Carlos Aguilar's Blog

AHADMIN is the COM API that IIS 7.0 uses for reading and writing its configuration system. One of the not so well known features is that you can also use the same API to manage Administration.config by calling the SetMetadata method and specifying that you will be targeting Administration.config. What this ends up doing is using an IAppHostPathMapper built-in mapper that will re-map the files so that you can manage Administration.config easily.

Every now and then after leaving my computer running for several weeks I would get a weird error message when trying to launch Excel saying something like:

In the past few days I've been reading a bit about SEO and trying to understand more about what makes a Web Site be SEO (Search-Engine-Optimized) and what are some of the typical headaches when trying to achieve that as well as how we can implement them in IIS.

In IIS 7.0 the configuration system has a nice feature that lets you extend it using what we sometimes refer as dynamic properties. This properties rather than being hard-coded in XML in some .config file they are implemented by COM interface that whenever a tool queries its value, the configuration system will create an instance of such a COM object and will query its value (through the IAppHostPropertyExtension interface). In our configuration system we used this capability to surface some runtime features such as the state of an Application Pool. We also used this feature to expose the SSL Certificate configured in a site binding. Furthermore, this extensibility also allows us to expose methods that provide functionality in a very similar way (through the IAppHostMethodExtension interface). We used this capability to provide functionality such as recycling an Application Pool, restarting a Site, or adding a certificate to a binding.

Yesterday I was having a conversation with Anil Ruia who happens to be the ARR (Application Request Routing) developer and based on customer feedback we discussed the idea of using ARR in the context of Remote Management in IIS which solves a question that several people asked me before and thought it would be fun to try it out.

For the past month its been pretty quiet in my blog since I have been a little bit busy with the best thing that has happened in my life, my first baby Sofia was borne and today we are celebrating her first month. Days have been incredibly full of love, fun and joy (but certainly not of sleep). Now nights are much better, sleeping for a few hours now and back at work with lots of enthusiasm for the upcoming work in IIS and the incredibly exiting times at the team. So now by blog should show a bit more activity moving forward.

One of the things I try to regularly do is to read blogs that are not necessarily pro-Microsoft and one of my favorite ones is Miguel de Icaza's blog. The other day I was reading one blog post that caught my attention about a blog he says he is a "fan of" named "Linux Hater's blog". So of course I decided to give that a read and went and started reading the entries in there, and I just could not stop laughing and laughing, and before I noticed I had been reading for almost an hour. I do have to warn though, the vocabulary used is their entries is ...um... lets say fluid?.

DiscountASP.net published a very nice video that shows how you can enable IIS Manager and Database Manager and other modules for their customers.