IIS7 Articles: Wow, am I glad that is over...

Introduction

So, I am not one that likes to draw attention to what items I am responsible for in my day-to-day job here at Microsoft.  My career thus far has taken me all over the place and I am finding that more and more each day I learn (and get more responsibility -darn it!)

I have adopted through since accidently and indirectly volunteering late last year the role of project manager & lead on the IIS.NET site launch plan.  Little did I know that it would lead to me owning it long term...

You ever been in class sometime and the class is asked a question, and you feel a rush (or sensation) to raise your hand halfway through the question - committed, right?  Let's just say that this kinda happen to me...I will, though, go on record as saying that I have learned a ton and this makes it exciting.  Regrets, nah not at all...

Articles & IIS.NET

We offered a experience at launch that we call "articles."  The articles offer an easy-to-read online document, while also maintaing a nice, printer friendly experience offline.

The one thing that is for certain is that there were a lot of things that we *didn't* think about prior to launching these cool articles.  Yeah, I admit it...I am guilty of not "foreseeing" the future of the article experience from an administration perspective.

That lack of planning on my part, well, led to some long hours of deployment time during the rollout of many updated articles on IIS.NET at the release of RC1.  Oh, in case you didn't know it - that was this past weekend!

Guess who was stuck with this task...3 guesses, the first two don't count ;-)

Why I took the time to Write this blog?

There is a simple reason - I hope you take the time to read the articles so that you can validate this experience is what you want and like.  You can even rate the articles you like, or dislike, and help us make sure that we learn from you what you like and don't.  If you take the time to read the articles, you get two valuable opportunities:

1)  Learn IIS7

2)  Provide real-time feedback to the author

There are many of you who don't know how to discover articles written on IIS7, and I am going to share the few ways you can access them. 

First:

We will always store any content available for IIS in the IIS.NET TechCENTER (which we will soon be updating the Search to a much more robust, powerful engine).  This is a uber-portal of any and all things that breathe IIS.  If Microsoft write its, you should find it ... ok, we are working to get there and it takes time so no spam that it doesn't find this article or that article.  (Do though send info to me if you don't see something as I will certainly add it). 

This includes articles written now and in the future.  We launched in May with 42+ articles and this number will soon grow very quickly - trust me!  To locate any article in the TechCENTER, you can always search but the easiest method is to filter by "Version" and Content Type "Article" and you will get them all.  Or Click Here!

Second:

You can also start with the IIS7 home page on IIS.NET and from there poke around based on your particular interest.  Such as, if you are a developer and interested in extensibility offerings from IIS7 then check out Core Server.

Third:

The easy way - click here as I am going to be so kind as to list them just for you!  For all you RSS readers out there, you are welcome in advance - <g>

Updated Articles for RC1 of Vista & IIS7

Per this IIS News article (which I am stealing as I wrote it), the following articles were updated per area for Windows Vista & IIS7 RC1

Core Server:

Administration:

Setup:

Troubleshooting:

As we continue to update articles, I will post back here just to let folks know.

Last Updated:  Can't I use this date?

You folks are smart people, just waiting to remind me of some cool technology that I failed to point out.  So, you ask:

"Have you lost your mind, Chris?  Why can't I use that handy-dandy "Last Updated" information listed for each article to know which ones have been updated?"

Oh, my smart young child.  You have so much promise and so much upside that I only wish you could have truely caught me in a pickle here.  However, you didn't - HA! 

See, we didn't just update the content in the articles but also fixed some bugs currently in our article system from launch (yes, surprising that our code isn't always perfect!) and these code changes caused us to touch every article whether updated or not.  Thus, all articles will have the time-stamp of Aug, 31 and isn't helpful! 

Good try though...

P.S.  The biggest bug fixed was the copy\paste problems in the article's code samples.  This was a problem because we were not catching the line breaks and hence your copies would really make you mad (at us probably!)  This is now fixed!

Summary

The article experience is our long-term approach to helping deliver you top-notch quality.  We will not, though, increase quantity of content but hurt the quality.  Thus, to date our article numbers are slightly lower than we want but we have a lot of great things in the pipeline that just begs that you stay on top now!  Don't fall behind, it could get ugly when we really start to turn the notch on and you are flooded. 

Enjoy, and drop me a line if you have suggestions, feedback, and don't forget to rate the articles...See ya in the forums!

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