Ruslan's Blog

URL Rewrite Module - Release to Web

RuslanY Blog — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:32:11 GMT

Today IIS team has made the URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 Release To Web (RTW) available for download. This is a final, production-ready release that is officially supported by Microsoft. Install the URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 RTW today! Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 RTW (x86) Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 RTW (x64) Upgrade from Go Live release If you already have Go Live release of URL Rewrite module installed then the installation package will upgrade it to RTW release. All rewrite rules in applicationHost.config and web.config files will be preserved. Note that system reboot may be necessary when upgrading from Go Live to RTW release. ASP.NET update The installer for URL Rewrite module includes an update for ASP...(read more)

Major revision of FastCGI/PHP article on IIS.NET

RuslanY Blog — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:27:05 GMT

Since the time we have published the article about installing FastCGI and PHP on IIS 7.0 it has become one of the most popular articles on http://learn.iis.net . Also it has received a lot of comments from site visitors. Today, we are publishing the updated version of this article that contains more up-to-date information and addresses most of the feedback from community. Here is what this article includes now: Overview Enabling FastCGI support in IIS 7.0 Windows Server 2008 Windows Vista SP1 Update for the FastCGI module Administration Pack for IIS 7.0 Install and Configure PHP Configure IIS to handle PHP requests Using IIS Manager Using command line Best practices for configuring FastCGI and PHP Security Isolation Process recycling PHP versioning...(read more)

Debug and troubleshoot rewrite rules easily

RuslanY Blog — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 05:13:28 GMT

One of the very cool features of URL Rewrite Module is its integration with IIS Failed Request Tracing . When you have rewrite rules that do not work the way you expect them to work - enable Failed Request Tracing and you will get the entire history of how rewrite rules were applied on the requested URL. I use Failed Request Tracing all the time and it has proven to be a great help when debugging and troubleshooting rewrite rules. When you enable Failed Request Tracing and make an HTTP request that you want to trace, IIS creates a trace log file fr NNNNNN .xml located by default at %WINDIR%\inetpub\logs\FailedReqLogFiles\W3SVC N . This xml file references freb.xsl file that is used to render the trace data in a web browser in a human-friendly...(read more)

ASP.NET postbacks and URL rewriting

RuslanY Blog — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:04:11 GMT

ASP.NET Web Forms extensively use postback mechanism in order to maintain the state of the server-side controls on the web page. This makes it somewhat tricky to perform URL rewriting for ASP.NET pages. When a server side form control is added to the web page, ASP.NET will render the response with HTML <form> tag that contains an action attribute pointing back to the page where the form control is. This means that if URL rewriting was used for that page, the action attribute will point back to the rewritten URL, not to the URL that was requested from the browser. This will cause the browser to show rewritten URL any time a postback occurs. Let me demonstrate this on an example. Assume you have a very simple web form in a file called default...(read more)

Wildcard script mapping and IIS 7 integrated pipeline

RuslanY Blog — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:30:18 GMT

The big benefit of IIS 7 integrated request processing pipeline is the fact that all the nice and useful ASP.NET features can be used for any type of content on your web site; not just for ASP.NET-specific content. For example, ASP.NET SQL-based membership can be used to protect static files and folders. Also, ASP.NET extensibility API’s, such as IHttpHandler and IHttpModule can be used to add custom modules and handlers that would be executed even for non-ASP.NET content. IIS 6 did not have this level of integration. ASP.NET was plugged into IIS 6 as an ISAPI extension and by default was configured to handle ONLY requests mapped to that extension - for example any request that ended with “.aspx” would be be processed by ASP...(read more)

Video walkthrough for URL Rewrite Module

RuslanY Blog — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:14:40 GMT

Last week I have recorded a video screencast that shows how to use URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 to perform some common URL manipulations tasks. Today this video has been published on IIS.NET - check it out at this location . The video demonstrates how to create rewrite rules to perform the following tasks: Enabling user friendly and search engine friendly URLs for dynamic web pages; Enforcing canonical host names, so that site visitors as well as search engines always use a particular domain name for your web site; Using rewrite maps to define static mappings between requested and rewritten URLs; Blocking unwanted site crawlers by aborting requests based on HTTP user-agent header. In addition, the video shows how to test, troubleshoot and...(read more)

URL Rewrite Module - Go Live release

RuslanY Blog — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:27:15 GMT

Today IIS team has made the Go Live release of URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 available for download. This release contains significant functionality and performance improvements and it is believed to have a quality level suitable for production deployments. Download the Go Live release of the module today! Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 Go Live (x86) Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 Go Live (x64) Note that the installer for URL Rewrite Module includes the FastCGI update for IIS 7.0 . If this update has not been yet installed on your machine it will be installed together with URL Rewrite Module. New Features since CTP release Here are the features that are new since CTP release (for a complete list of features and changes since...(read more)

