Provide a Better Web Site Experience with Faster Response Times Today, Microsoft announced the beta release of IIS Application Warm-Up – an extension for IIS 7.5 that enables IT Professionals to improve the responsiveness of their Web sites by loading the Web applications before the first request arrives. By proactively loading and initializing all the dependencies such as database connections, compilation of ASP.NET code, and loading of modules, IT Professionals can ensure their Web sites are responsive at all times even if their Web sites use a custom request pipeline or if the Application Pool is recycled. For more information or to download, please visit the IIS Application Warm-Up page. http://www.iis.net/extensions/ApplicationWarmUp

I get a kick out of people who think that ASP.net doesn't scale. (Considering that some of the biggest, baddest, websites in the world run it, and can run anything they want). Interesting post of PHP vs ASP.net performance test. Comments are a good read too.

Discovered the other day the labs from the Windows Server 2008 Hosting roadshow for IIS 7 were all made into Virtual Labs and posted online. Here's one of adding PHP, ASP and ASP.net applications that takes you through the steps to add add these lanugages and add a websites in each language. There are a couple of non-obvious steps that you should pay attention to. Virtual Lab Here's another that shows you can create 4000 websites in just a few seconds and how easy it is manage them in the IIS Manager. In fact if you just search for IIS 7 Virtual Labs you can find a bunch of good stuff on line.

I was looking around at Applied Innovations web hosting offerings (which hosts this site), and was interested to find their IIS 7 web hosting has some new additions the IIS 7 media pack, URL rewrite, and Database manager add ons. What I like about this is that it shows a progressive hosting company making services avaialable on IIS 7 that simply aren't to be had otherwise. In addition, you can manage your website with the IIS 7 Manager remotely instead of using a control panel or remote destkop, how cool is that! http://www.appliedi.net/blog/2009/04/28/applied-innovations-boosts-windows-server-2008-iis7-hosting/

The IIS team annouced a lot of new releases and tools for IIS 7. These have been coming out of the team steadily since IIS 7 was released. In the history of IIS there has never been so much activity coming out of the IIS team between major release cycles.
This is great stuff!
•Application Request Router (ARR) 2.0 beta, with disk cache and cache proxy support for edge configurations the IIS HTTP load balancer. ARR can be used as a complement to existing hardware load balancers, or as a standalone proxy.
•FTP 7.5 RTW, with extensibility support for developers who want to customize this IIS7 FTP publishing service.
•WebDav 7.5 RTW, with support for both shared and exclusive locks to prevent lost updates due to overwrites.
•Advanced Logging beta for monitoring and measuring media and Web browsing experiences, rich and flexible data collection, client-side logging and real-time logging capabilities.
•Administration Pack for IIS7 RTW, with IIS Manager support for management of FastCGI, Request Filtering, ASP.NET authorization and custom error settings, and HTTP request filtering, and Configuration Editor for easier config management.
•IIS Snap-in for Windows PowerShell RTW, for management of the IIS configuration system through Windows PowerShell, along with 60 cmdlets for common management tasks in Powershell.
•Web Deployment Tool RC, which is a platform for Web deployment of IIS servers and applications that run on servers. This extension provides a foundation for administrators who want to synchronize and migrate Web servers in a web farm. Developers use Web Deployment Tool to deploy applications to a server or integrate with the new Windows Web Application Gallery.
•Database Manager RC, providing Web database management support for local and remote databases from within IIS Manager.
•Media Services 3.0 beta, which introduces the world to live streaming on IIS with multiple extensions extensions, including Smooth Streaming and Advanced Logging. Our media extensions bring high quality media delivery to IIS customers as well as CDNs like Akamai.
and more...

Update to the IIS 7 version of FTP has been reelased. The bits are online at, http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/0/1/C013B8EE-9012-4B2F-B3FA-3FB6A93753AB/ftp7_x86_75.msi http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/0/0/4003F62F-8A21-4CB7-9414-FAA6345D167C/ftp7_x64_75.msi

SANs published a list of the top 25 reasons systems are hacked. Evidently, a consortium of people participate in this list including Microsoft. The list is a whose who of problems that continually plauge systems and range from improper coding, to improper permissions, to running processes in privledged accounts.

