

More fine-grained control over request filtering, specifically for query strings to help prevent SQL injection attacks on applications hosted on the server. Request filtering also now supports request-specific rules so that SQL Injection rules apply to specified requests only.

Nego2 support, which will allow for built-in support of LiveID providers, FedSSP, and more granular Kerberos/NTLM enablement.

Support for Managed Service Accounts for domain accounts that don't require a password.

AppPool identity support -- this one calls for a whole separate blog posting, so stay tuned for that.

Support for application pool warm-up for large applications that want to "prime" an application pool for better performance on the intial request.

IIS Best Practice Analyzer
Windows Server 2008 R2 introduces a new feature in Server Manager called the Best Practice Analyzer. The BPA provides a single console experience within Server Manager to manage best practice rules for configuration across different server roles, like Exchange, AD, and IIS. In Server Manager, you can run the BPA against some IIS rules that focus on best practices for security and performance -- for example, checking to make sure that basic authentication is not enabled without SSL. This list of BPA rules for IIS is not exhaustive by any means but it does give a good core set of guidance to get started. We will also be updating and increasing the rule set automatically through Server Manager. Note that this functionality lives in Server Manager only, and is not hosted in IIS Manager.

And of course, we have fixed bugs along the way.

Your feedback helped us refine IIS7, which is the best Web server platform yet. You can download the Windows Server 2008 R2 beta today here. A nice way to bring in 2009!

Thanks for reading,

Mai-lan