Archives
-
Speed up WordPress on IIS 7.0
The performance of WordPress may be sufficient for an average blog that gets a few page hits per minute. However, if your blog post suddenly shows up on digg.com or any other social networking site, it may become challenging for server to handle such huge spike in traffic. A few options exist to help server to cope with flood of requests:
-
Enable custom errors in WordPress on IIS 7.0
Recently, I found out that my WordPress powered blog did not correctly handle 404 - File Not Found errors. When a request was made to a non-existent page, then instead of getting nice WordPress based error page, visitors used to get a generic IIS 7.0 404 error page. Somehow, I have missed that part of the configuration when I set up WordPress initially. The fix for that turned out to be very simple, but since it seems to be a very common configuration task when hosting WordPress on IIS 7.0, I decided to explain the necessary configuration steps.
-
URL Rewrite Module - Release to Web
Today IIS team has made the URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 Release To Web (RTW) available for download. This is a final, production-ready release that is officially supported by Microsoft.
-
Major revision of FastCGI/PHP article on IIS.NET
Since the time we have published the article about installing FastCGI and PHP on IIS 7.0 it has become one of the most popular articles on http://learn.iis.net. Also it has received a lot of comments from site visitors. Today, we are publishing the updated version of this article that contains more up-to-date information and addresses most of the feedback from community. Here is what this article includes now:
-
Debug and troubleshoot rewrite rules easily
One of the very cool features of URL Rewrite Module is its integration with IIS Failed Request Tracing. When you have rewrite rules that do not work the way you expect them to work - enable Failed Request Tracing and you will get the entire history of how rewrite rules were applied on the requested URL. I use Failed Request Tracing all the time and it has proven to be a great help when debugging and troubleshooting rewrite rules.
-
ASP.NET postbacks and URL rewriting
ASP.NET Web Forms extensively use postback mechanism in order to maintain the state of the server-side controls on the web page. This makes it somewhat tricky to perform URL rewriting for ASP.NET pages. When a server side form control is added to the web page, ASP.NET will render the response with HTML <form> tag that contains an action attribute pointing back to the page where the form control is. This means that if URL rewriting was used for that page, the action attribute will point back to the rewritten URL, not to the URL that was requested from the browser. This will cause the browser to show rewritten URL any time a postback occurs.
-
Wildcard script mapping and IIS 7 integrated pipeline
The big benefit of IIS 7 integrated request processing pipeline is the fact that all the nice and useful ASP.NET features can be used for any type of content on your web site; not just for ASP.NET-specific content. For example, ASP.NET SQL-based membership can be used to protect static files and folders. Also, ASP.NET extensibility API’s, such as IHttpHandler and IHttpModule can be used to add custom modules and handlers that would be executed even for non-ASP.NET content.
-
Video walkthrough for URL Rewrite Module
Last week I have recorded a video screencast that shows how to use URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 to perform some common URL manipulations tasks.
-
URL Rewrite Module - Go Live release
Today IIS team has made the Go Live release of URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 available for download. This release contains significant functionality and performance improvements and it is believed to have a quality level suitable for production deployments.
-
ASP.NET Routing, Request Filtering, URL Rewriting
Today I have published two new articles on http://learn.iis.net. The articles are intended to explain the differences between various URL manipulation technologies available in IIS 7.0 and to provide help with choosing of the technology best suited for a particular usage scenario.
-
Update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI module
IIS team has recently released an update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI module that fixes compatibility problems with several popular PHP applications. In particular, the update changes the behavior of FastCGI module in the following ways:
-
Ruby on Rails in IIS 7.0 with URL Rewriter
If you ever tried to set up Ruby on Rails (RoR) on IIS 7.0 with FastCGI you have probably noticed that the process is not very straightforward. There are a few workarounds that need to be applied in order for RoR to function correctly. In particular, handling of static files in your web application can be tricky on IIS 7.0. The problem is that RoR uses clean URL’s that look similar to this: http://mysite.com/home/about. In order for RoR to be invoked for this kind of URL’s it is necessary to create a “catch all” handler mapping in IIS (that is a handler mapping with path attribute set to “*“). When you create such a handler mapping it will cause requests for static files to be routed to RoR, which will obviously fail to handle them.
-
Scripting URL rewrite module configuration
URL rewrite module fully utilizes extensibility of IIS 7.0 configuration system. The rewrite rules are stored in applicationHost.config and web.config files in XML format. This provides a huge benefit of being able to use rich set of IIS 7.0 management tools and API’s for managing and scripting URL rewriter configuration.
-
IIS.NET uses URL rewrite module
IIS.NET team has been very proactive in helping us out with testing of URL rewrite module. In fact, they even agreed to deploy the latest build of the module on the production server that hosts http://www.iis.net. This kind of real-life deployments really helps us validate the features and functionality of the module. And being able to do this validation so early in release cycle gives us a good opportunity to adjust the feature set, re-consider some of the design decisions, or just find some very good bugs.
-
Per-site PHP configuration with IIS FastCGI
There have been a few questions on IIS.NET PHP forum regarding enabling per-site PHP configuration. This is a common requirement when running PHP applications in shared hosting environment, because each PHP application may require a different set of PHP settings. Shared hosting providers often want to provide their customers with an option of controlling PHP configuration if necessary.
-
Introduction
My name is Ruslan Yakushev. I am a program manager on IIS team, working on some of the very interesting projects that are being developed in the team right now. I have joined the team about a year ago, and was thinking about starting a blog for a while now. The primary work responsibilities kept me busy, so I have been postponing blog idea for a while. Every time I needed to make an announcement or an update on IIS community site, I asked some of my colleagues on the team to blog my content. Finally, I figured that I should probably start my own blog, so I could have all the freedom of publishing my own content any time I want.