It is a solid list and I would recommend that you inspect it for anything you aren't already looking for:

http://www.sans.org/top25errors/#s4

Wanted to postback to this article by Wade on the IIS team.

He summarizes this issue really well - in particular that topics lose focus due to a the many posts and lack of the ability to see information chronologically sorted in searching.

http://blogs.iis.net/wadeh/archive/2008/12/18/how-iis-can-help-with-sql-injection.aspx

Keep in mind that as he points out early on, request filtering for SQL inhections is a band-aid. Your appliciations should be written so they do not allow passing of invalid or risky strings to the server.

Thanks!

-brett

 

 

Somehow I started revisiting Log Parser resources and links today and wanted to post a few things. If you don't know about Logparser and you manage an IIS server or set of servers (almost any type), then stop what you're doing and go to http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1287 , download and smile.

It slices , it dices, it reads multiple log file formats using a SQL like syntax and outputs into multiple formats. The guys at Microsoft.com swear by this jewel.  (PS read anything, ANYTHING written by Jeffery Johnson).  

Here's a visual wrapper that may be helpful. I haven't used it and it's still beta, so don't know how buggy it is or not. http://www.codeplex.com/visuallogparser 

Don't miss this as free online logparser resource that appears to be very active forum.

http://forums.iis.net/default.aspx?GroupID=51

And check this out: http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Parser-Toolkit-Gabriele-Giuseppini/dp/1932266526 by Gabriele Giuseppini, who wrote the first 3 version of the tool.

Hope the holidays are treating you well!

-brett

 

 

Here's an interesting blog post

http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2008/12/16/running-lamp-on-windows-server-2008-webcast-and-screencasts-now-available.aspx

discussing running most of the LAMP stack on Windows. Controversial! You bet. But if i told you two years ago that IIS would have FASTCGI that would have been met with disbelief as well.

 

-brett

 

IIS Admins. I am shamelssly pasting this anncoucment from the IIS team here. Very nice tool that leverages the new extensible IIS 7 pipeline, configuraiton system, and UI.

-brett

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Install the URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 RTW today!

Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 RTW (x86)

Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 RTW (x64)

Upgrade from Go Live release

If you already have Go Live release of URL Rewrite module installed then the installation package will upgrade it to RTW release. All rewrite rules in applicationHost.config and web.config files will be preserved. Note that system reboot may be necessary when upgrading from Go Live to RTW release.

ASP.NET update

The installer for URL Rewrite module includes an update for ASP.NET runtime. The update has fixes for bugs specific to URL rewriting. The update is applied only if the machine where URL Rewrite module is being installed has .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1 or higher. If required version of .NET Framework is installed after URL Rewrite module has been installed, then the ASP.NET update can be applied by re-running URL Rewrite module installer in repair mode.

Features

Here is the complete list of features supported by URL Rewrite module:

·         Rules-based URL rewriting engine. Rewrite rules are used to express the logic of what to compare/match the request URL with and what to do if comparison was successful. Web server and site administrators can use rewrite rule sets to define URL rewriting logic.

·         Regular expression pattern matching. Rewrite rules can use ECMA-262 compatible regular expression syntax for pattern matching.

·         Wildcard pattern matching. Rewrite rules can use Wildcard syntax for pattern matching

·         Global and distributed rewrite rules. Global rules are used to define server-wide URL rewriting logic. These rules are defined within applicationHost.config file and they cannot be overridden or disabled on any lower configuration levels. Distributed rules are used to define URL rewriting logic specific to a particular configuration scope. This type of rules can be defined on any configuration level by using web.config files.

·         Access to server variables and http headers. Server variables and HTTP headers provide additional information about current HTTP request. This information can be used to make rewriting decisions or to compose the output URL.

·         Various rule actions. Instead of rewriting a URL, a rule may perform other actions, such as issue an HTTP redirect, abort the request, or send a custom status code to HTTP client.

·         Support for IIS kernel mode and user mode output caching. IIS 7.0 output caching provides significant performance improvements for web applications. URL rewrite module is fully compatible with both types of output caching. This means that it is possible to safely cache responses for rewritten URL's and thus boost the performance of web applications that rely on URL rewriting.

