Vishal Sood : IIS News Item

IIS Advanced Logging Beta is now Live

vsood — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:29:00 GMT

We proudly announce the Beta of IIS Advanced Logging. With Advanced Logging you will be able to capture rich details in your logs and process them in real-time. These capabilities make this feature really compelling by helping you monetize your content with better analytics and improve service with rich QOS information.

IIS Advanced Logging includes the following features:

Client-side logging. Advanced Logging builds capabilities into IIS to accept client-side consumption metrics. This provides relevant and important user engagement metrics that your customers will love.
Centralized logging. Advanced Logging provides capabilities to set up a central log farm that collects and logs client-side metrics. This reduces the effort required to collect distributed logs, and consolidated log collection results in more efficient post-processing. I wanted to clarify that this is not for all logging. Note: This is for client-side logging.
Multiple Logs per request. Advanced Logging provides capabilities to filter information relevant to specific purposes by creating multiple logs per request, with each log containing data relevant to the log's purpose. For example, Quality of Service (QoS) data in one log and Analytics data in another. All the post-processing required to distill the information using today's solutions is no longer needed.
Real-time logging. Advanced Logging can extend the platform to support real-time analytics, helping you to provide real-time reports to customers or work with partners to do the same.
Rich/Flexible logging. Advanced Logging does not assume what is important to you. Instead, it provides enough control to specify what fields are important to you, add additional fields with ease, and provide policies around log rollover and request filtering. These capabilities do not exist today. Now you can log any of the HTTP request/response headers, IIS server variables, and client-side fields with simple configuration through the management console.
Application Logging. Making use of the IIS configuration system, Advanced Logging provides capabilities to generate separate logs for sites, applications and so on.
Module Specific Log fields. If you are developing modules for IIS, you can specify custom fields that can be collected in logs.

You can learn more about the feature by reading the walkthroughs:

Getting started with Advanced Logging
Real-Time Logging
Client Logging
Learn more about the feature on - http://www.iis.net/extensions/AdvancedLogging

We eagerly await your feedback and comments on the Advanced Logging Discussion Forum.

Web Playlists Release Candidate (RC) Released

vsood — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:08:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce that the Web Playlists Release Candidate (RC) release is ready for you to download and deploy.

This release supports upgrade from the previous Go Live release. (Note: It is recommended that if you have a release earlier than Go Live, you should uninstall the old build and then use the downloads below to do a fresh installation.)

You can get the RC downloads here:

32 bit - Download
64 bit - Download
SDK - Download

Here is a list of walkthroughs published that will help you get going with this release:

Please refer to the online readme for more details.

For general information on how Web Playlists work, please see this post.

For us, this release was primarily about two things:

A step towards embracing open standards - The playlist format now is SMIL-based and additionally you can output the playlist in any XML/text format. The walkthrough talks more about this feature and illustrates and example where you can use ATOM as an output format.
Even more thorough testing - This is incremental release over our earlier Go Live release and our test team has tested it even more than previous release

The three key new features in Web Playlists RC release are:

Ability to customize output format - This release enables you to change the response to a Web Playlists request to a format understood by your app. This feature works by taking and XSL style-sheet from you and transforming the ASX response according to it. The walkthrough talks about this in more details.
Allow Client-side Caching - Earlier releases of Web Playlists disabled the client-side caching using http headers. We got customer requests suggesting that although this is a great security feature, they would like to control this so in this release we allow you just that. You can control, whether clients can cache content or not.
SMIL-based playlist format - Earlier releases used a custom XML. With this release, we are moving a step closer to open standards. We are now using a SMIL-based format. While, Web Playlists does not support the entire SMIL syntax, the sub-set supported is fully SMIL compliant. For those upgrading from previous builds, there is a tool available here to convert old isx files.

We would like to hear what you feel about this release and would love to hear how you are using it.

Got more questions or need support?: Please use media forum.

Web Playlists Go Live release is now ready for downloads

vsood — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:33:00 GMT

I am really excited to announce that Web Playlists Go Live was just released to public. Here are the download links for the same:

Here is a list of walkthroughs published on the all new learn.iis.net:

Here is more about this release: http://www.iis.net/Downloads/files/playlist/WebPlaylists_Readme_GoLive.htm.

For general information on how Web Playlists work, please see this post.

Web Playlists Go Live release includes these key features:

Support for all digital media files types. Any digital media file type that can be downloaded from a Web server can be added to a Web playlist by using this feature.
Nested Web playlist media entries. Web playlist files (.isx) can be added as media entries to the Web playlists that you create, up to five levels deep. For more information about how nested playlists work in this feature, see Creating a Simple Playlist.
Remote HTTPd media entries. Content locations that begin with the httpd:// URL prefix can be added as media entries to the Web playlists that you create, allowing you to reference a remote Web server page that returns a custom URL or path for the media item to be played.
Session settings. Allows you to specify the maximum number of clients that can connect to the playlist and the amount of content that must be watched before skip functionality is enabled on the client.
Session provider settings. Allows you to add ASP.NET session persistence and provides an additional level of control for the content on a Web server by configuring multiple options that specify how long the content referenced by a playlist is available to users.
Impersonation settings. Allows for media items that are protected by user credentials to be added to playlists.
ASX import. Allows for quick conversion of client-side playlists (files with .asx file name extensions) for files stored on the Web server to Web playlists.
Custom providers. A COM interface is included that you can use to write native and .NET-based custom providers that extend the default behavior of Web Playlists. For more information, see the Extending Web Playlists through custom providers.

Got more questions or need support?: Please use media forum.

IIS 7 Media Pack Web Playlists Customer Technology Preview 2 (CTP2) is Live

vsood — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:28:00 GMT

I am really happy to announce that Web Playlists CTP2 is now released. Web Playlists CTP2 builds on top of CTP1 release that we had in February. It has the following additional features Extensibility through custom providers – We are releasing interfaces...(read more)

Bit Rate Throttling is now released

vsood — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:27:00 GMT

Bit Rate Throttling is now out of Beta. We are really pleased to announced the release of IIS Media Pack Bit Rate Throttling Download Links 32 bit - http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1640 64 bit - http://www.iis.net/downloads...(read more)

Windows Media Services 2008 RC1 for Windows Server 2008 RC1 is now live

vsood — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:09:00 GMT

I am happy to announce that Windows Media Services (WMS) 2008 RC1 is now live. This version of WMS will install only on Windows Server 2008 RC1 version. In addition to Cache Proxy Plug-in and Sever Core installation option, Windows Media Services RC1 is supported on English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish languages for Windows Server 2008 RC1.

Windows Media Services 2008 lowers the TCO with advanced features like Cache /Proxy now available on Standard / Web SKUs. Please refer to the updated feature support table here

Here are some other useful resources:

If you have any feedback/questions, please let us known on the newsgroups or comment on this post

Windows Media Services 2008 RC0 is now live

vsood — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:17:00 GMT

I am happy to announce that Windows Media Services (WMS) 2008 RC0 is now live. This version of WMS will install only on Windows Server 2008 RC0 version. Windows Media Services for Windows Server 2008 boasts of a Cache Proxy Plug-in and support for the Server Core installation option.

In addition WMS now supports some advanced features on Standard / Web SKUs. Please refer to the updated feature support table here

Here are some other useful resources:

If you have any feedback/questions, please let us known on the newsgroups.