Robert McMurray : IIS Topics

Using URL Rewrite with Web Site Testing

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:49:00 GMT

Recently I ran into an interesting situation when I was rolling out a new web-based application. I had tested it on my development server, and because it was a rather complex application I wanted to test it on my production server before making it live. I had already set up a placeholder web site with a home page that announced the new site as "Coming Soon," and I had some of the supporting infrastructure configured for the placeholder site: database connections, permissions, FTP bindings, etc. In order to test the new site, I could have set up a temporary web site by duplicating the placeholder web site, running my tests, and then deleting the temporary site after I was comfortable that everything was working in production. Or I could simply...(read more)

Creating a Microsoft Access Provider for IIS Database Manager

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:22:00 GMT

Following up on my last blog post about the API set for the IIS Database Manager , I have something of a secret to let you in on - you can use the code samples in several of those API documents to create a fully functional provider for Microsoft Access databases. I would never use an Access database in a production environment, but having an Access provider has had some great benefits for me from a test perspective. I often use Access databases for test projects, and using the IIS Database Manager to manage the Access databases on my test systems means that I don't need to install Microsoft Access on any of my test servers. That being said, as I was writing the API documentation I needed to create something of value to test my code samples....(read more)

Database Manager API Topics on MSDN

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:16:00 GMT

Today Microsoft released version 1.0 of the IIS Database Manager , which enables you to manage local and remote SQL Server or MySQL databases through the IIS Manager. I cannot stress enough how this module has rapidly become one of my favorite extensions for IIS Manager. There are many times when I need to access the data in one of my databases where opening the database management tool would be inconvenient or impossible. (For example, when I am working remotely, or when I don't have the database management tools installed.) In these situations, the Database Manager has been worth its weight in gold. Another great feature of the IIS Database Manager is that it is extensible, like every other part of IIS these days, meaning that you can create...(read more)

eWeek Reviews for IIS 7.5 and FTP 7.5

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:45:00 GMT

One of my coworkers, Vijay Sen, just forwarded the following eWeek review of IIS 7.5 to me: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Windows/REVIEW-Microsoft-IIS-75-Improves-Management-Deployment-Options-822018/ The review was written by Jim Rapoza , and he said some great things about IIS 7.5, which ships with both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 client. But what really made my day was the following things that he said about FTP 7.5: Another welcome change in IIS 7.5 is the elevation of FTP as a full-fledged part of the server. In previous versions, setup and management of an FTP server in IIS were done pretty much separately from Web server management. In IIS 7.5, FTP administration is fully integrated into the IIS Management Console. I found this to...(read more)

FTP 7.5 Extensibility and Visual Studio Express Editions

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:19:00 GMT

In earlier blog posts I have mentioned that I written the several walkthroughs to help developers get started writing providers for the FTP 7.5 service, all of which available on Microsoft's learn.iis.net Web site under the " Developing for FTP 7.5 " section. In each of these walkthroughs I wrote the steps as if you were using Visual Studio 2008. Following up on that, I received a great question yesterday from a customer, Paul Dowdle, who wondered if it was possible to write an extensibility provider for the FTP 7.5 service using one of the Visual Studio Express Editions. By way of coincidence, I used to install Visual C# Express Edition on my laptop when I was traveling around the world to speak at events like TechEd . I usually did this because...(read more)

Hiding your FTP Server Type and Preventing Unauthorized Access

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:05:00 GMT

As evidenced by my How to Use Managed Code (C#) to Create an FTP Authentication Provider with Dynamic IP Restrictions walkthrough and my other FTP authentication extensibility walkthroughs, I spend a lot of time trying to find ways to prevent unauthorized access to my FTP server while still allowing valid users to have easy access to their site content. Today's blog discusses several of the ideas that I like to use on my FTP servers. Preventing Unauthorized Access To start things off, I globally disable FTP Basic Authentication on my server and I only use custom authentication providers. Since my FTP users do not have actual accounts on my server or my domain, that helps prevent access to my physical server. It was for this reason that I wrote...(read more)

The End of Metabase Corruption (R.I.P.)

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 07:28:00 GMT

Even though IIS 7 with its new XML-based configuration settings has been around for a while, I was going through some old directories on one of my computers the other day and I stumbled across an image that I had labeled "Metabase Corruption." I have kept that image around for the past decade or so because it's one of the few actual examples of metabase corruption that I have actually verified, although there have definitely been more cases than just the ones that I have seen. But I thought that it might make for a good blog entry to explain the origins of the term "Metabase Corruption" and what that means to you if you're using a version of IIS that is earlier than IIS 7. A brief history of the IIS metabase and metabase editors Many years ago...(read more)

A Little Scripting Saved My Day (;-])

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:55:00 GMT

I have mentioned in previous blog posts that I tend to write many of my blog posts and walkthroughs for IIS.NET based on code that I’ve written for myself, and today’s blog post is the story of how one of my samples saved my rear over this past weekend. One of the servers that I manage is used to host web sites for several friends of mine. (It’s their hobby to have a web site and it’s my hobby to host it for them.) Anyway, sometime on Sunday someone let me know that one of my sites didn’t seem to be behaving correctly, so I browsed it with Internet Explorer and saw that I was getting an HTTP 503 error. I’ve seen this error when an application pool goes offline for some reason, so I didn’t panic – yet – because I knew that the web site was in...(read more)

