Vaidy's IIS Blog

IIS Express Bootstrapper Package

vaidy_gopalakrishnan — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 21:13:00 GMT

As I mentioned in a previous post, the IIS 7.5 Express MSI can be redistributed with your software package. This is enabled by the license agreement so you don’t need any additional approval. When your software is being installed on a customer’s machine, you’ll want to install IIS Express as a prerequisite, if it isn’t already present. Installer dependencies on redistributable components, such as IIS Express, are typically handled using Bootstrapper Packages.

IIS Express doesn’t officially provide a Bootstrapper Package. This is not a showstopper since you can create one yourself. See the following links, for example.

Creating Bootstrapper Packages

Application Deployment Prerequisites

For reference, I am including a Bootstrap Package for IIS Express as a part of this blog post. The zip file includes some XML manifests that will allow you to include IIS Express as a prerequisite for your setup package.

Disclaimer: The bootstrapper package is provided as-is, as a sample only. It is not officially supported. I have only verified that some simple cases work correctly. Please be sure to review and modify it as appropriate, and test it more thoroughly.

Relying on this manifest won’t bundle the IIS Express MSI with your package. Instead, when the user runs your setup program, the Windows installer will download and install IIS Express from Microsoft Download Center, if it isn’t already installed. This is fine if you are distributing your software over the internet and/or if your customers will be connected to the internet when they install your package. It makes your package leaner too, which is a good thing.

You can modify the manifest to include the IIS Express MSI. I won't describe how to do this in this blog post. Take a look at the MSDN links provided above for additional information.

Installing the Sample

To install the bootstrapper package on your machine, simply extract the zip file to the bootstrapper folder location. This folder contains bootstrapper packages for other Microsoft redistributable components, such as .NET 4.0.

On my 64-bit computer running Windows 7, this location is C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages.

If you can’t find the above location, check the Path value under one of the following registry keys, depending on your architecture.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\GenericBootstrapper\4.0 for 64-bit machines
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\GenericBootstrapper\4.0 for 34- bit machines.

A new IISExpress7.5 directory will show up under the Packages folder and will contain the product and package manifests for IIS Express.

Using the Sample

Here are steps to include IIS Express as a required component for your setup program in Visual Studio 2010.

- Launch your setup project in Visual Studio 2010

- In Solution Explorer, right-click your project and click Properties.

- Click the Prerequisites Button in the Properties dialog.

- In the ensuing dialog, select IIS Express as a prerequisite in addition to any others, as shown below. Also, make sure .NET 4.0 is checked since IIS Express requires it.

- Build your project.

Visual Studio will build a MSI as well as a setup.exe bootstrapper program. In order to make sure all prerequisites get installed, make sure your customers run setup.exe.

I hope this is useful and look forward to your feedback.

IIS 7.5 Express Official Release Highlights

vaidy_gopalakrishnan — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 20:57:00 GMT

The first official release of IIS Express was announced last week. It shipped as a part of the January Web Release, which also includes ASP.NET MVC3, WebMatrix, NuGet and Orchard.

IIS Express is a simple and lightweight version of IIS that is optimized for developers. It is free, supports the powerful features of IIS, and can run on Windows XP and above. I’ll describe the IIS Express official release below.

For information regarding the January Release, please look at ScottGu’s blog post.

Changes in IIS Express since Beta 3

Compared to Beta 3, there aren’t many new features. The official release does differ in the following respects.

- We’ve added support for 9 languages, besides English.

- The official release can be distributed (more details below).

- Numerous bug fixes have been made.

Installing IIS Express

You can install IIS Express using Web Platform Installer or directly using the download center. See the following link for additional details.

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/868/iis-express-overview/#Installation

Using IIS Express

You can use IIS Express using WebMatrix, Visual Studio, or using the command line.

WebMatrix seamlessly uses IIS Express as its web server.

Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta adds support for using IIS Express for development instead of Cassini. See ScottGu’s related blog post for more information.

In order to use IIS Express with Visual Studio 2008, you will need to launch IIS Express from the command line and manually configure VS to use it via the custom web server option.

You can also run IIS Express from the command line.

Distributing IIS Express

The official release allows you to distribute the IIS Express MSIs as-is. Since this is enabled by the licensing agreement, you don’t need special approval.

Note that you can’t distribute the IIS Express official release in any other way. For example, you can’t copy a subset of the binaries that are included in the MSI and ship them as part of your product. Please review the IIS 7.5 Express EULA before you distribute IIS Express.

Additional Information

We hope you enjoy using IIS Express and will love to hear your feedback. Here are some additional links that you might find useful.

IIS 7.5 Express Readme

IIS Express Overview

IIS Express FAQ

IIS Express Area on IIS.net

Serving external traffic with WebMatrix Beta

vaidy_gopalakrishnan — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:38:00 GMT

You will notice in WebMatrix Beta that the default website as well as new ones you create are bound to localhost. In other words, they can service local traffic only. This default behavior makes a lot of sense since we want users to explicitly opt into the security risk that comes with running over the network. You can verify this is the case by navigating to the Settings section in the Site workspace, as shown below:

The URL shown above is editable so you can try and replace localhost with your machine name (which happens to be vaidesg1 in my case). However IIS Developer Express will error out saying you need administrative rights (see bottom of screenshot below).

