IIS7 – ASP.NET on Windows Server 2008 Server Core R2

If you are a Server Core fan, and wished you could host ASP.NET websites in Server Core, then feel better, you wish had come true. Windows Server 2008 R2’s Server Core will have .NET Framework which means, ASP.NET too. This is a big news for all those wanted to deploy Server Core, but stopped because .NET Fx wasn’t there in the RTM release.

Windows Server 2008 R2’s blog details this:

“Added the following as optional features:

• Subset of .NET Framework 2.0
• Subset of .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5 – WCF, WF, and LINQ
• Windows PowerShell
• ASP.NET and additional IIS support – the only IIS feature not available in Server Core is the management GUI
• FSRM"

You can read this here too. You can also view the PDC announcement, and few more interesting things here. But, you have to live with appcmd for all IIS configuration changes as there is no GUI IIS manager would be available – after all Server Core fans don’t expect that to be available.

Happy Server Core deployments, wait for the R2 release!