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

Improve Web User Experience with IIS SEO Toolkit RTW and IIS URL Rewriter 2.0 RC

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Remember the scene in Diehard when he shoots the glass? That was cool. What’s even cooler is now you can fine tune your Web site for the search engine, thus improving the experience for your Web users.

Today, Microsoft announced the releases of IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit RTW and IIS URL Rewriter 2.0 RC – both extensions for IIS.

Don’t take it personally – I know it can be hard when your significant other tells you how to make improvements on something you worked hard on, let alone a faceless piece of software. But really, they are both just trying to help. Think of the customers.

The IIS SEO Toolkit helps Web developers, hosting providers, and Web server administrators to improve their Web site’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make the site content more search engine-friendly. The IIS SEO Toolkit helps to improve the volume and quality of traffic to your Web site from search engines, control how search engines access and display Web content, and inform search engines about locations that are available for indexing.

We’ve all been to a cocktail party when you’re trying to impress that certain person, and they ask for the URL of the latest project you are working on. It’s embarrassing when you have to rattle off a long-winded URL with question marks, equal signs, random ID numbers, and ampersands. But with URL Rewriter, you don’t have to anymore.

IIS URL Rewriter 2.0 adds support for outbound response rewriting and enables Web administrators to create powerful rules to implement URLs that are easier for users to remember and easier for search engines to find. IIS URL Rewriter 2.0 can now replace the URLs generated by a Web application in the response HTML with a more user friendly and search engine friendly equivalent, modify the links in the HTML markup generated by a Web application behind a reverse proxy, and fix up the content of any HTTP response by using regular expression pattern matching. IIS URL Rewriter 2.0 helps to easily define rules that match URLs or HTTP headers to generate more friendly and consistent URLs, protect content and assets from unauthorized linking and scanning, and integrate with existing IIS features to improve management, performance, and troubleshooting.

Did I mention it’s free? And it’s available to download and install today with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0, your one-stop shop to get everything for the Microsoft Web Platform – including IIS SEO Toolkit RTW and IIS URL Rewriter 2.0 RC. From IIS Extensions to the Windows Web App Gallery and beyond, there is sure to be something useful for your Web site endeavors.

Oh, if you run PHP, be sure to check out our learning section on Running PHP Applications on IIS. We have a ton of brand new and updated content to help provide PHP on Windows users a single source of end-to-end guidance. Pretty sweet!

For more information or to download, please visit the IIS SEO Toolkit RTW page and the IIS URL Rewriter 2.0 RC page.

Eric Rezabek

Senior Product Manager

IIS/Web

Increase Web Application Scalability and Reliability with ARR 2.0 RTW

Anonymous — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Today, Microsoft announced the final release of IIS Application Request Routing (ARR) 2.0 RTW.

Customers - such as hosting providers, Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers, and IT Professionals are changing the way they do business as a result of ARR 2.0. ARR 2.0 delivers cost savings, elastic scalability, and flexible deployment options. With IIS 7.5 and ARR 2.0, customers can create a native Silverlight infrastructure and configure their CDN so that it provides superior live and on-demand media offerings for their users. Customers can implement new capabilities in their CDN and as a result, can replace Apache Squid on their edge servers and cut costs. By deploying this new solution based on ARR 2.0, customers can provide a better viewing experience for Web consumers, boost the scalability and level of control they have over their CDN, and enhance the reports they can provide their users.

There are now several new scenarios available to the Microsoft Web Platform. My personal favorite is a media solution combining IIS Live Smooth Streaming with ARR 2.0 to deliver live HD video over a CDN – a scenario nobody else can do today. ARR 2.0 also adds support to enhance disk based cache and cache proxy for CDNs while increasing Web application reliability and scalability through rule-based routing and load balancing of HTTP server requests. ARR 2.0 is able to cache on disk any HTTP traffic that passes through the server. By combining the disk caching capabilities along with a hierarchy of IIS Web servers running ARR 2.0, CDNs and hosting providers are able to considerably reduce the network traffic that traverses up to the origin server.

In other words – get your free software load balancer with caching on top of Windows Server! And oh, if you want to stream live HD media across a CDN – we got you covered! Did I mention it’s free? And it’s available to download and install today with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0, your one-stop shop to get everything for the Microsoft Web Platform – including ARR 2.0 RTW. From IIS Extensions to the Windows App Gallery, there is sure to be something useful for your Web site endeavors.

If you still aren’t convinced that ARR 2.0 is the coolest thing since sliced bread, as LeVar from Reading Rainbow would say: “but…don’t take MY word for it”! Internap, an Internet Service Provider company based out of Atlanta, Georgia deployed ARR 2.0 and IIS 7.5 in the Windows Server® 2008 R2 operating system to implement new capabilities in its content delivery network. As a result, the company can replace Apache Squid on its edge servers, cut costs, and improve scalability, reporting, and the users’ Web experience. Be sure to check out their brand new case study.

For more information or to download, please visit the IIS ARR 2.0 RTW page.

