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

Quick Install of the World’s Most Popular Web Applications on IIS7

bills — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:48:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I announced the availability of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI) in Beta. Web PI makes it easy to obtain and install the Microsoft Web Platform, including IIS, ASP.NET, Visual Web Developer Express, SQL Express and tons of other great IIS and other platform extensions in a single place. The Microsoft Web Platform provides everything you need to develop, deploy, host and operate powerful Web applications.

Speaking of powerful Web applications, today I’m excited to announce another tool that makes installing some of the world’s most popular ASP.NET and PHP applications on IIS7 a snap! The Microsoft Web Application Installer (Web AI) is a companion to Web PI, and provides a super easy way to download, install and configure many popular community and open source applications on IIS7. Available applications include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress, with more on the way. If you decide to try some of the PHP applications, you may want to check out this recent blog post on how to get PHP and MySQL installed as well. Try out Web AI today!

Web AI downloads each application from its original source, so if the application is updated, you know that Web AI will be pointing to the latest and greatest bits. In addition, Web AI will check for the presence of prerequisite components before installing the application, and after installation, it will offer configuration pages so that you can set up an associated database (another great reason why we included both SQL Server 2008 Express and the SQL Server driver for PHP in Web PI) and if needed, personalize your application by entering credentials and setting application options.

Remember, this is just a beta release, so you can expect to see more functionality and even greater integration as we update this tool in the months to come. And as with Web PI, we have created a Web AI forum where you can discuss Web AI and provide feedback or make suggestions to us, so do let us know what you think.

Community Links 10/11/2008: URL Rewrite, ASP.NET, Extensibility, Diagnostics, WordPress

bills — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 05:01:14 GMT

Here are a few cool links I found today while catching up on my IIS reading:

URL Rewrite

In case you missed it, the IIS7 URL Rewrite extension is now licensed for production use in its final beta release. Deploy it today and get all the benefits from one of the most powerful IIS7 features around. Use it to clean up URLs, provide extension-less URLs, fix canonicalization issues with your site to improve search ranking, redirect incoming users and much, much more. This latest URL Rewrite release includes all new IIS Manager support for creating rewrite rules using templates, rule testing and more. Speaking of the URL Rewrite extension, check out these community links:

CarlosAg wrote a really awesome post on how to make your IIS7 site search engine friendly (SEO) with IIS7 URL Rewriter. Barry Wise, who has written a lot about SEO, did a follow-up post on the topic for IIS
Scott Hanselman writes about URL Rewriter as well on how he uses it to improve canonicalization including a scenario with ASP.NET MVC to remove trailing backslashes.
One of the powerful new features of this URL Rewrite release is the support for URL Rewrite templates. Check out Daniel’s post on how to extend the URL Rewrite Template support
RuslanY posted a walkthrough video of the URL Rewrite extension in action.
If you’re looking for a URL rewrite solution for IIS5/6/7, check out Helicon Tech’s isapiRewrite solution

ASP.NET

The ASP.NET team announced MVC Preview 5 of the new ASP.NET MVC Framework. Download the link on codeplex.
Also in the news, jQuery will now ship with with Visual Studio! This makes adding slick browser animations to ASP.NET applications a cinch.
ScottGu links to a bunch of related community links on the MVC and jQuery news in his recent blog post.
I’ve seen a lot of ASP.NET developers use wildcard script-mapping with IIS 6.0. As they move to IIS7, questions pop-up about whether *scriptmap is still supported, and how it relates to the new IIS7 integrated pipeline which allows .NET modules and handlers to run natively inside IIS’ core HTTP processing engine. RuslanY wrote an excellent article on this topic titled, wildcard script mapping and IIS 7 integrated pipeline

Misc

Tobin posted the source code up on codeplex for his very popular IIS7 logging UI which he released for Vista RTM (Vista SP1 now includes logging UI support by default). This is a good example of how to build UI extensions for IIS Manager
Tess wrote an in-depth post on how to diagnose performance issues using Failed Request Tracing and AppCmd.
TrainSignalTraining wrote a nice tutorial series on how to install WordPress on IIS7 in two parts (part 1, part2)

How to get new features for IIS7

bills — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:46:00 GMT

If you've been following http://blogs.iis.net/ or http://www.iis.net/downloads/ lately you've probably noticed a lot of IIS software releases coming out with lots of odd acronyms... CTPs, GoLive releases, RTWs. You may wonder: what are these releases, and how do they compare to IIS in the past? For anyone who has been an IIS customer for a while, it may seem quite foreign to see IIS features coming out which are not attached to an OS release.