ASP.NET Routing, Request Filtering, URL Rewriting

RuslanY Blog — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:28:30 GMT

Today I have published two new articles on http://learn.iis.net . The articles are intended to explain the differences between various URL manipulation technologies available in IIS 7.0 and to provide help with choosing of the technology best suited for a particular usage scenario. Here is the short summary of the articles: IIS 7.0 URL Rewriting and ASP.NET Routing - with the release of URL-rewrite module for IIS 7.0 and the inclusion of ASP.NET routing into the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, there have been a lot of questions from ASP.NET developers about how these two features relate to each other and when to use each. This article describes the differences between these two technologies and provides guidance for Web developers on when to use IIS...(read more)

Update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI module

RuslanY Blog — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 02:10:00 GMT

IIS team has recently released an update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI module that fixes compatibility problems with several popular PHP applications. In particular, the update changes the behavior of FastCGI module in the following ways: REQUEST_URI server variable set by FastCGI module now includes query string and path info. Previously, lack of the query string in this server variable caused the popular CMS application Drupal to not work with FastCGI on IIS 7.0 REQUEST_URI server variable now contains the originally requested URL path before any URL rewriting was performed. Prior to this fix, the server variable used to contain a final rewritten URL, which caused problems when using URL rewriting to enable “pretty permalinks” for popular blog engine...(read more)

Ruby on Rails in IIS 7.0 with URL Rewriter

RuslanY Blog — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:57:15 GMT

If you ever tried to set up Ruby on Rails (RoR) on IIS 7.0 with FastCGI you have probably noticed that the process is not very straightforward. There are a few workarounds that need to be applied in order for RoR to function correctly. In particular, handling of static files in your web application can be tricky on IIS 7.0. The problem is that RoR uses clean URL’s that look similar to this: http://mysite.com/home/about . In order for RoR to be invoked for this kind of URL’s it is necessary to create a “catch all” handler mapping in IIS (that is a handler mapping with path attribute set to “ * “). When you create such a handler mapping it will cause requests for static files to be routed to RoR, which will...(read more)

Scripting URL rewrite module configuration

RuslanY Blog — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 04:18:21 GMT

URL rewrite module fully utilizes extensibility of IIS 7.0 configuration system. The rewrite rules are stored in applicationHost.config and web.config files in XML format. This provides a huge benefit of being able to use rich set of IIS 7.0 management tools and API’s for managing and scripting URL rewriter configuration. For example, you can automate any configuration task, including creating, editing and deleting of rewrite rules, by: writing .NET code that uses Microsoft.Web.Administration API’s; writing JavaScript code; using IIS command line tool appcmd.exe ; using PowerShell provider . The Configuration Editor , included in the Administration Pack for IIS 7.0 , greatly simplifies the process of generating scripts for automating...(read more)

IIS.NET uses URL rewrite module

RuslanY Blog — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:46:54 GMT

IIS.NET team has been very proactive in helping us out with testing of URL rewrite module . In fact, they even agreed to deploy the latest build of the module on the production server that hosts http://www.iis.net . This kind of real-life deployments really helps us validate the features and functionality of the module. And being able to do this validation so early in release cycle gives us a good opportunity to adjust the feature set, re-consider some of the design decisions, or just find some very good bugs. IIS.NET has URL rewriting requirements, which are typical for large content management systems. The articles on the site are often moved or updated and the old links should continue to work. Or there is a need to have a nice URL (for example...(read more)

Per-site PHP configuration with IIS FastCGI

RuslanY Blog — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 08:03:32 GMT

There have been a few questions on IIS.NET PHP forum regarding enabling per-site PHP configuration. This is a common requirement when running PHP applications in shared hosting environment, because each PHP application may require a different set of PHP settings. Shared hosting providers often want to provide their customers with an option of controlling PHP configuration if necessary. Until recently, it was thought that per-site PHP configuration was only possible when running PHP on Apache in *nix based OS. However, with FastCGI module it is possible to enable this for PHP applications hosted on IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0. The development team at GoDaddy.com has researched and validated several options for enabling per-site PHP configuration on Windows...(read more)

Introduction

RuslanY Blog — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 05:29:11 GMT

My name is Ruslan Yakushev. I am a program manager on IIS team, working on some of the very interesting projects that are being developed in the team right now. I have joined the team about a year ago, and was thinking about starting a blog for a while now. The primary work responsibilities kept me busy, so I have been postponing blog idea for a while. Every time I needed to make an announcement or an update on IIS community site, I asked some of my colleagues on the team to blog my content. Finally, I figured that I should probably start my own blog, so I could have all the freedom of publishing my own content any time I want. Being a technical program manager on the team, I like to use (in other words - “dogfood”) the products...(read more)