Carlos Aguilar's Blog

The other day somebody ask me if there was a way to limit the amount of work that Site Analysis in IIS SEO Toolkit would cause to the server. This is interesting for a couple of reasons,

In the URL Rewrite forum somebody posted the question "are redirects bad for search engine optimization?". The answer is: not necessarily, Redirects are an important tool for Web sites and if used in the right context they actually are a required tool. But first a bit of background.

Today somebody was running the IIS SEO Toolkit and using the Site Analysis feature flagged a lot of violations about "The page contains multiple canonical formats.". The reason apparently is that he uses Query String parameters to pass contextual information or other information between pages. This of course yield the question: Does that mean in general query strings are bad news SEO wise?

One easy way to enhance the experience of users visiting your Web site by increasing the perceived performance of navigating in your site is to reduce the number of HTTP requests that are required to display a page. There are several techniques for achieving this, such as merging scripts into a single file, merging images into a big image, etc, but by far the simplest one of all is making sure that you cache as much as you can in the client. This will not only increase the rendering time but will also reduce load in your server and will reduce your bandwidth consumption.

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.

While using IIS Manager, did you ever wondered what configuration section is this UI changing? Is there a way I could automate this using scripts or command line?

During this PDC I attended Ian's presentation about WPF and Silverlight where he demonstrated the high degree of compatibility that can be achieved between a WPF desktop application and a Silverlight application. One of the differences that he demonstrated was when your application consumed Web Services since Silverlight applications execute in a sandboxed environment they are not allowed to call random Web Services or issue HTTP requests to servers that are not the originating server, or a server that exposes a cross-domain manifest stating that it is allowed to be called by clients from that domain.

IIS 7 provides a rich extensibility model, whether extending the server or the user interface, one critical thing is provide a simple setup application that can install all the required files, add any registration information required, and modify the server settings as required by the extension.
Visual Studio 2008 provides a set of project types called Setup and Deployment projects specifically for this kind of applications. The output generated for these projects is an MSI that can perform several actions for you, including copying files, adding files to the GAC, adding registry keys, and many more.
In this document we will create a setup project to install a hypothetical runtime Server Module that also includes a User Interface extension for IIS Manager.
Our setup will basically perform the following actions:
•    Copy the required files, including three DLL’s and an html page.
•    Add a couple of registry keys.
•    Add the managed assemblies to the GAC
•    Modify applicationHost.config to register a new module
•    Modify administration.config to register a new UI extensibility for InetMgr
•    Create a new sample application that exposes the html pages
•    Finally, we will remove the changes from both configuration files during uninstall