In the past, IIS has always shipped as part of a Windows Operating System release... IIS 5.0 in Windows 2000, IIS 5.1 in XP, IIS 6 in Windows 2003 and IIS7 in Vista and Windows 2008. The BIGGEST, sometimes invisible feature of IIS7, is the deep level of extensibility we've baked into the product. In fact, I often talk about IIS7 as a server platform release first, and a Web server release second. (but they both came out at once) We added a few new features in IIS7, but many of the new capabilities are a direct result of a re-factored architecture built around public extensibility points. This new extensibility model allows customers and partners to use the same fidelity APIs the IIS team uses to extend, customize and enhance IIS. And for the IIS team it means we can easily plug in new features over time, out of band from Windows. What does it mean for you, dear blog reader? Lots of cool new features for IIS7 will be coming out over the coming year or two! So the great Web server you're just getting to know will just get better and better.

I wanted to help you to parse these releases by explaining the acronyms and the quality bar each release is published under. This can help you decide how and when to use them.

CTP - Community Technology Preview

Think of the CTP release as a debut release. I tend to think of them as early 'beta' releases. With CTP releases our primary goal is to debut a project to the world in order to get feedback. This is your opportunity to shape the release...what you like, and what you don't like. CTP releases are usually not feature complete, and they are definitely not stress or performance tested to a large degree. We may ship multiple CTPs as we continue to iterate on the feature designs. For each CTP we do basic functional testing, a basic amount of security review (though not complete) and we put it out there for you to try out. CTPs are not licensed for production use, so we recommend against using a CTP in real world scenarios... not only may it crash or not perform well, but there is no guaranteed path to upgrade/migrate to the final release, and the feature you end up depending on may never come out (or change significantly before final release). Use CTPs at your own risk, but test them aggressively. Occasionally we will engage with a small number of customers and ask them to actually use the CTP in real world scenarios so we can evaluate how it works in more than test environments. These are well controlled environments where we can work closely with the customer to ensure good results, or the ability to pull back should things go wrong. If you're interested in doing this kind of engagement on a particular feature, it never hurts to ask!

Releases that are currently in CTP form:

Web Playlist for IIS7 (x86) and (x64)
PowerShell Provider for IIS7 (x86) and (x64)
Administration Pack for IIS7 (x86) and (x64)
Database Manager for IIS7 (x86) and (x64)
URLrewrite for IIS7 (x86) and (x64)

GoLive - Ready for Production Use / Testing

Once a feature has reached a certain level of quality, we release it under a "GoLive" label. GoLive releases are licensed for production use, but are not in final release form. I think of them as 'release candidates'. GoLive releases are feature complete (all the major features planned are implemented) and they must meet a much higher quality bar before release. For GoLive releases we do a fair amount of testing automation, to ensure repeatable functional testing, and we do some stress and performance testing to ensure basic quality. We review the security of the feature, to ensure customers are not put at risk by deploying the feature. Our primary goal with GoLive releases is to validate that the product is ready for the final release. Be sure to take calculate risks and try these out on your Web servers and tell us what you think!

Releases that are currently in GoLive form:

Microsoft Web Deployment Tool (x86) and (x64)

RTW - Release to Web

And when a feature is done we release it under a "RTW" label. RTW releases are the final Web release of a feature for IIS7. For a feature to reach RTW status, it must go through the full release process here at Microsoft, which means lots of lots of testing, review, and yes, lots of paperwork. RTW releases are fully supported, just as if they were shipped as part of the Operating System. You can count on RTW releases to run your business. If a critical security fix becomes necessary, we will release an update for the feature. If major functional bugs or changes are required to an RTW release, we will plan an incremental version update (v1.1).

Releases that are currently in RTW form:

FastCGI Extension for IIS6.0 (this feature is built-in to IIS7 - Vista SP1 and Windows 2008)
FTP Publishing Service for IIS7 (x86) and (x64)
WebDAV Extension for IIS7 (x86) and (x64)
IIS Manager for Remote Administration (x86) and (x64)
Windows Media Services 2008 (x86) and (x64)
IIS7 Media Pack - Bit Rate Throttling (x86) and (x64)

Life after RTW?

