What IIS serves

For the past few years, I've spent a great deal of time in the details of IIS. I learned how to build management extensions, to perform administrative tasks from Powershell and how IIS security has improved over the years.That said, a few weeks ago I had an opportunity to move over to the MSDN team and take on some pretty big tasks. I realized very quickly that while my skills in IIS had deepened, I lost the breadth of understanding I had in development before coming to Microsoft. It was very easy for me to lose sight of what is served on top of IIS as opposed to how IIS serves it.

 So I set out on a journey. I tweeted my first introduction to my new learning website (LearningInPublic.net) and started a series on ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (I'll get into 2.0 later). To anyone who has been doing web development for a while IIS running ASP.NET is a no-brainer. That said, I also posted that you could do MVC with CakePHP quite some time ago. I had the opportunity to sit down at the Microsoft Web Developer Summit and listen to many of the worlds best and brightest developers who don't ever/always/typically use Microsoft products. I didn't get to talk individually to everyone (mostly because I crashed the event like some uninvited guests at a White House social). That said, I was very impressed with what each individual brought to the table and I'm very thankful for ALL of the feedback they gave to me individually as well as to the company.

I've been having some fun lately with Orchard as well. I built my first content type today and have been digging into it. This is an amazingly well-executed project. I'm also learning about Streaming Media so I can more effectively serve video content from LearningInPublic.net.

I've been in the trenches of IIS for years learning how IIS serves content -- but I'm having a lot of fun learning a lot more about what it serves.