I spent the week hanging out at the IIS booth at TechEd. The booth was, as usual for IIS, located in the back and kind of out of site. "Can't get no respect". I didn't do any formal presentations this year but did a few "chalktalks". A chalktalk is what we call a presentation that is not a formal "breakout" session. The chalktalks were presented at the little theatre style areas on the expo floor. If you go to a Microsoft event, be sure to check these out as they often have the coolest info. Theres usually about 5-25 people there so you can ask a lot of questions, the presenters are typically expert in their topics and the presenter is able to do a much for relaxed, free form presentation.

One of my favorites was Andrew Lin, who works with the IIS team on the UI and administration, doing a presentation on the new Microsoft.web.adminstration API for IIS 7. In real time, he created a little comman line utility that did basic operations like create a website, assign it an app pool, then added features to with just a couple of lines of code like stop and start the site etc. Very nice. He took requests (or at least tried to get requests) from the audience about what to add. In the end, he had a little utility that would do some basic operations for administering a site using the the ne managed code API. Before you ask, APPCMD, the new command line utility, will do all of these things as well. The point was to show off the new API and how you can write code to deploy content as well as mange the server quite easily.

Another favority demo was on that Alexis Eller, IIS PM, did in her formal breakout session. I was really amazed at her demo bravery. She installed Community Server on IIS 7 in real time then loaded it with request using prepared Wcat scripts. Then she used Powershell to implement a WMI call to show the currently executing requests (using the new APIs again), in a worker process but only when the CPU use was over 75%. This worked flawlessly and the powershell code was only about 20 lines of code. When this ran, every 10 seconds or so, the screen would show about 10-15 currently exectuing requests, then pause as the CPU load dropped, then list some more lines, then drop. Very cool stuff. She'll proably post it on IIS.net, but I'll ask her about it.

People who saw IIS 7 were pretty impressed and of course the biggest complaint is that we have to wait till Longhorn Server. So next year, expect IIS 7 to be huge at TechEd! Looking forward to that.