You may ask: what comes after RTW? Will there be future versions of a feature? Will it ever make it into the OS? The answer to these questions is a definite maybe. Depending on the feature, we will put it in the next Operating System release if we think it is a broadly useful feature that customers want to have as part of an Operating System (and assuming we can make the Windows schedule/dates). For example, in the next version of Windows you can expect to see the new FTP7 and WebDAV extensions integrated into the release. For other features, especially if we think we want to be able to rapidly evolve a feature over multiple versions, you can expect to see minor and major version releases going out on the Web rather than incorporation into the OS.

I'm really excited by the agility and new freedom the IIS team enjoys in delivering features out of band to make Windows a better Web server. We hope these features are interesting to you and give you even more reason to keeping using IIS, and upgrade to IIS7. If you have feature ideas you'd like to see developed, be sure and send me feedback! By giving you early access to new feature ideas we're developing, through the CTP and GoLive releases, we hope to incorporate your feedback into the product and make sure it works exactly like you need it to. Be sure and tell us what you think!

IIS7 in the Community...11/7/2007

bills — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 22:32:00 GMT

The IIS7 community is growing! There have been a number of really cool things going on in the community around IIS7. Here are some of my favorites:

New Web Control Panels for IIS7!

I was very excited to see two new control panels for IIS7 hit the market this past month. I was excited to see the DotNetPanel guys be one of the first to market with an update of their DotNetPanel product for IIS7. They have a demo on their site you can try out now, or go download a copy for free (up to 10 sites!) The reviews on the download page look good. I was also excited when big-name vendor SWSoft released an update to their Plesk product for Windows v 8.3 beta which also supports IIS7. These guys are used all over the place in giant Web hosters, and having IIS7 support pre-launch is a really great sign. You can download their latest beta here.

New IIS7 Administration Tool Add-ons!

Rakki of the IIS/ASP.NET support team has published some really great IIS7 Admin Tool extensions that you may want to check out, including a new backup/restore UI extension, an IISRESET UI feature, and a diagnostics UI Module (called FREBUIModule).

How to install MySQL, PHP and PHPMyAdmin on IIS

With the introduction of FastCGI on IIS, running PHP on Windows is now a great experience. I ran across this great blog post by Shabbir which provides step-by-step instructions for how to get IIS, PHP, MySQL and PHPMyAdmin up and running.

Running 32bit and 64bit Side-by-Side in IIS7

For some odd reason I thought everyone already knew this, but I saw it pop up on blogosphere and quite a few people have cross-posted so I thought I better as well. Yes, it is now possible with IIS7 to run 32bit and 64bit AppPools side-by-side. Check out Rakki's blog for the scoop: http://blogs.msdn.com/rakkimk/archive/2007/11/03/iis7-running-32-bit-and-64-bit-asp-net-versions-at-the-same-time-on-different-worker-processes.aspx

Making PHP Applications Great on IIS7

Wow, this is a killer post by Drew Robbins on IIS7 extensibility in action for a PHP application. He shows off running Qdig, a popular PHP photo applications, using built-in forms authentication and the integrated pipeline, extensible configuration support, and a UI extension. It rocks!

Fun with http.sys caching

This is a great blog post by Rick James, IIS developer, on how the http.sys cache works and the kinds of performance benefits it provides.

Book Review: IIS7 Implementation and Administration

Andrew Westgarth provides a nice write-up of this new book by John Paul Mueller. If you're interested in purchasing a book on IIS7, check out this write-up and the growing list of IIS7 books on Amazon.com. I'm anxiously waiting for my copy of this 700 page monster.

Finding your way around IIS7 configuration sections with AppCmd

Mike Volodarsky writes up a great post on how to figure out the dozens of IIS (hundreds if you count ASP.NET) configuration sections and how to use them.

How to install VMWare Web Management on IIS7

This great post on AngryPets shows how to setup VMWare's Web Management Application for IIS7 and Windows Server 2008.

How to install IIS7 and PHP with FastCGI - ScreenCast

And last, but not least, Scott Hanselman published this great screencast of how to get PHP working on IIS7.

Happy Reading!

Download Windows Media Services (WMS) for Windows Server 2008 June CTP

bills — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 21:44:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce that Windows Media Services (WMS) package for Windows Server 2008 June CTP is now live! With this package, WMS is now supported on Web SKU (Windows Web Server 2008) as well. This package is available for all beta participants who have access to the June CTP.