• Rewrite maps. Rewrite map is an arbitrary collection of name-value pairs that can be used within rewrite rules to generate the substitution URL during rewriting. Rewrite maps are particularly useful when you have a large set of rewrite rules, all of which use static strings (i.e. there is no pattern matching used). In those cases, instead of defining a large set of simple rewrite rules, you can put all the mappings between input URL and substitution URL as keys and values into the rewrite map, and then have one rewrite rule which references this rewrite map to look up substitution URL based on the input URL.

·         Failed Request Tracing support. IIS7.0 Failed Request Tracing can be used to troubleshoot errors related to URL rewriting.

·         Extensible Rule templates. Rule template is an extension for URL rewrite module user interface, that simplifies creation of rewrite rules for a particular task.  The GoLive release of the module includes 3 built-in rule templates, plus it allows plugging in any number of custom templates.

·         UI for testing of regular expression and wildcard patterns. A GUI tool for testing rule patterns is included into the module's user interface. The tool can be used to quickly check how the regular expression or wildcard pattern works. Also, it can be used for troubleshooting and debugging of problems related to pattern matching.

·         UI for managing rewrite rules and rewrite maps. Rewrite rules and rewrite maps can be added, removed and edited by using "URL Rewrite Module" feature in IIS Manager.

• GUI tool for importing of mod_rewrite rules. URL rewrite module includes a GUI tool for converting rewrite rules from mod_rewrite format into an IIS format.

·         String manipulation functions. Built-in string manipulation functions can be used to convert URLs to lowercase and to perform URL encoding and decoding.

More information

The following resources related to Microsoft URL Rewrite Module are available on IIS.net:

Walkthroughs:

• Creating rewrite rules
• Using Failed Request Tracing to trace rewrite rules
• Using global and distributed rules
• Using rewrite maps
• Importing rewrite rules
• Enabling "Pretty Permalinks" in WordPress
• Rule templates
• User Friendly URL
• Rule with Rewrite Map
• Request Blocking
• Testing rule and condition patterns
• Using URL rewrite module - video walkthrough

References and guidance:

• URL Rewrite Module configuration reference
• URL Rewriting and ASP.NET routing
• URL Rewriting and Request Filtering
• URL Rewriting for ASP.NET Web Forms
• Developing rule templates for URL Rewrite module

Bill Staples posted an important annoucment about the availability of the Web Deployment tool release Beat 2.

When Bill says something like this "It is one of the fundamental building blocks that IIS will be building on the next several years.", that means "Hey you - IIS admin - pay attention to this cause it's going to REALLY important and some very cool features that you can't live without".

He goes on to say that current features include:

Migrate entire servers or individual sites from one machine to another (IIS6 –> IIS7)

Sync Servers, Sites, and Applications (IIS6 –> IIS6, and IIS7 –> IIS7)

Create offline packages that can be used as backups, version control, and deployment units

as well as:

- Support for SQL Server 2008 database deployment with sites
- Integration into the IIS Manager
- Upcoming support for Web Deploy built into Vistual Studio 2008

Check it out!

 http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2008/10/30/iis-web-deployment-tool-beta-2-released.aspx

 Microsoft has released an updated SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP. The SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP download is available to all SQL Server users at no additional charge. The SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP is a PHP 5 extension that allows for the reading and writing of SQL Server data from within PHP scripts. The extension provides a procedural interface for accessing data in all editions of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=61BF87E0-D031-466B-B09A-6597C21A2E2A&displaylang=en

The IIS team continues to deliver on the promise of the modular pipeline. One often requested module was URL re-writing, which was released today.

-brett

 

Install the URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 Go Live today!

Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 Go Live (x86)

Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 Go Live (x64)

New Features

Here are the features that are new since CTP release (for a complete list of features refer to this article):

·         Support for IIS kernel mode and user mode output caching. IIS 7.0 output caching provides significant performance improvements for web applications. URL rewrite module is fully compatible with both types of output caching. This means that it is possible to safely cache responses for rewritten URL's and thus boost the performance of web applications that rely on URL rewriting.

·         Lower case conversion. A lower case conversion function called "ToLower" can be used within rewrite rule to convert any rule input string or substitution URL to lower case.

