Microsoft Web Platform Installer Beta Released

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:00:00 GMT

Today we are releasing a new Web Site at http://www.microsoft.com/web/ where users can get a one stop shop for learning about the Microsoft Web Platform. This is part of a bigger effort to make it easier to get started with building and running Web Applications on Windows and IIS.

As part of this a new tool called the Web Platform Installer Beta is also being released to help you getting started installing and getting all the software that you need from a single place without having to hunt around for installers, links or anything else. Just launch the tool, choose the software and configuration you are interested and it takes care of validating and installing pre-requisites.

This tool will let you easily setup your development machines for building Web Applications quite nicely, it will also help you discover new tools, applications, features and beta's as they are getting released from several sources including IIS, ASP.NET and Visual Web Developer and more as we continually make new software available through updates to the feed that the tool consumes.

Download page: http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/WebPlatformInstaller.aspx

Link to Run it: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9588072

Here are a few snapshots of the tool:

This is the start page where you can choose to install everything available or customize the installation (Your Choice).

In this page you can customize the selection and browse around all the current list of products and check and uncheck any product you want to install.

There are a couple of more pages, and finally the progress where the tool downloads any files required and install them, so that you can at once get the whole Web Platform installed easily.

Some of the products and features that the Beta supports installing and configuring include:

IIS (Ability to granularly configure each of the features of IIS)
IIS Extensions (such as the Out-of-band releases that we have made available in http://www.iis.net including Bit Rate Throttling, Web Playlist, Microsoft Web Deployment, FTP 7.0 Server, URL Rewrite, and more)
.NET Framework 3.5
SQL Express 2008
SQL Server Driver for PHP
Visual Web Developer 2008 Express
Windows Installer 4.5
more

So as you can see everything you need to build Web Applications, from a Web Server (IIS), to a Development tool (Visual Web Developer) to a Database (SQL Server Express) and many more all for free.

So go ahead and try the tool, give us feedback (remember this is a Beta) so it can only get better :)

Using Microsoft.Web.Administration in Windows PowerShell

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:53:00 GMT

A couple of months ago I wrote about using LINQ with Microsoft.Web.Administration to manage and query IIS 7.0 configuration. Somebody came back to me and said that LINQ was very cool but that it was very much Developer oriented and that in a production server without VS or .NET 3.5 it wouldn't be an option. Indeed that is a very valid comment and so I decided to show similar stuff with a tool that is available in Windows and its more IT oriented, Windows PowerShell.

So in this blog I will quickly mention some of the things you can easily do with Microsoft.Web.Administration inside Windows PowerShell.

To start working with Microsoft.Web.Administration the first thing you need to do is load the assembly so that you can start using it. It is quite easy using the methods from the Assembly type.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.Web.Administration")

Once you have the assembly available then you will need to create an instance of our ServerManager class that gives you access to the entire configuration system.

$iis = new-object Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager

The above line basically declares a variable called $iis that we will be able to use for all of our configuration tasks.

Now to more interesting stuff.

Getting the list of Sites

Getting the list of sites is as easy as just accessing the Sites collection, this will output all the information about sites

PS C:\ > $iis = new-object Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager
PS C:\ > $iis.sites
ApplicationDefaults : Microsoft.Web.Administration.ApplicationDefaults
Applications : {DefaultAppPool, DefaultAppPool, DefaultAppPool, DefaultAppPool...}
Bindings : {}
Id : 1
Limits : Microsoft.Web.Administration.SiteLimits
LogFile : Microsoft.Web.Administration.SiteLogFile
Name : Default Web Site
ServerAutoStart : True
State : Started

However, we can also specify the information we care and the format we want to use, for example:

PS C:\ > $iis = new-object Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager
PS C:\ > $iis.sites | select-object Id, Name, State
Id Name State
-- ---- -----
1 Default Web Site Started
2 Site2 Started
3 Site3 Started

You can also use the where-object command to filter objects to get only the sites that are Stopped, and then we want to Start them.

PS C:\ > $iis = new-object Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager
PS C:\ > $iis.sites | where-object {$_.State -eq "Stopped"} | foreach-object { $_.Start() }

OK, now let's imagine I want to find all the applications that are configured to run in the Default ApplicationPool and move them to run in my NewAppPool. This is better to do it in three lines:

PS C:\ > $iis = new-object Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager
PS C:\ > $iis.sites | foreach {
$_.Applications | where { $_.ApplicationPoolName -eq 'DefaultAppPool' } |
foreach { $_.ApplicationPoolName = 'NewAppPool' }
}
PS C:\ > $iis.CommitChanges()

Now let's say I want to find the top 20 distinct URL's of all the requests running in all my worker processes that has taken more than 1 second.

PS C:\ > $iis = new-object Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager
PS C:\ > $iis.WorkerProcesses | foreach {
$_.GetRequests(1000) | sort TimeElapsed -descending |
select-object Url -unique -first 20 }

OK, finally let's say I want to display a table of all the applications running under DefaultAppPool and display if Anonymous authentication is enabled or not. (Now this one is almost on the edge of "you should do it differently, but it is Ok if you are only reading a single value from the section):

PS C:\ > $iis = new-object Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager
PS C:\ > $iis.Sites | foreach {
$_.Applications | where { $_.ApplicationPoolName -eq 'DefaultAppPool' } |
select-object Path,@{Name="AnonymousEnabled"; Expression = {
$_.GetWebConfiguration().GetSection("system.webServer/security/authentication/anonymousAuthentication").GetAttributeValue("enabled")
}}
}

Again, the interesting thing is that now you can access all the functionality from M.W.A. from Windows PowerShell very easily without the need of compiling code or anything else. It does take some time to get used to the syntax, but once you do it you can do very fancy stuff.

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Microsoft Web Platform Installer Beta Released

Using Microsoft.Web.Administration in Windows PowerShell