Download Location

http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1481

IIS7 on Server Core - June CTP build released!

bills — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 19:06:00 GMT

I'm excited to announce that a new build of IIS7 and Windows 2008 Server is available for testing by Beta testers. This build includes updates and fixes made since the Beta 3 release earlier this year, and includes the previously announced IIS7 on Server Core configuration. Important note: This build is released as a Community Technology Preview (CTP) release, and has not been tested to the degree that we test full Beta or Release Candidate builds, so use at your own risk!

In response to customer feedback and bugs reports since beta 3, we've fixed almost a thousand bugs and made several notable changes:

IIS7 on Server Core

As previously announced, IIS7 is now the seventh role available in Server Core, the low footprint OS configuration. This 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.

Mete, one of the senior Test leads on the team, just published a great blog post with helpful hints on how to get started with IIS7 on Server Core. We've also posted this as an article on IIS.net, titled IIS7 on Server Core, which answers basic questions about this release and gives some helpful steps for how to get IIS7 up and running.

Improved Diagnostics support for UNC paths in the UI

There is a new diagnostics option added to the UI where paths are configured (the physical paths you configure for sites, applications, virtual directories, etc.) which can help you diagnose problems with connections to these file server paths.

Kernel Caching support in the Output Caching UI

It is now possible to enable kernel caching as part of the output caching feature in the UI.

Improved support for IPv6 addresses

IIS has supported wildcard IPv6 bindings since IIS6, but with this build IIS also supports the ability to provide specific IPv6 bindings for a site or server.

Demand start threshold based on memory limit

IIS7 now supports the ability to dynamically adjust AppPool timeout values based on memory limits. This enables greater density AppPool configurations ensuring that the most active AppPools stay active, while more aggressively timing out stale AppPools when available memory becomes low.

Improved Default Document UI

This very common feature gets some usability improvements and performance help.

And several other hidden gems. :) There has never been a better time to try out IIS7!

My Take: IIS vs. Apache

bills — Mon, 07 May 2007 07:40:00 GMT

I ran across Apache at 56% - what is wrong? by /home/liquidat this weekend, and the resulting Digg thread, and enjoyed reading the age-old IIS vs. Apache debate waged by loyalists on both sides. It is great to see the passion for Web servers still very much alive. This is one of the reasons I love software...it is so much more than bits and bytes. Software, good and bad, evokes an emotional response from users. It frustrates the crap out of me when it doesn't work like I want it to, and it makes me nod my head and say "cool..." when it does something really powerful that I don't expect.

The IIS vs. Apache debate has been going on for a while, and reminds me of the Mac vs. Windows debate, which also never gets old. I used to be a die hard Windows fan. I got my hands on a Windows 95 beta and was so blown away by it. I was one of those crazy kids that went to CompUSA at midnight the day it was released and bought my own copy. Later in college I dual-booted into Linux so I could have access to gcc and all the great development tools we were using in class. Now I run Mac OSX and Vista at home.

When I got out of college, I worked for a start-up ISP, and ended up focusing a lot of my energy on the Web hosting side of the business. We started out with a Sun Ultra server, running Solaris, then deployed a bunch of Linux servers. We used Zeus and Apache as a Web server. They were both great. I admire Apache for a lot of reasons. It is a solid Web server with a great extensibility model, and is very reliable when run on Linux.

My history with IIS

I got my hands on IIS when it first came out in 1996. At first it seemed like a toy (maybe because it was) but it quickly grew up. With ASP in IIS 3.0 I fell in love. After hacking so many CGI applications together in C or PERL, I was blown away at how productive I could be with ASP, especially when MDAC came out and made data access so easy. If I had to make a bet, I'd guess this is one of the reasons people love IIS to this day: it is easy to setup, use, and incredibly powerful to program against.

I pushed the IIS4/NT 4 option pack very hard at the company I worked for in 1997, and we deployed the last beta in production. It required a reboot every day in order to run properly, and depending on which series of patches we installed, it sometimes required more, but it was worth it. I remember once installing an Oracle patch one morning, on recommendation from an Orcale support engineer, that took out the entire server and required a full rebuild. That was the day I learned to never install patches on a production server without first testing them. :)

IIS5 came out with Windows 2000, right as I joined Microsoft, and ended up being a disasterous release for the IIS team. I remember sitting through meeting after meeting with customers who were hit by Code Red and Nimda, who were justifiably furiated by the impact the vulnerabilities had made on their business. IIS wasn't very popular inside the company at the time either, as these were the first broad-scale internet worm attacks against any Microsoft product, and it took time for others to realize: it can happen to you.

