BillS IIS Blog

DiscountASP.NET - a great low-cost Windows/IIS7 hosting provider - has agreed to offer the current Admin Pack and Database Manager extensions for "IIS Manager" free to their customers.  I connected up to their test server from my home PC, via my cable modem connection, and was amazed at the performance - it is really very cool to manage a remote SQL Server, from inside IIS Manager, with a secure, delegated connection. 

Interested in knowing what kind of performance gains you can expect from IIS7?  The Microsoft.com operations folks have put together a great summary of their real-world performance data.  The short story is: IIS7 servers handle 31% more requests per second than their IIS6 peers, at a slightly higher CPU rate.  For all the gory details, read the Microsoft.com blog!

ASP.NET 2.0 (3.0 and 3.5) are easy to install with Windows Vista and Windows 2008 - just install the ASP.NET component located under IIS->Word Wide Web Services->Application Development Features.  You can find this set of components in Windows 2008 by clicking Start, and click Server Manager.  Expand the left-hand treeview in Server Manager and click Manage Roles, and then Web Server (IIS).  In the right-hand pane look for an option that says Add Role Services.  If you're on Windows Vista, click Start, click Control Panel, click Programs, and then Windows Features.  Look for the following tree of features under Internet Information Services (IIS):

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. 

I hear this question a lot in the http://forums.iis.net/, and thanks to Carlos and team's rocking Configuration Editor, figuring this out on your own is a breeze.  Here is how you can generate code for ANY IIS7 configuration change, without writing a line yourself.

One of the most hotly requested features for IIS is now available!  Yesterday we shipped the first technical preview of a new URLrewrite module for IIS7.  It is free for all IIS7 users and available for download x86 and x64.  Thomas and Carlos have blogged about many of the details already, so be sure and check their posts out.  Ruslan also posted a bunch of really great walkthroughs on IIS7, which you can check out here, including:

You may have seen recent reports that have surfaced stating that web sites running on Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 have been compromised. These reports allude to a possible vulnerability in IIS or issues related to Security Advisory 951306 which was released last week.

One of the things I'm most excited about Windows Server 2008 is the new Web-focused version of Windows called Windows Web Server 2008.  It is a special, low-priced version of Windows (only $469 retail, half the price of Standard edition and available anywhere Windows Server is sold) that is focused exclusively on Internet-based Web serving.