Using Apple's WebDavFS for Mac OS X with WebDAV on IIS 7

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:19:00 GMT

Today's blog post needs to have a disclaimer right up front - I freely admit I'm not a Mac OS X expert, so I may not have everything 100% correct in this post. But I've seen a lot of questions on forums.iis.net that discuss using IIS WebDAV with Mac OS X, so I thought that I'd share a few of the things that I've noticed. Just the same, if I were writing a formal walkthrough I would have said something like, " Microsoft is not responsible for the behavior of Apple's Mac family of products. The information that is provided in this topic is provided to assist Mac OS X users connect to IIS using WebDAV. " All that being said, here are the prerequisites for getting your environment together: Your server needs to be running Windows Vista, Windows...(read more)

FTP Clients - Part 6: Core FTP LE

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:10:00 GMT

For this installment in my series about FTP Clients, I'd like to take a look at the Core FTP client. For this blog post I used Core FTP Lite Edition (LE) version 1.3c (build 1447) and version 2.1 (build 1603), although all of my screen shots are from version 2.1. Core FTP is available from the following URL: http://www.coreftp.com/ At the time of this blog post, Core FTP provides the LE for free and charges a small fee for a professional version. Like most graphical FTP clients, the Core FTP LE user interface is pretty easy to use and rather straight-forward - you have separate windows for your local and remote files/folders, as well as a logging window that lists the FTP commands that are sent and the FTP server's responses: Core FTP LE has...(read more)

BLOG - FTP 7.5 Service Extensibility References

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:23:00 GMT

As I pointed out in my recent blog post that was titled " FTP 7.5 and WebDAV 7.5 have been released ", one of the great new features of the FTP 7.5 service is extensibility. In that blog post I mentioned that I wrote the following walkthroughs to help developers get started writing providers for the FTP 7.5 service, and these walkthroughs are all available on Microsoft's learn.iis.net Web site: For Managed Code Developers: How to Use Managed Code to Create a Simple FTP Authentication Provider How to Use Managed Code to Create a Simple FTP Home Directory Provider How to Use Managed Code to Create a Simple FTP Logging Provider For Native Code Developers: How to Use Native Code to Create a Simple FTP Authentication Provider How to Use Native Code...(read more)

Creating a Read-Only Membership Provider for phpBB 2.0 Users

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:16:00 GMT

I recently posted a blog that was titled Creating a Read-Only Snitz Membership Provider , where I re-used the code from my How to use the Sample Read-Only XML Membership and Role Providers with IIS 7.0 walkthrough on the learn.iis.net web site to write a membership provider for web sites that use the Snitz Forums application. After I finished writing that blog post, I started thinking about the web sites where I use the phpBB 2.0 application, which leads us to today's blog post. Following in the footsteps of my Snitz blog and XML walkthrough, today's blog post will show how to set up a simple, read-only provider for phpBB 2.0, although for this blog I tested a web site that was specifically using the phpBB 2.0.22 version. (Before anyone sends...(read more)

Advertising IIS Around the World

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:43:00 GMT

In case you haven't already surmised from some of my other blog posts, I've been around IIS for a long time, so it should go without saying that I'm a big fan of IIS. I remember when we first released IIS 1.0 for Windows NT 3.51 and we were handing out IIS CD-ROMs at trade shows way back in early 1996; everyone kept asking, "What is this for?" (Obviously the Internet was still a new concept to a lot of people back then.) Out of nostalgia, I kept a shrink-wrapped copy of IIS 1.0 for myself, and I think that I have one of the few boxes left. It usually sits in my office next to my IIS 4.0 Limited Edition CD-ROM... Anyway, over the years the IIS team has printed up an assortment of IIS shirts, and I have been wearing several of these various IIS...(read more)

Creating a Read-Only Snitz Membership Provider

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 02:53:00 GMT

For this blog post I'm going to take a brief departure from my FTP client series and share some code that I put together recently to help address a situation that presented itself a short time ago. Problem Description I keep a web site for my extended family that uses the Snitz Forums for private discussions between family members. Recently one of my relatives scanned several historical photographs of family members from the early 1900s, and I thought that uploading those to the family web site would be a great way to share them with everyone. Of course, I don't want to share those photos with the entire Internet, so I needed to come up with a way to share them with just my family members. My site has been using the Snitz forums application...(read more)

New IIS 7.0 Configuration Reference

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:51:00 GMT

For the past several months I have been working with several members of the IIS team on a brand-new configuration reference for IIS 7.0 that describes every configuration setting for IIS in great detail, which is now located at the following URL: http://www.iis.net/configreference Each topic focuses on a specific configuration element and contains an overview section that describes the purpose of each configuration element, setup steps when appropriate, "How To" examples using the IIS Manager, and practical examples using IIS configuration settings and code samples. The complete reference contains hundreds of screenshots and thousands of lines of code using AppCmd, C#, VB.NET, JavaScript, and VBScript - all of which should help you understand...(read more)