The IIS team learned some very hard lessons about security vs. features in 2001 and 2002. We poured over our code, we hired independent contractors to come pour over our code, fuzz it, hack it, and try to break it. The result is quite possibly the most secure and reliable Web server ever with IIS6 - released with Windows 2003 Server. Don't take my word, search http://secunia.com for IIS security issues yourself, and compare it to any other Web server product.

And with 2007 came IIS7 in Windows Vista, and later this year, with Windows Server "Longhorn". IIS7 is more like a "v1" release, than a "v7". I can honestly say it is the biggest release of IIS ever. It has more fundamental improvements and new capabilities than any previous release of IIS, and hasn't lost sight of the basics: security, reliability, performance. I think it will change the Web server market. If you're already an IIS customer, there is a lot to look forward to with IIS7. And if you haven't checked out IIS for a while, or you are still worried about security or reliability, it is time to give IIS a second look.

Bad reasons to avoid IIS

If you're saying to yourself: IIS isn't as secure as Apache, or isn't as reliable, or isn't as fast, you should think twice.

Security. If you're worried about IIS security vs. Apache, you're concerns are outdated. Check out http://secunia.com and compare IIS5 and IIS6's track record for the last 4-5 years and compare it to Apache. Having been on the IIS team during Code Red and Nimda I can tell you it was a very painful experience and one I don't ever hope to re-live, nor do I wish it on my worst enemy. The IIS team learned hard lessons in 2001, and the results speak for themselves. Is IIS perfect? Nope, it is still build by faliable humans and we make mistakes just like every other engineering team.

Reliability and Performance. IIS6 included a new process model which can reliably host Web applications, and monitors them for health and responsiveness. It can proactively recycle applications when they are unhealthy. IIS7 takes this process model to the next level by automatically isolating each new site when it is created in its own Application Pool, and dynamically assigning a unique SID (identity) to the AppPool so it is isolated from all other sites on the box from a runtime identity perspective - without any additional management required. It also isolates the configuration for the AppPool, so it is impossible to read configuration from other sites on the server. This provides the ultimate Web server architecture for Windows - a high performance multi-threaded server that provides secure isolation of Web sites by default and is also agile enough to respond to poor health conditions and gracefully recycle applications

If you're worried about IIS performance and reliability when running PHP vs. running on Apache, you're concerns are definitely valid. Up until recently there were only two ways to run PHP: the slow way (CGI), and the unreliable way (ISAPI). :) This is primarily a result of the lack of thread-safety in some PHP extensions - they were originally written for the pre-fork Linux/Apache environment which is not multi-threaded. Running them on IIS with the PHP ISAPI causes them to crash, and take out the IIS process serving your application.

Fortunately, the Microsoft / Zend partnership has brought about fixes to these issues with many performance and compatibility fixes by Zend, and a FastCGI feature for IIS which enables fast, reliable PHP hosting. FastCGI is available now in Tech Preview form, and has also been included in Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta 3. It will be included in Vista SP1 and Longhorn Server at RTM.

Reasons you should check out IIS7 if you use Apache today

There are so many new capabilities in IIS7, it would turn this already long post, into a short novel to list them all. If you want lots of specifics, go read through the IIS7 site. Here are a few reasons you Apache users might be interested in looking at IIS7:

Text file configuration

Apache has httpd.conf - a simple text file for configuration - which makes it very easy to edit Apache configuration using text/code editors or write PERL or other scripts to automate configuration changes. Since the configuration file is just a text file, it also makes it easy to copy configuration from one server to another. Unfortunately, Apache does require the Administrator to manually signal Apache to reload configuration in order for changes to take effect.

Many IIS customers dread IIS' configuration store - the 'metabase' - and for good reason. It has been an opaque configuration store like the registry since it was introduced in IIS4, and while there are many tools and APIs to use to configure IIS with, nothing beats being able to open up your configuration in the text editor of your choice and directly change configuration settings. With IIS7, all IIS configuration is now stored in a simple XML file called applicationHost.config, which is placed by default in the \windows\system32\inetsrv\config directory. Changing configuration is as simple as opening the file, adding or changing a configuration setting, and saving the file. Want to share configuration across a set of servers? Simply copy the applicationHost.config file onto a file share and redirect IIS configuration to look there for its settings. And whether your configuration is stored locally on the hard drive, or on a file server, changes take effect immediately, without requiring any restarts. All IIS configuration settings are self-described in a schema file that can be accessed by going to \windows\sytem32\inetsrv\config\schema. Adding new configuration to IIS is as simple as dropping a new schema file in this directory, registering it, and it automatically becomes available through IIS' cmd-line tool and programmatic APIs.

