Search results matching tag 'Developers'

Lots of new software for IIS, ASP.NET, AJAX and PHP this week

bills — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:13:00 GMT

Wow, what a week of innovation for the Microsoft Web Platform. This week we released a ton of new software which, if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out. Here is a quick overview:

IIS Search Engine Optimization v1 final release!

The IIS team shipped the final release of IIS SEO toolkit which makes it easier to optimize your Website for search engines. It acts like a mini-search engine on your computer, scans your site and then provides useful tips for how to improve the relevance of your site to search engines. This tool is now out of beta and available for download through Web PI.

ASP.NET MVC 2 beta!

The ASP.NET team has been hard at work on the second release of MVC, which is now available to beta test. Phil has a great blog post on the release with links to the download page, readme notes and the source code. There are a bunch of new features in MVC 2 including AsyncController, expression based helpers, improvements with client validation, all new areas support, and more. Read more on Phil’s blog.

ASP.NET AJAX Library beta!

The ASP.NET AJAX team also has some exciting news with the release of the ASP.NET AJAX Library beta. James has a terrific blog post with the news This is the first project accepted into the new CodePlex Foundation! (more on that later) The ASP.NET AJAX Library has a new portal at www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary with tutorials, samples, and more. Read James’ post about the news and check it out!

IIS Application Request Router 2 final release!

The IIS team also released the final version of the IIS Application Request Router v2. This is a super powerful module that provides routing and load balancing capabilities for Windows and IIS. It makes it easy to create and manage an entire cluster of Web servers. Mai-lan has a lot of info on the release in her blog post and you can download ARR v2 using Web PI today.

PHP WinCache module final release - faster PHP on Windows!

The PHP team announced today the final release of the Windows Cache Extension for PHP, or WinCache for short, which makes PHP run much, much faster on Windows. The iBuildings guys released a benchmark showing how the WinCache extension speeds up PHP by as much as 2x over standard PHP. The other exciting part of this announcement is that the sources for the extension are now available under an open source BSD license and the source code is maintained and host on http://pecl.php.net/packages/wincache/ If you install PHP using Web PI, you automatically get WinCache.

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

ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 are here!

bills — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:56:07 GMT

The ASP.NET and Web tools for Visual Studio teams have been cranking away on this release all year long and we’re excited to launch Beta 2 today! MSDN subscribers can download it today…it will be available for everyone on Wednesday.

There are a ton of new features in this release, this MSDN page gives a good overview. Here are some highlights for Web developers:

Numerous improvements to Web Forms including more control over viewstate, meta tag control, new browser support, routing support for clean URLs, more control over HTML with FormView and ListView controls, filtering support in data source controls, better Web standards support and accessibility
New Dynamic Data features including a RAD experience for quickly building a data-driven site, automatic validation, field template support for GridView and DetailsView controls.
Visual Studio has undergone a face lift and now supports simpler, code optimized view, multi-mon support, enhanced multi-targeting and more..
Visual Web Developer has better support for HTML, CSS and JavaScript including auto-completion for tag names, IntelliSense for HTML and Jscript snippets, and more…
Visual Studio also natively supports the Web Deployment Tool, a powerful new packaging and deployment model for Web applications. Check out Vishal’s blog (PM for these features) for a bunch more info on this as well.
Auto-start Web Applications
And much more…

All said this is an impressive release and now is a great time to try it out and provide your feedback!

Microsoft Ajax Library Preview 6

bills — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:13:28 GMT

The ASP.NET team has been cranking away on more AJAX goodness…this time with a significant update to the Microsoft Ajax Library – Preview 6. This update includes updates to our client-side AJAX library that can be used with any type of Web application as well as deep support within ASP.NET for AJAX across ASP.NET 2.0, 3.5 and 4.0…for both Web Forms and MVC style projects.

In addition to the updated AJAX support, the team is shipping a cool new AJAX minifier tool which reduces the size of your JavaScript files to improve performance.

You can download the release from the CodePlex project and read more information on the team blogs below:

Scott – Announcing Microsoft Ajax Library…
Bertrand – Entirely unobtrusive and imperative templates…
James – How the Script Loader…will make your life wonderful

Also check out the Channel9 interview with Stephen Walther on the new release! Enjoy ~

Error connecting to SQL Server from Windows 7 / Windows 2008 R2 with ASP.NET

bills — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:41:00 GMT

Just ran into this and thought I’d share. If you are trying to connect to a "user instance" of SQL Server from your Web application running on Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 and you’re getting a message that looks like this:

Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to failure in retrieving the user's local application data path. Please make sure the user has a local user profile on the computer. The connection will be closed.

I can probably help you out.

Note: this error only happens if you have User Instance=true in your connection string. The IIS team made a change to the default identity of the worker process. Starting with IIS 7.5, Application Pools run with a unique identity based on the Application Pool name, rather than NetworkService – the default identity for IIS6 and IIS7. The primary reason for this change is to increase the security of IIS and Application Pools by default, providing a much better sandbox between Applications and other Windows services by default.