Eric Rezabek

Senior Product Manager

IIS/Web

Provide a Better Web Site Experience with Faster Response Times

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:53:00 GMT

Have you ever hummed the Jeopardy theme song while waiting for a Web site to download - even on a high-speed Internet connection? Sometimes the problem is OUT of your control – whether it is an Internet traffic jam, scheduled maintenance, or some other unknown cause for a delay in receiving your request to view the latest on what the stock market is doing. But sometimes the problem is IN your control – such as pre-loading worker processes at the start of the Web server or when Overlapped Recycling occurs. As a IT Pro in charge of Web sites, you probably want to do everything you can on your side to make those delays as few as possible to your end-users. Like an easy-bake oven, you can now ‘Warm-Up’ your Web site to the proper ‘temperature’ before serving your customers.

Today, Microsoft announced the beta release of IIS Application Warm-Up – an extension for IIS 7.5 that enables IT Professionals to improve the responsiveness of their Web sites by loading the Web applications before the first request arrives. By proactively loading and initializing all the dependencies such as database connections, compilation of ASP.NET code, and loading of modules, IT Professionals can ensure their Web sites are responsive at all times even if their Web sites use a custom request pipeline or if the Application Pool is recycled.

For more information or to download, please visit the IIS Application Warm-Up page. If you can’t decide where to start, first get the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 RTW – this is your one-stop shop to get everything for the Microsoft Web Platform. From IIS Extensions to the Windows App Gallery, there is sure to be something useful for your Web site endeavors.

Eric Rezabek

Senior Product Manager

IIS/Web

Six Ways to Help Customers Extend their Web Sites

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:03:00 GMT

Wow – do we have a bunch of announcements for you! If you care about Web sites, read on. From really cool media scenarios, to making it easy getting started on the Microsoft Web Platform, to advanced tweaks to your Web site – we have something for all walks of life to check out. Let’s cut to the chase. Today, Microsoft announced updates to six important IIS Extensions:

· IIS Application Request Routing 2.0 RC adds support to enhance disk based cache and cache proxy for content delivery networks while increasing Web application reliability and scalability through rule-based routing and load balancing of HTTP server requests.

· IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit Beta2 helps Web developers, hosting providers, and Web server administrators to improve their Web site’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make the site content more search engine-friendly.

· IIS URL Rewriter 2.0 adds support for outbound response rewriting while enabling Web administrators to create powerful rules to implement URLs that are easier for users to remember and easier for search engines to find.

· IIS Web Deployment Tool RTW simplifies the migration, management, and deployment of IIS Web servers, Web applications, and Web sites.

· IIS Database Manager RTW allows you to easily manage your local and remote databases from within IIS Manager.

· Coming soon, IIS Media Services 3.0 RTW, an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform, combines all IIS media extensions - including IIS Live Smooth Streaming - and delivers true HD (720p+) streaming for users and real-time logging to measure media investments.

Microsoft also announced three significant enhancements to the overall Microsoft Web Platform:

· The new Microsoft® WebsiteSpark™ program makes it easy for Web professionals to get the software and support needed and a marketplace to grow their business on the Microsoft Web Platform.

· The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 RTW provides developers with a simplified, ‘one click’ installation of technologies in the Web stack – including IIS Extensions, amplifying ease of use and reducing complexity.

· The Windows Web Application Gallery provides access to over 20 popular, free, and ready to install Web apps to build Web sites and Web applications that run on Windows.

If you can’t decide where to start, first get the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 RTW – this is your one-stop shop to get everything for the Microsoft Web Platform. From IIS Extensions to the Windows App Gallery, there is sure to be something useful for your Web site endeavors.

Eric Rezabek

Senior Product Manager

IIS/Web

Download the New Windows Cache Extension for PHP Beta

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:42:00 GMT

Download the New Windows Cache Extension for PHP Beta

Perhaps you are a Web Developer or a Web Hoster who on the one hand likes PHP. But on the other hand you like Windows. It’s OK. It’s not a contradiction. Now you can run your PHP applications even better on Windows. It’s also OK to tell your Linux friends what they are missing.

Today, Microsoft is announcing the Windows Cache Extension for PHP Beta – a PHP accelerator that is used to increase the speed of PHP applications running on Windows and Windows Server. Once the Windows Cache Extension for PHP is enabled and loaded by the PHP engine, PHP applications can take advantage of the functionality without any code modifications. How sweet is that?

If you run PHP on Windows, check it out. If you run PHP on Linux and want an alternative, check it out. If you want to increase PHP application performance on Windows by caching PHP bytecode in memory, check it out. If you want to reduce file system I/O overhead by caching the PHP scripts in memory, check it out. If you want to avoid redundant mapping for absolute paths by using relative file path cache, check it out.

Windows Cache Extension for PHP Beta can be installed with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 RC and works great with IIS 7.5, IIS 7.0, IIS 6.0 and IIS 5.1. Find more information on Using Windows Cache Extension for PHP. Also, be sure to check out other official IIS Extensions from Microsoft.

Eric Rezabek

Senior Product Manager

IIS/Web

Announcing: IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit Beta 1

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:24:00 GMT

Today we are releasing the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. The IIS SEO Toolkit is a set of features that aim to help you keep your Web site and its content in good shape for both Users and Search Engines.