Technorati Tags: IIS Developer Express,Web Matrix,external,traffic,developer

You can circumvent this by restarting WebMatrix as an Administrator, but this is a very bad idea for security reasons, especially for external facing sites. For the future, we are looking at adding an option in WebMatrix. However, you can manually configure this to work as shown below.

Step 1 – Configure HTTP.SYS (requires elevation)

In case you weren’t aware, HTTP.SYS is the OS component that both IIS and IIS Developer Express use to handle HTTP requests. By default, HTTP.SYS won’t allow an application running as a standard user to listen over the wire. It is possible to explicitly configure HTTP.SYS to allow external traffic as shown below. However you will need to be an administrator. For more details look at Configuring HTTP and HTTPS. The commands you will need to run in this situation are as follows.

On Vista and Win7, run the following command from an administrative prompt:

netsh http add urlacl url=http://vaidesg:8080/ user=everyone

For XP, first install Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools. Then run the following command from an administrative prompt:

httpcfg set urlacl /u http://vaidesg1:8080/ /a D:(A;;GX;;;WD)

Obviously, you’ll need to replace vaidesg:8080 in the URL with the combo for your site. Also, you’ll need to do this for every URL you want to expose over the wire.

In HTTP.SYS parlance, you are adding a namespace reservation for your URL. If you ever need to get rid of the reservation you added previously, run the following command from an administrative prompt. You should do this if you delete your site, move it to a different port or decide to run it locally.

On Vista and Win7, run

netsh http delete urlacl url=http://vaidesg1:8080/

On XP, run

httpcfg delete urlacl /u http://vaidesg1:8080/

Step 2 – Configure URL binding in WebMatrix

If you haven’t already, go ahead and edit your URL binding to use your machine name instead of localhost. You should now be able to successfully start the website and browse to it from your local machine. There is one additional step to browse to your website from a different machine.

Step 3 – Configure your firewall

Finally, you’ll need to punch a hole in your firewall. The exact steps will vary depending on what firewall product you have running on your computer.

It takes a bit of work but hopefully gets you going for now. We are looking to address this in the future, as I mentioned.

WCF workaround for WebMatrix Beta 1

vaidy_gopalakrishnan — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 19:56:00 GMT

IIS Developer Express Beta doesn’t work with WCF out-of-the-box. If you run a WCF application and browse to it, you will see the following error message:

“Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Web.Administration, Version=7.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.”

This will be addressed in a forthcoming release. Meanwhile there are a couple of simple ways you can workaround this limitation.

Workaround 1: Copy assemblies to the app’s bin folder

Copy the following assemblies from the WebMatrix install location to your application’s bin directory.

Microsoft.Web.dll
Microsoft.Web.Administration.dll

By default, WebMatrix gets installed in “%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft WebMatrix” or “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft WebMatrix”, depending on your machine architecture.

Workaround 2: GAC the required assemblies

Installing the above assemblies in the GAC will work as well, but requires you to be an administrator. From an administrator prompt, switch to the WebMatrix install location. Then run the following commands:

gacutil /i Microsoft.Web.Administration.dll

gacutil /i Microsoft.Web.dll

One of the above workarounds will hopefully resolve the issue. If not, please let us know and we’ll be happy to investigate.

Introducing IIS Developer Express

vaidy_gopalakrishnan — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:13:40 GMT

Today, we announced the beta version of WebMatrix, which includes a developer-focused version of IIS called IIS Developer Express. You can learn and download WebMatrix using the following links:

http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/06/introducing-webmatrix.aspx

In this first blog post, I’d like to help you understand IIS Developer Express better and point you to some existing resources. We’ll use the coming days to drill into various aspects of the product.

First, a bit about myself

I am a program manager with IIS and joined the team a short (but intense and exciting) 5 months ago. Have been with MS since Dec 2007, prior to which I spent 10+ years as a developer and lead in the San Francisco bay area. My last stop was with Intuit’s desktop payroll product team in Mountain View, CA. Back at HP, I was part of a group that built an embedded web server for the imaging and printing platform. I have been fascinated with the Web ever since and am relishing my role with IIS. I work on IIS Developer Express as well as other portions of the core IIS server.

Back to IIS Developer Express

The goal of WebMatrix (and IIS Developer Express) is make Web development a lot simpler and productive on the Windows platform. WebMatrix includes a few other components to deliver this promise (more information in the links above).

You can get a good overview of IIS Developer Express from Scottgu’s blog from last week. Note that Scott uses the unofficial name of the product (IIS Express). Also, please note that not all of the features Scott discusses in his blog posting and responses are implemented in Beta. In particular, the Beta version isn’t officially integrated with Visual Studio (this support will be added to VS10 later on), can’t be redistributed and doesn’t support all IIS7.x modules.

Here are some additional links to look at.

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/868/iis-developer-express-overview/

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/901/iis-developer-express-faq/

The first link will give you a 50-foot overview of IIS Developer Express and explain its relationship to IIS7.x. The second one is intended to help you better understand what is in the Beta release.

Check out WebMatrix and IIS Developer Express, and let us know if you have any questions.