·         Rule templates. Rule template is an extension for URL rewrite module user interface, that simplifies creation of rewrite rules for a particular task.  The Go Live release of the module includes 3 built-in rule templates, plus it allows plugging in any number of custom templates.

·         UI for testing of regular expression and wildcard patterns. A GUI tool for testing rule patterns is included into the module's user interface. The tool can be used to quickly check how the regular expression or wildcard pattern works. Also, it can be used for troubleshooting and debugging of problems related to pattern matching.

·         UI for managing rewrite rules and rewrite maps. Rewrite rules and rewrite maps can be added, removed and edited by using "URL Rewrite Module" feature in IIS Manager.

More information

New and updated walkthroughs: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-url-rewrite-module/

Updated configuration reference: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/465/url-rewrite-module-configuration-reference/

URL Rewriter Forum on IIS.NET: http://forums.iis.net/1152.aspx

Just ran across this white paper on Technet.

This is a GREAT PAPER on IIS 7 created by the Microsoft.com guys. I love their stuff. If you've ever seen their presentations at TechEd, MIX you know they are full of hard core IT details about how they deal with eye-poping scale. Thing is though, they always keep in mind the very useful details - "tweak this like that", "run this logparser script", "we setup our pools like this.." - showing you how they keep the house running. Despite rumors to the contrary, Microsoft.com is a 100% IIS 7 shop running out of the box bits.

While there are very few sites that need the kinds of scale Microsoft.com supports, the best practices and policies they have are really good for many of you supporting web farms. If I were running one, I would be very familiar with anything coming from these guys.

Migrating a Large, High-Volume Web Site to Internet Information Services 7.0

Had a question come up on the IIS 7 list server (iislists.com) on using CDONTS on IIS 7. Steve has written a blog post on the topic I thought was worth referencing.

Getting CDONTS to work on Windows Server 2008 x64 - Steve Schofield Weblog

One of the often heard requests for IIS has been about the need to have a more flexible, rules based URL rewriting system. The IIS team is making good on it's promise to release some out of band updates to the server using the modular pipeline. From all appearances, this is a really nice first release of a url rewrite system that comes complete with a UI. For example, you could redirect to a specific page based on the contents of URL, server variables or http headers. Examining the headers lets you make routing decisions based on the host header for example.

This is a pre-release version so  be sure to give the team some feed back over on iis.net

 

IIS.net : Learn IIS7: Using URL Rewrite Module: Installing and Configuring IIS 7.0

Update for WebDAV may be hard to find.

 

Solution: IIS7 WebDAV Module Tweaks « Enter the Tatrix

Hey, check out this article by Mvolo. As usual, he's got a great line on the important details and impeccable insight into practical implementation.

IIS 7.0: Top 10 Performance Improvements in IIS 7.0

Version 1.0 RTM of the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP is live!

 

Version 1.0 of the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP is available for download on the MSDN download site.

Ran across this today on IIS.net.  For those of you that know me, I've been raving about URLScan as great security tool for IIS since IIS 5 days. It was one of the centerpieces of the IIS FastTrack class I taught back in the day.

After a very long time, the IIS team has released an update to URLScan 2.5, a beta release of URLScan 3.0. It's still an ISAPI filter and I'd bet that it's written by the leading authority on ISAPI at Microsoft, Wade Hilmo who also wrote the original URLScan and siblings.

One of the key new features is the ability to create different rule sets for different sites.  In URLScan 2.5 you could only have 1 ruleset for the entire server which was great for sites that had 1 primary app or very similar workloads on different sites, but if you had 1 site that had a maximum URL of 50 characters and another 250 characters, you had to set the max URL length to 250 which meant less than optimum security. Now, you can tuneup each site to according to it's requirements.

Another cool addition is that if you change the ruleset, you don't have to recycle IIS in order to pick up the changes. That's a nice improvement that is harder than it sounds .

So check out the new beta and be sure to send a note to the team via the forums about how these tools. When they hear from customers about the usefulness of these releases, it helps them justify doing more of updates and add-ons.

Learn IIS7: Using UrlScan: Configuring Security: Installing and Configuring IIS 7.0

During the development of IIS7, Bill Staples often promised better integration with Powershell was in the future.

Well, the future is now and today I got the following message in my inbox:

Congates IIS team for this very cool improvment in integration and administration that makes IIS even easier to manage!