The features that are included in this Beta release include:

Site Analysis. This feature includes a crawler that starts looking at your Web site contents, discovering links, downloading the contents and applying a set of validation rules aimed to help you easily troubleshoot common problems such as broken links, duplicate content, keyword analysis, route analysis and many more features that will help you improve the overall quality of your Web site.
Robots Exclusion Editor. This includes a powerful editor to author Robots Exclusion files. It can leverage the output of a Site Analysis crawl report and allow you to easily add the Allow and Disallow entries without having to edit a plain text file, making it less error prone and more reliable. Furthermore, you can run the Site Analysis feature again and see immediately the results of applying your robots files.
Sitemap and Sitemap Index Editor. Similar to the Robots editor, this allows you to author Sitemap and Sitemap Index files with the ability to discover both physical and logical (Site Analysis crawler report) view of your Site.

Checkout the great blog about IIS SEO Toolkit by ScottGu, or this IIS SEO simple video of some of its capabilities.

Run it in your Development, Staging, or Production Environments

One of the problems with many similar tools out there is that they require you to publish the updates to your production sites before you can even use the tools, and of course would never be usable for Intranet or internal applications that are not exposed to the Web. The IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit can be used internally in your own development or staging environments giving you the ability to clean up the content before publishing to the Web. This way your users do not need to pay the price of broken links once you publish to the Web and you will not need to wait for those tools or Search Engines to crawl your site to finally discover you broke things.

For developers this means that they can now easily look at the potential impact of removing or renaming a file, easily check which files are referring to this page and which files he can remove because of only being referenced by this page.

Run it against any Web application built on any framework running in any server

One thing that is important to clarify is that you can target and analyze your production sites if you want to, and you can target Web applications running in any platform, whether its ASP.NET, PHP, or plain HTML text files running in your local IIS or on any other remote server.

Bottom line, try it against your Web site, look at the different features and give us feedback for additional reports, options, violations, content to parse, etc, post any comments or questions at the IIS Search Engine Optimization Forum.

The IIS SEO Toolkit documentation can be found at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/639/using-iis-search-engine-optimization-toolkit/, but remember this is only Beta 1 so we will be adding more features and content.

Download the New IIS SEO Toolkit Beta

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Download the New IIS SEO Toolkit Beta

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to tirelessly explore the Internet as a search engine crawler? What would you find? Would the sites you meet help you or are you on your own? Would the sites tell you where important information lives or must you scour even further? Would the sites tell you how often they are updated or would you just have to figure it out? What info do you pass on to your human overlords? Were the sites even built with you in mind? The internet can feel like a big daunting place to search engine crawlers, so let’s do our part to help out. Enter the world of Search Engine Optimization.

Today, Microsoft is announcing the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit Beta – brand new tools that help Web developers, hosting providers, and server administrators improve their sites’ relevance in search results by recommending how to make them more search engine-friendly, which is especially important now, because we all need to play nice with the new kid, Bing. The IIS SEO Toolkit includes three modules that integrate with IIS Manager: Site Analysis, Robots Exclusion, and Sitemaps and Site Indexes.

The Site Analysis module suggests changes that can help improve the volume and quality of traffic to your Web site from search engines. Site Analysis allows users to analyze local and external Web sites with the purpose of optimizing the site's content, structure, and URLs for search engine crawlers.

The Robots Exclusion module makes it easier to control and restrict the content that search engines index and display. Robots Exclusion enables Web site owners to manage the robots.txt file from within the IIS Manager interface. This file is used to control the indexing of specified URLs, by disallowing search engine crawlers from accessing them.

The Sitemaps and Site Indexes module can help inform search engines about locations that are available for indexing. Sitemaps and Site Indexes enables Web site owners to manage the sitemap files and sitemap indexes on the site, application, and folder level to help keep search engines up to date, including the most important URLs listed and ranked in the sitemap.xml file.

So don’t forget about one of your most important customers with no voice (or arms, or legs, just crawly thingies) and help out the search engine crawlers of the World Wide Web. The IIS SEO Toolkit Beta can be installed with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta for use with IIS 7.0 and IIS 7.5. Also, be sure to check out other IIS Extensions from Microsoft.

Eric Rezabek

Senior Product Manager

IIS/Web

New release of MS Deploy RC1

faith_a — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:08:00 GMT

We have a new release of the RC1 build to fix a couple issues that people found. We recommend that folks download the new version as it fixes some important issues.

How can I get the new build?

Just go to our download links for x86 and x64.

How does it upgrade if I already have the earlier RC1 build?

If you install the new build, it will automatically uninstall the older build and install the new one.

How does it work if my server is running the old RC1 (437) and my client is running the new RC1 (438)?

You will get an error that there is a version mismatch. The reason for this is that if your builds are out of sync, something might be different in the syncing process and cause an error. So we require the client and server to be running the same build.

What issues were fixed?

Installing an application package in certain time zones would result in an error.
Skip and replace rules didn't work properly.
A couple of other smaller infrastructure changes.

Let us know if you see any issues!

Thanks,

-faith

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.