Mai-lan's Blog
Web and media platform, etc.
-
Introducing the new IIS.NET web site
So...notice anything different today? :-) Thanks to the efforts of a whole team of people here in Redmond, Telligent, Goldman Design and ORCS Web, we have significantly overhauled our http://www.iis.net/ web site. As you can tell from the depth of the content and the participation of the product group in forums and blogs, fostering a strong and vibrant technical community is a huge deal for us. We care about you in particular, and how you learn, use, and extend IIS in all the ways that you do. To help with that process, we've rolled out some infrastructure and tools across http://www.iis.net/ that helps us get information out to you and for you to get information back to us.
-
IIS Migration and Synchronization tool, Web Deploy (Technical Preview 1)
We recently released IIS7's Web Deploy, which gives you the ability to migrate and synchronize IIS6 and IIS7 applications(download the x86 bits here and the x64 bits here).
-
TechNet Radio Broadcasts for "Managing PHP on Windows" and "Deploying and Managing a Customized Web Server"
Right before the holidays, we did some radio broadcasts on our team targeting the IT Professional and focusing on specific topics of interest in IIS7.
-
Integrated Pipeline and Hostable Web Core: Two good things to know if you develop on top of IIS...
IIS7 is a big release for developers. For example, we've changed our extensibility model in this version to make it easier for customers and vendors to build web applications and extend the Web server. I think two of the most interesting innovations in this release are the integrated pipeline and hostable Web core. Mike Volodorsky wrote a great article on one of the reasons why the integrated pipeline is so cool in this month's MSDN magazine. Check it out if you can at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/08/01/PHPandIIS7/default.aspx. Hostable Web core (HWC) is a feature that we haven't talked enough about but will start adding more information to iis.net (stay tuned). HWC opens up a lot of interesting scenarios if you are looking to build solutions or tools that hosts IIS, like a control panel. Kanwal did an excellent job of introducing Hostable Web core to developers in this blog: http://blogs.iis.net/ksingla/archive/2007/12/20/ins-amp-outs-of-hostable-web-core.aspx.
-
New worker process performance counters in IIS7
In IIS7 RC0, one of the neat new features we added were two performance counters that give you a window into what’s happening on a per worker processes and the application level at runtime. This is useful because it lets you have a finer-grained monitoring view on servers that are running a large load. You can check out the overall health of specific processes and apps on a well-loaded server with these two new counters, which let you monitor and track over time per worker process data, like when/how requests are queuing or if the output cache truly is working. All of our worker process counter instances are named <pid>_<apppool_name>. If you wanted to search in perfmon for a counter, you could use the *_AppPoolName to get all WP instances running that app pool.
-
Automating IIS from the Command-Line/Scripting Webcast
I gave a presentation recently on automating IIS from the command-line (you can check it out at: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032352182&role=attend&pw=D80FDE8D). I focused on how to manage IIS using PowerShell, WMI, and AppCmd. I talked a lot about Server Core as well, and the management options for IIS with Server Core.
-
Health model and KB round-ups
I have troubleshooting on the mind this week since we just released the IIS7 health model (you can check it out at http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/b19873a2-9f72-40c8-b73d-89f39cda62781033.mspx?mfr=true). When we talk about diagnostics, we talk a lot about the new diagnostic features like FREB in IIS7 -- Mike has blogged about these in depth at http://blogs.iis.net/mvolo/archive/2007/07/26/troubleshoot-iis7-errors-like-a-pro.aspx. What's neat about the health model is it provides information about every error message that you will encounter in IIS. Take, for example, error code 2269: http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/b19873a2-9f72-40c8-b73d-89f39cda62781033.mspx?mfr=true. It gives you specific steps to fix and verify the fix for error message "The worker process for app pool '%1', PID='%2', failed to initialize the http.sys communication when asked to start processing http requests and therefore will be considered ill by W3SVC and terminated. The data field contains the error number." Really useful information for free, phone-less troubleshooting. The health model might not have the final solution to every problem, but it is a great first step for troubleshooting any error.
-
Windows Server 2008 RC1 available for download!
Windows Server 2008 RC1 is available for download! We are feature and quality complete with this release. In this build, we address feedback that we have gotten from customers in beta and our RC0 release. There is nothing quite like deploying IIS7 in a diverse set of production environments worldwide, ranging from huge enterprises and hosters to smaller business environments, to shake out those last issues that need fixing. You can download Windows Server 2008 RC1 at: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/audsel.mspx
-
If you posted a comment on some of my blog posts recently...
I just realized that I had a bunch of comments stacked up in an unapproved queue. Sorry! I had some spam issues with the blog and switched to moderated comments. I've gone through and pushed the comments through now, and will be answering them. I really do want to hear from you so I will go huddle with Pete, who is our IIS.NET guru and figure out how I can have a spamless blog that lets real comments come through. Sorry for the delay and keep sending the comments and questions my way.
-
FastCGI Extension for IIS6 – GoLive to RTM release upgrade
As it has been already mentioned in download instructions for FastCGI Extension RTM for IIS 6, we do not support in-place upgrade of FastCGI Extension from pre-RTM builds to RTM build. If you have been running pre-RTM build (such as GoLive release or Intermediate release), you will need to uninstall it first and then install FastCGI RTM. This post describes some situations to watch out for during upgrade process.