MVolo's Blog : AppCmd

When to restart IIS when making changes to your application

IIS 7.0 Server-Side : IIS — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 06:02:00 GMT

Knowing when to restart IIS to pick up various types of changes to your application has traditionally been a challenge. IIS and ASP.NET are both stateful software systems, which heavily rely on cached state that is loaded once to provide high performance...(read more)

Trace IIS 7.0 Errors Like a Pro with Failed Request Tracing

IIS 7.0 Server-Side : IIS — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 04:25:00 GMT

When dealing with hard to find IIS 7.0 errors, I break out the trusty Failed Request Tracing. My favorite way of doing this is through the command line...( read more ) Read More......(read more)

Finding your way around IIS 7 configuration sections with AppCmd

mvolo — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 05:33:00 GMT

The IIS 7 configuration system contains 50+ configuration sections (100+ if you count .NET Framework configuration), 477 attributes, and 57 collections. This can make it pretty challenging to figure out exactly what IIS 7 configuration section needs to be used to turn on some particular behavior, and then exactly syntax the configuration in that section should follow.

This is not typically an issue for me, because I can write most IIS configuration from memory. But, what if you didn't spend the past 4 years developing IIS7?

Learn some tricks for demystifying the IIS7 config at http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/11/01/IIS7-configuration-sections-exposed.aspx.

Fastest way to create IIS7 websites, applications, and application pools

mvolo — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 06:10:00 GMT

IIS7 provides quite a few ways to create websites, applications, and application pools. You can use the GUI, but what if you need to create 10, 100, or even 10,000 websites?

Read about the fastest way to create IIS7 websites in bulk at http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/10/06/Create-IIS7-websites-and-application-pools-fast-with-AppCmd.aspx.

Anatomy of an IIS7 configuration path

mvolo — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 04:53:00 GMT

If you have worked with IIS6 and previous versions of IIS, you are most likely familiar with the IIS metabase paths. You know, the ones that look like LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT. These metabase paths serve as a mechanism to identify a part of the IIS website hierarchy, or a url therein, for the purposes of read/writing their configuration settings.

As you know, IIS7 repaces the metabase with a whole new configuration system, based on a distributed hierarchy of XML configuration files also used by the .NET Framework/ASP.NET. This confguration system is fundamentally different from the metabase, and so it should come as no suprise that the way configuration paths work is also different.

The concept of configuration paths is fundamental to managing and operating an IIS server, so I wanted to spend some time explaining it in hope that this can help everyone enjoy their IIS7 server just a little bit more :) If you have come here wondering exactly what the hell is MACHINE/WEBROOT/APPHOST, you have come to the right place.

Read all about IIS7 configuration paths at http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/07/21/Anatomy-of-an-IIS7-configuration-path.aspx.

Creating IIS7 sites, applications, and virtual directories

mvolo — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:40:00 GMT

In the course of IIS7 development, the team and I have answered an infinity of questions about IIS7 on any possible topic imaginable. Ironically, neither I nor anyone else I know on the team has ever answered the most basic question - what is the minimum set of steps necessary to get a website running with IIS7?

This post answers this exact question, and explains the key IIS7 concepts of sites, applications, and virtual directories (vdirs), which must be created before your IIS7 server can serve a single request. It also provides the steps necessary to create IIS7 sites, applications, and virtual directories, and options for configuring them.

Read more at http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/07/12/Creating-IIS7-sites_2C00_-applications_2C00_-and-virtual-directories.aspx.

Most Important AppCmd Commands: Backing up and restoring IIS7 configuration

mvolo — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 04:08:00 GMT

Welcome to the first post of the "Most Important AppCmd Commands" series. Have you ever made some changes to a system's state, and then after everything suddenly stopped working, wondered how the hell you are going to get back to a working state?

Well, this post is all about doing just that when you are working with IIS7's configuration.

Most Important AppCmd Commands

mvolo — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 04:06:00 GMT

Usually, a day doesnt go by that I dont get a collegue or a partner team in Microsoft asking how to do something or other about AppCmd.exe, the unified command line management tool for the IIS7 server.

For a while, I've been thinking about blogging about the most commonly used commands to assist people get going with managing IIS7 from the command line - and so the "Most Important AppCmd Commands" post series was born.