-brett

===================================================

 

 

IIS7 PowerShell Provider Tech Preview 2

 

Here is a quick overview:

What’s new with TP2?

·         IIS7 Powershell provider now supports SSL (installing and acquiring a certificate, creating an ssl site binding)

·         Tech Preview 2 ships with 40 new cmdlets. All of these cmdlets are for day-to-day IIS tasks like creating web-sites, web-applications, enabled request tracing, adding a handler or a module. The complete list is at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/492/using-the-task-based-cmdlets

The IIS7 PowerShell Provider offers

• Create Web-Sites, Web Applications, Virtual Directories and Application Pools
• Change Simple Configuration Properties on Web-Sites, Application Pools, Web Applications and Virtual Directories
• Add and Change Complex Configuration Settings
• Query Run-time Data (Web-Site State, Application Pool State, Currently Executing Requests)
• Execute Advanced Configuration Tasks, Scripting, Integration with other PowerShell Snap-Ins and features
• Search and Discover Configuration Settings

DOWNLOAD:
Tech Preview 1 of the IIS 7.0 PowerShell Provider can be found here:
x86: http://iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1664
x64: http://iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1665

FORUMS:
Go to our PowerShell forum if you need support or if you are looking for 'Tips and Tricks'
http://forums.iis.net/1151.aspx

WALKTHROUGHS:
The walkthroughs are here: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/447/managing-iis-with-the-iis-70-powershell-provider/

 

Mike Volo advises about the benefits of creating lean, mean web server machine!

http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2008/06/17/Make-your-next-IIS-7.0-web-server-a-lean-one.aspx 

IIS 7.0 Server-Side : Make your next IIS 7.0 web server a lean one

Mike Volodarsky announces he's leaving Microsoft. Mike was a central player in the creation of IIS 7 and was the PM for many key projects including the integrated pipeline and APPCMD.  Aside from assisting the team, he wrote the modules used in the demos for the Windows Server 2008 Hosting roadshow that went on worldwide, and saved my butt on more than on occasion with details about a switch or missing punctuation in a program or command line.

Of course, I'm sure he's up to new very interesting projects so expect to hear more from him!

IIS 7.0 Server-Side : Leaving Microsoft ...

Bill Staples sent this annoucment out about the release of this new tool. I know they worked on this for a loooong time. looking forward to feedback!

-brett

 

IIS is thrilled to announce the Beta 1 (Go Live) release of the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool! The tool provides deployment and migration support for IIS 6.0 and 7.0. It incorporates many features that enable web server administrators to deploy, sync and migrate sites, including configuration, content, SSL certificates and other types of content associated with a Web server.

 

This tool can be used on Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 as well as Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0. Please note that this is a Beta release, support is available on the forums.

 

How to Get Started

Download the x86 version: http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1602

Download the x64 version: http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1603

Read the walkthroughs: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=8100895

 

Web Deployment Tool forum: http://forums.iis.net/1144.aspx

Web Deployment Team blog: http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/

 

Features

We've loaded this version with many great new features such as:

• PowerShell Support - We have PowerShell cmdlets so that you can integrate MS Deploy commands with PowerShell directly.
• Enhanced Dependency Checking - We have IIS7 dependency information listed, plus the ability to see where a dependency is being triggered from. For example, if you have a dependency on Windows Authentication, you can now determine where this is set in the configuration.
• Detailed Help File - We have a Help chm file included in the tool so that you can browse through all the functionality and flexibility offered by the tool, instead of looking through online walkthroughs.

 

Scott mentions in this blog entry planned updates for IIS 7. In addition "We will also shortly begin sharing details of a new web application deployment framework for IIS that enables you to easily automate the deployment of web applications on either a single server or across a web farm of machines.

.NET Web Product Roadmap (ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS7) - ScottGu's Blog

Here's a blog post from Bill Staples on this issue. Bill is the uber manager of IIS and was the main vision and driver for both IIS 6 and IIS 7 as well as having key involvement since IIS 4.

SQL Injection Attacks on IIS Web Servers - BillS IIS Blog

Worth readin.g

Reading a Hacker's Mind : Running Multiple ASP.NET applications SECURELY on a single web server