Drew's IIS Blog

The IIS team today released the technical preview of a new web deployment tool that addresses many of the requests I've heard from developers for making the deployment of web applications easier on the Windows platform. The new tool allows for synchronization of applications between IIS6 and IIS7 web servers, migration of applications from IIS6 to IIS7 and analysis and troubleshooting of applications during deployment/migration.

If you are in the U.S. and interested in hearing more about what's new for developers in IIS7, the MSDN Presenters will be traveling the states and presenting in a theater near you. That's right a movie theater. The thing I always love about attending the MSDN events is the free popcorn from the movie theater. :)

Elizabeth Smith wrote up a great explanation of FastCGI and the reasons it makes Windows a better host for PHP applications. In the opening, she writes:

Today at TechEd IT Forum in Barcelona, Bob Kelly announced the official release of the FastCGI Extension for IIS 6.0. This means customers now have reliable, high-performance hosting for PHP and other CGI-based applications on production Windows servers with full support from Microsoft.

You may have heard about the new interoperability improvements for PHP and Microsoft technologies that Bill Staples blogged about. A few weeks ago, I spoke at PHP|Works in Atlanta and showed off a project I've been working on to demonstrate how PHP applications can take advantage of the new features of Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7).

Scott Hanselman produced an awesome screencast on configuring IIS7 and PHP with FastCGI. He also does some live performance testing of the Qdig application using CGI, FastCGI and the new kernel-mode caching in IIS7.

While at the Heartland Developers Conference, Jeff Julian and John Alexander interviewed me about the new features in IIS 7.0. In fact, they interviewed quiet a few people on a variety of topics while at the conference - lots of great content. You can follow along on Jeff's blog.

Today I spoke at the Heartland Developers Conference on why ASP.NET developers should care about Windows Server 2008. If you were at the session or just want to know more about what's in store for you as an ASP.NET developer, check out the following resources.