Distributed Configuration (by default)

Apache supports distributed configuration with a feature called .htaccess. It is a powerful feature that enables configuration for a Web site to be overriden using a simple text file in the content directory. Unfortunately, due to the way it is designed in Apache, using it incurrs a huge performance hit. In fact, the apache.org site recommends you avoid using it whenever possible.

IIS7 supports distributed configuration in web.config files, and has some important advantages over .htaccess. Web.config is the file that ASP.NET uses today to store configuration, so developers now have a single file, format and API to use to target Web site / app configuration. Imagine storing your PHP, Apache and Web Application settings in one file. This distributed configuration support is very powerful, and allows for every per-URL configuration IIS property to be set in distributed configuration. IIS7 caches web.config data, which avoids the per-request performance hit Apache suffers from. The IIS implmenetation for distributed config is so good we've made it the default for a bunch of IIS configuration that we know developers typically want to set along with their Web sites. For example, if you use any IIS7 tool to override the default document for a site or application, that setting will be stored in the web.config file for that directory by default. Of course, you can override the default and store everything in IIS' global configuration file if you want, and you can decide on a section-by-section basis which settings you want distributed, and which you want to keep centralized. There is much more granulatiry in IIS' configuration locking support over Apache, enabling you to even lock at the attribute level if desired.

Extensibility (C/C++/C#/VB.NET/and 30+ other languages...)

As I noted above, Apache has had a very modular architecture with powerful extensibility for many years. Apache's architecture has allowed many people to take it and add / modify / extend the Web server to do many custom things. The resulting community modules for Apache has been impressive to watch. IIS' ISAPI extensibility hasn't been a complete slouch: some of the world's biggest application frameworks have successfuly run on ISAPI, including ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, ActiveState PERL, etc. Unfortunately, the number of successful ISAPI developers does seem to be smaller than the successful Apache mod developers, and the product team itself elected to rarely use ISAPI to build actual IIS features.

This all changes with IIS7. With IIS7, IIS introduces a new native extensibility interface, CHttpModule, on top of which we ported all of the IIS features as a discrete, pluggable binary. The IIS core Web server itself is a very thin event pipeline, and each of the IIS features can now be added and removed independently. The extensibility point, CHttpModule, is much more powerful than ISAPI, and provides a fully asynchronous super-set support for extensions and filters. Don't like how IIS does XYZ feature, rip it out and replace it with your own: you have all the APIs the IIS team has.

Even more impressive, IIS7 introduces managed extensibility of the core Web server via the existing System.Web IHttpModule and IHttpHandler interfaces, enabling any .NET framework developer to extend IIS at the core and build a new, custom or replacement feature. I showed this off in a recent blog post on how to build a SQL Logging module that can add to or replace the built-in W3C logging using .NET in less than 50 lines of code.

Advanced Diagnostics and Troubleshooting support

Whether you're running IIS or Apache, troubleshooting problems can be a real bear. Applications running in a high-performance, multi-threaded, console environment are very tough to debug, especially when in production use. IIS7 innovates in several key ways to make the support for these situations far better than what you see with any other Web server.

First, IIS supports a feature called 'failed request tracing', which is really very cool. Simply give IIS a set of error conditions to watch out for, based on response code or timeout value, and IIS will trap this condition and log a detailed trace log of everything that happened during the request lifetime that led up to the error. Seeing requests timeout on a periodic basis, but not sure why? Simply tell IIS to look out for requests that take longer than n seconds to complete, and IIS will show you ever step in the request lifetime, and including duration to complete each step. And you'll see the last event to have fired before the timeout to occur. Are you seeing the dreaded "Server 500 Error - Internal Server Error"? Tell IIS to trap this error and then browse through each step along the request to see where things went south. I know of nothing like this with Apache.

IIS also supports real-time request monitoring and runtime data. Want to know which requests are in flight on the server, how long they have been running, which modules they are in, etc? IIS can tell you from the cmd-line, administration tool, or even programmatically via .NET and WMI APIs. It is very easy to now look inside IIS and see what's going on inside your Server.