Unfortunately, the new identity does not have a user profile, and as you can see from the error, this causes the SqlClient data stack to fail. There are a few things you can do to "fix" this error: 1) switch back to NetworkService 2) switch to a user account that has a local profile (like a real user / domain user account). To do that, fire open IIS Manager and browse to Application Pools node for your computer. Click on the AppPool for the application you are trying to run and select the “Advanced Settings” task (in yellow on right). Select identity and choose NetworkService as a built-in account, or select “Custom account” and type in the user/password.

If you’re a command-line person, you can do it this way (all on one line):

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set config  
-section:system.applicationHost/applicationPools /[name='YOUR_APPPPOOL_NAME_HERE'].processModel.identityType:"NetworkService"  
/commit:apphost

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/.

A big day for Web pros: WebsiteSpark, Web PI and more!

bills — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:11:43 GMT

Today we’re launching a number of really cool things for Web developers.

WebsiteSpark

WebsiteSpark is a program designed to jumpstart Web development for individuals or small companies who make a living on the Web. The program is free to join and runs for three years with no cost obligations other than a $100 program fee, payable on exit. What is in it for you?

Windows Web Server 2008 R2 – 4 processor licenses for production use!
SQL Server 2008 – 4 processor licenses for production use!
Expression Studio 3 – 1 license including Expression Web, Blend and Sketchflow
Expression Web – 2 licenses
Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition – 3 licenses
DotNetPanel control panel (to manage your servers, and allow your customers to manage their site!)

Beyond just software you also get free support, training and Microsoft will even help drive business your way. Anyone can join as long as 1) you build web sites or applications for other people and 2) your company has less than 10 employees. If you meet these requirements, sign-up today! As part of the sign-up process you will need a referral code. Contact me if you need a code, I’d be happy to sponsor you into the program! Read more about the program on the WebsiteSpark portal.

Web Platform Installer 2

I’m also happy to announce that the Web Platform Installer 2.0 is available in final release form! The Web Platform Installer (sometimes called Web PI) makes it easy to install the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform including IIS, ASP.NET, Visual Web Developer, SQL Express and more! New for the final release, we’ve fixed many bugs, improved usability, added new products including Expression Web, Azure Tools and the latest releases also being announced today. We’re also launching WebPI in 9 different languages and allow users around the world to access the Web Platform in their regional language. Look for more components of the Microsoft Web Platform to be added to Web PI v2 over time. Web PI also makes it super easy to install any of the Web applications in the Windows Web App Gallery. Web PI can also now install both PHP and MySQL for applications that require it. Install Web PI today!

Trivia: since launching the Windows Web Application Gallery at MIX in March 2009 – just 5 months ago – Web PI has installed more than 840,000 applications! Do you have a killer Web application just waiting to be discovered by the masses? Want Microsoft to drive users to your community? Submit your Web app to the gallery today!

Web Deployment Tool

The IIS team just released the final 1.0 version of the Web Deployment Tool, a super powerful deployment technology that you are going to see a lot of going forward. It is like a swiss army knife for Web masters. It can migrate sites or entire servers from IIS6 to IIS7. It can synchronize Web sites or applications between multiple servers. You can package a Web site or application and then push it out to your entire server farm. It knows how to not only replicate content, but also configuration, databases, COM dll, GAC assemblies, certificates, ACLs, and a whole lot more. After about three years of development I’m super excited to see this thing in final release form. It is already being integrated into Visual Studio 2010 and from there you’ll be able to not only build but also package and deploy your applications with just a few clicks of the mouse. Other teams around Microsoft are picking this thing up and integrating it as well, so you definitely want to get up to speed with this tool. Download it today!!

Database Manager 1.0

The IIS team just released the 1.0 version of Database Manager, and IIS Manager extension that makes it super easy to manage your database, local or remote, from within the IIS Manager tool. This thing rocks! It supports SQL Server and MySQL and is one powerful tool, and completely free. Check it out!

Search Engine Optimization Toolkit – Beta 2

The IIS team also announced the released the beta 2 of the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit, another IIS Manager extension that makes it possible to learn things about your site you can’t find anywhere else. It crawls your Web site, local or remote, and reports on dozens of well known but hard to discover issues that cause your site to be less relevant to search engines. This version includes many bugs fixes and new features over the previous release, definitely check it out and send feedback to the team on the forums.

Application Request Routing 2 – Release Candidate

The IIS team is also releasing a Release Candidate of the 2.0 version of the Application Request Routing extension for IIS7/IIS7.5, which provides built-in routing, load balancing, proxying and caching support on the IIS platform. This release includes an all-new disk cache option, bug fixes and performance improvements. Read more about the release in the learn portal. This powerful extension is available for free, download it today!

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.