IIS at Tech∙Ed: IT Forum in Barcelona: Day 1

Today was the first official day of the 2006 Microsoft Tech∙Ed: IT Forum in Barcelona. I caught Bob Muglia's opening keynote address, and there were some great demos: Vista, Office 2007, SharePoint 2007, etc., but the best demo from an IIS perspective was when they managed a web farm of IIS 7 servers using PowerShell. They also discussed the new FastCGI technology in IIS and how it can be used for faster PHP or other CGI technologies.

Sergei Anatov and I were joined at the IIS "Ask The Experts" booth today by Ivan Gonzalez Vilaboa, who is an IIS MVP from spain. (Thanks, Ivan!)

Based on the customers that visited our booth, here are the pressing questions that seemed to be on most everyone's mind regarding the future of IIS:

• Clustering/Load Balancing/Replication - People want to know what IIS is going to do about these technologies. I discussed replication in Vista/Longhorn and using distributed configuration files with IIS 7, but it was still the #1 subject for customers.
• IIS and PHP - Is IIS going to have a PHP engine built-in? There was a bit of confusion on the information that was presented in the keynote address, because several people got the impression that IIS was going to ship with a PHP script engine. I had the misfortune of communicating that this is not the case, and showed people the annoucement on www.iis.net that discusses the technical preview of FastCGI.

That's all for today. See you tomorrow!