Rich Administration APIs and Tools

This is an area where IIS has traditionally shined, and IIS7 takes the lead even further. IIS7's new administration tool is very simple and easy to use, but extremely powerful. It is now feature-focused: simply click on a Web server, site or application and see every feature available to manage. On the right hand pane there is a set of simple administration tasks for each scope that makes it easy to create new sites and applications, modify logging settings, or see advanced settings. The administration tool remotes over HTTP, making it possible to manage the server locally or over the internet. And the tool fully supports the distributed configuration model, making it possible to add 'delegated' administrators for Web sites and applications and allowing them to use Web.config or the same Administration tool to configure their Web site. The administration tool is also completely modular, and built on top of a new extensibility framework, making it easy to add new features into the tool.

In addition to a rich administration tool, IIS also ships AppCmd.exe, a swiss-army knife for cmd-line administration. With it, you can set any IIS setting, view real-time request and runtime information, and much more.

IIS7 also includes several programmatic interfaces which can be used to manage the server. Sure, you can use PERL to hack away at the new text-based config file if you want, or you can use rich, object-oriented APIs in any .NET or script language if you prefer. Microsoft.Web.Administration is a powerful new .NET api for programmatically managing the Server. IIS7 also includes a new WMI provider for scripting management using VBscript or JScript.

Summary

IIS7 is a major overhaul of the Web server. It builds on the rock-solid security and reliability of IIS6, and promises some very powerful new extensibility and management capabilities that meet and exceed what Apache can do today. It's already in Vista, so you can use it on the desktop today, and with Beta 3 it is available for free for production use through the GoLive program.

I'm quite certain this won't end the debate of which is the better Web server, but I thought I'd add my two cents. ;)

IIS.NET DownloadCENTER is now Live!!!

bills — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 06:04:00 GMT

I'm really excited to announce that DownloadCENTER is now live and kicking on IIS.net. Simply click "Downloads" on the IIS.NET site and enjoy our latest addition. DownloadCENTER is a community hotspot for discovering, sharing, reviewing and promoting IIS-related solutions in a single place. What better way to celebrate the Vista launch! ;)

IIS.NET DownloadCENTER is for everyone. Got something for IIS you think is useful? Share it! Need a tool or download for IIS? Find it! Like something you've used? Review it!

The DownloadCenter is truly a for-the-community, by-the-community section of IIS.net. This has always been our intention with IIS.net and so far we’ve seen the community voice speak out through the forums and in comments to our blogs. Now with the DownloadCenter, the community can really participate in the site in a big way. I heartily recommend everyone subscribe to the RSS feed ASAP - so you can get notified of all new downloads as they come online.

Here are a couple of quick tips for how to use the site:

+ Looking for something? You can easily find stuff by keyword or category. If you want to search for a download by keyword, just enter the keyword in the textbox. Use * as a wildcard search character. If you want to browse by category, just click the 'Browse' link, or use the links on the left navigation pane under 'categories'.

+ Want to submit something to the site? Just click the 'contribute' link on the DownloadCENTER home page. Once you're logged on, you can submit any script, tool, extension or code to the DownloadCENTER for review. Once it is approved, it will show up in the 'recently featured' items list.

+ Want to provide more information about you or your company? Click on the contribute link and click "edit profile". You'll be able to share information about your company on IIS.net, and we'll associate all of your contributions with your profile.

We'll be selecting featured downloads on a regular basis from the community to spotlight in the 'Featured" section. Are you a developer with solutions you want to share or sell? There has never been a better place to list your Web site and solution than DownloadCENTER. We're also announcing the IIS Strategic Commercial Partners program to help you promote your solutions - check it out here.

To coincide with the Vista launch, we've also added a few new banners to the IIS.net home page. Here is my favorite for some reason - it always cracks me up:

Now answer me this: who is the catsup and who is the fry?

And finally....a BIG thank you! When we started this project - probably four to five months ago - I told the guys I wanted us to take the IIS.NET site up a notch - visually, and functionally. I wanted people to go to the downloads page and say "Whoah! Those guys know something about the Web". It took a lot of design iterations (thanks Kevin for being so patient!), a lot of planning and specing (ChrisAd rocks!) and a lot of coding (Scott is a rockstar!) but they really took me serious, and they seriously delivered.