IIS Technical Evangelist

Hello, my name is Drew Robbins. I just started as the IIS Technical Evangelist focused on developers who build web applications that use and extend our platform.

On this blog, I'll be covering topics like the following:

  • Taking Advantage of IIS7 as an ASP.NET Developer
  • Using technologies like PHP, ColdFusion, Rails, Python with IIS7 and Windows 2008
  • Creating Managed Extensions to IIS7
  • Hosting Web Services in IIS7
  • Programming Windows Media Services
  • Highlighting People/Companies Creating Great Apps for IIS7

To give you a little background, I've been developing web applications since sometime in college. I started out writing applications in PERL before I was introduced to some of the popular frameworks at the time. I had a lot of fun coding in various environments such as Cold Fusion, PHP and ASP. I've spent the last 5-6 years focused primarily on ASP.NET, while still keeping an active interest in other frameworks.

I value using the best tool for the job, while not reinventing the wheel every time new technology arrives. That's how I arrived at this role. IIS is an exciting technology, because it is not only a great web server, but it enables you to combine the technologies that make sense for your organization or project. With IIS7, I can use both .NET and PHP together. I can even pull in tools like BlueDragon and integrate CFML.

I'm not a big proponent of mixing a lot technologies into a single project, but I do get excited when you can download a great PHP blog application like Wordpress and integrate it into your existing ASP.NET site using the built-in membership providers (Mike recently did just that). That saves a lot of time so you can concentrate on creating new functionality.

Feel free to contact me via this blog or email. My alias is drobbins at Microsoft.

4 Comments

  • Drew, silly question, but anyway -- how do you install IIS6 or better yet IIS7 on a machine? I have an XP box that I'd like to make into a server, but it still has IIS5. Is XP even upgradeable to 6?

    Thanks.

  • Hi Eugene. IIS ships with the operating system, so IIS 5.1 is the only version of IIS that is available with XP (unless you get the 64bit addition of XP which was released later and has IIS 6.0). IIS 6.0 also ships with Windows 2003, and IIS 7.0 ships with Windows Vista, and later this year with Windows 2008 Server. Hope this helps -

  • It does. That's what I thought. Thanks!

  • Congratulations on the move!

    Paul

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