IIS 7.0 Manager for Windows XP, 2003 and Vista SP1

Last Wednesday we released the IIS Manager 7.0 client for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista SP1.
This is basically the IIS 7.0 Manager GUI that provides the ability to connect remotely to a Windows Server 2008 running the Web Management Service (WMSVC) to manage IIS 7.0 remotely.

There are several key differences in this version of IIS Manager and its remote infrastructure:

1) It allows for the first time users without administrative privileges to connect and manage their web sites and applications remotely

2) It runs over SSL, no more DCOM, which makes this a firewall friendly feature easy to setup.

3) Runs as a smart client, which means if a new feature is installed on the server it will automatically download the updated versions to the client machines.

You can download it from:

IIS.NET Web Site
x86:
http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&i=1626&g=6

x64:
http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&i=1633&g=6

Microsoft.com/Downloads
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=32c54c37-7530-4fc0-bd20-177a3e5330b7&displaylang=en

To learn more about remote management and how to install it:
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/159/configuring-remote-administration-and-feature-delegation-in-iis-7/

Now, to really show you what this is, I created a very simple demo that briefly shows the remote management capabilities over SSL. (Below there is a transcript in case my accent makes it difficult to understand my english :))

Transcript:

The purpose of this demonstration is to show you how easy it is to manage IIS 7.0 running in Windows Server 2008, from any machine that has Windows XP or Windows 2003 or Windows Vista by downloading the IIS Manager 7.0 that runs on all of those platforms.

Now, today I am not going to focus on the details of how to configure it and how to setup the server to support remote management, but mainly just focus on the client aspect.

On of the most interesting aspects of this remote management infrastructure is that it now uses an architecture that uses HTTPS to communicate to the server making this a nice firewall friendly remote management feature. Another key feature of this functionality is that it allows users without administrative privileges to connect and manage their Web Sites or their applications in a delegated way, where an administrator can restrict which options they can modify or not.

OK, so to show you this I have here a Windows Server 2008 installed with IIS 7.0, and as you would expect I can manage it locally quite easily using IIS Manager, whether its adding a Web Site or managing the configuration from both IIS or ASP.NET I can do it here.

This is all good, but now turns out I don’t want to connect locally but instead be able to remotely from my development machine connect to the server and still be able to do that and have the same experience as if I was locally logged on to the machine.

To show this, I have here a Virtual PC image running a clean install of Windows XP SP2, the only thing it has installed additionally is the .NET Framework 2.0 which is the only requirement for the installation of IIS Manager 7.

I have already downloaded the IIS Manager installer which takes only about 3MB of disk, that you can find at http://www. iis.net or http://Microsoft.com/downloads.

Installing it is really simple and fast, just double click the icon and click next…

Once installed I can now connect to any machine running Windows Server 2008 that has been configured to support remote management. To do that I just need to choose the option “Connect To Server/Site/Application” from the File Menu or the Start Page.

Today, I will not drill down on the multiple differences between these connections, so for now I will just show how you can connect and manage the entire server by using a Windows Administrator account.

Another interesting feature of the remote management platform is that if some new feature built on top of the UI Management extensibility API is installed on the server, when I connect again to the server, it will automatically prompt me if I want to get the new functionliaty and I can choose which features to install or not.

To summarize, the IIS Manager 7 for Windows XP SP2, 2003 SP1 and Vista SP1 is available now, it only depends on the .NET FX 2.0 and it will allow you to connect to a remote server to manage it and have the same rich experience as if you were locally but using its new SSL remoting architecture.