Search results matching tags 'IIS News Item' and 'Administration'

Why IIS7? Top 12 cool features…

bills — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:13:45 GMT

Every time I talk with customers in meetings or at conferences I’m struck by how many cool amazing new capabilities IIS7 has. I can go on for literally hours talking about the new features and benefits, and showing demos. And with each new IIS7 Extension, the list of new features just gets bigger and bigger. A few months ago I realized we didn’t have the top list of features written up anywhere, and so we started the process of distilling down the list to the top 10. We almost made it! We ended up with the top 12 reasons you should get IIS7 today. Check them out here:

http://www.iis.net/getstarted

Over the next few weeks we’ll be adding a cool demo for each of the reasons to show the features in action. Be sure to check back soon!

How to Script / Automate IIS7 Configuration (without writing code)

bills — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:58:00 GMT

I hear this question a lot in the http://forums.iis.net/, and thanks to Carlos and team's rocking Configuration Editor, figuring this out on your own is a breeze. Here is how you can generate code for ANY IIS7 configuration change, without writing a line yourself.

1) download the IIS7 Administration Pack. What, you don't have it already? You're really missing out on some fantastic tools, including the Configuration Editor. Learn more about the admin pack here http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/401/using-the-administration-pack/ You can download x86 and x64 from http://www.iis.net/downloads.

2) open "IIS Manager" and click on the "Configuration Editor" feature under the "Management" category:

3) Find the configuration section(s) you want to edit using the drop-down combo box, in this case isapiFilters:

4) use the configuration editor to make your change. In this case, I'm editing a collection, which pops up a collection editor where I can add items to the isapiFilter list by clicking 'add' in the task pane.

5) once you're done making any configuration updates, click on the 'Generate Script' task in the main Config Editor window:

6) the script generator creates three ways of automating the configuration change you just made C#, JavaScript (again the AHAdmin COM interface) and AppCmd.exe

7) Copy and Paste these changes into your own script / code and whoila, you've got sample code for making any IIS7 configuration change.

You may also want to read up on the IIS7 Administration APIs. You can find a lot more information here:

Using Scripts to Automate Management

Managing IIS with the IIS 7.0 PowerShell Provider

IIS7 on Server Core

bills — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:16:00 GMT

Today at TechEd 2007, Bob Muglia announced the availability of IIS7 on Server Core in Windows 2008 Server, starting with the upcoming CTP and RC1 releases. We've added IIS7 on Server Core as a result of a lot of customer demand to make it available on the lowest footprint Windows server ever. See Microsoft's PressPass for what Bill Laing has to say about this announcement.

If you're not familiar with Server Core, it is a low footprint Server installation option that lays down just the minimal footprint to boot up the server, it doesn't even install the Shell. This has several key benefits for IT Pros. First, it means server core uses less disk and memory footprint. In our testing, we see about a 1GB disk footprint and the server runs well starting with just 512MB ram! Of course, fewer features also means a lower attack surface and less frequent patching, as well as fewer things to manage.

Having IIS7 on Server Core is like the perfect marriage. It means you get an extremely modular, customizable Web server on a thin server OS, perfectly suited for appliance-like environments, or Web farm front-end servers where you want to blast a small, cloned image out and forget about it.

You may wonder: what doesn't work on Server Core?

Since Server Core doesn't have the Windows Shell, there are no GUI administration tools for it. This includes IIS manager, the IIS administration tool. The IIS cmd-line tool, AppCmd.exe, as well as our WMI and COM APIs work just fine, however, and now that IIS configuration is all stored in config files, you can obviously edit them by hand as well (yes, notepad.exe works on server core!)
Currenly the .NET Framework is not on Server Core, which means ASP.NET is currently not available. This is something the .NET team wants to add and we're working on adding it as soon as possible. Classic ASP works just fine, and with the new FastCGI support, PHP also runs great on Server Core.
Our remote administration service that handles HTTP remote administration and delegated administration relies on the .NET framework, so it is likewise unavailable. Of course, distributed web.config files still work just fine, so anyone with access to a content directory can publish IIS configuration for the Web site / application.

All other features of IIS7 work as they normally do on any version of Windows server. The IIS7 on Server Core installation option should be available on an upcoming CTP build, and in RC1.

IIS7 Logging UI for Vista - Download Now

bills — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 07:33:00 GMT

It's no secret that there is no way to configure logging settings in IIS7/Vista. A PM convinced me that configuring "logging" settings on a "Developer" machine simply isn't interesting - and "if they want to do it, they can always use config".

But, I have two pieces of good news for those seeking the logging UI.

First: it will reappear in SP1. It was already in "Longhorn Server", but for various reasons I won't elaborate on was removed from Vista. Now that we've heard your feedback, it will magically reappear when you install Vista SP1, as soon as it is available. As I said, it has always been in Longhorn Server, so look for it there too with the upcoming Beta 3 release. (I'm VERY excited about this, and when it is released, I think you will be too, when you hear what we've been up to. :))

Second: for those who don't want to wait, Tobin just posted a module to the DownloadCENTER which provides basic UI for log settings. Thanks to the completely extensible admin tool we've built with IIS7, he used the same APIs the Dev team did to build the original feature, and plugged in his own version. It is pretty darn sweet. Check it out here: http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1328

Thanks Tobin!

bill