BrettBlog

Microsoft announced the beta release of IIS Application Warm-Up –

2009-10-14T18:39:30.5202517-04:00

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

Article on PHP vs ASP.net relative speed with interesting results.

2009-08-08T18:30:28.664-04:00

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.

IIS 7 Labs online

2009-07-26T12:28:24.002-04:00

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.

Making the most of Web Hosting with IIS 7

2009-05-17T21:10:25.189-04:00

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/

IIS 7 in the Mix

2009-03-18T13:56:48.033-04:00

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...

IIS FTP 7.5 released

2009-03-12T16:43:22.3815-04:00

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

Top 25 Reasons systems are hacked - new list from SANS

2009-01-13T18:38:03.6875-05:00

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

IIS7 in Windows Server 2008 R2

2009-01-12T12:11:18.962-05:00

Mai Lan posted an article on the details of what to expect in R2

http://blogs.iis.net/mailant/archive/2009/01/11/iis7-in-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx

The most interesting thing is that several of the most useful "out of band" downloads that you add on the server, FTP, Dav, and Admin Pack specifically are now considered part of the server distribution. I haven't validated this, but this probably means they are part of the installation options on the server with equivalent optional component, automated installation options.

This is very good news on two fronts. Often, companies forbid the use of "out of band" additions to IIS even if it's from Microsoft as they may not be fully supported and there's a stigma that if the code is not part of the core platform, then it shouldn't be trusted. This means that the IIS team is making a statement that this code is production quality for server - which is a big deal, as it is tested a gillion ways before release. My guess is that we can expect to see more of this - code released out of band by the IIS team, becomes incorporated into the core product. The second part is that updates to the code will occur automatically through windows update.

Speaking of core produce. Core server will acquire the ability to run asp.net! YES! To be honest, I was always a bit backed off core server as an IIS engine, although it makes a great ISAPI delivery vehicle, since it didn't have .NET capabilities (meaning no integrated pipeline). Adding .NET to core opens a lot of doors to have smaller footprint .NET servers that you manage with Powershell and of course, to make that vision real...

R2 comes with an IIS powershell provider.

Yeah! Looking forward to this...

http://blogs.iis.net/mailant/archive/2009/01/11/iis7-in-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx

-brett

Preventing SQL Injections

2009-01-06T13:00:16.5297515-05:00

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

LogParser Revisited

2008-12-31T18:05:02.151-05:00

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

LAMP on Windows?

2008-12-17T12:47:30.472875-05:00

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

Install the URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 RTW today!

2008-11-10T18:16:17.3065-05:00

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:

References and guidance:

New Web Deployment Tool for IIS shows includes replication, migration, and packaging of sites

2008-10-31T13:41:53.328-04:00

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

SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP Cumulative Update

2008-10-16T20:21:57.258875-04:00

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

URL Rewriting module for IIS 7 is live

2008-09-11T15:33:59.2828763-04:00

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

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

2008-08-28T18:54:22.106875-04:00

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

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

2008-08-19T01:41:42.226625-04:00

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

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

2008-08-07T04:05:18.113125-04:00

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

Solution: IIS7 WebDAV Module Tweaks « Enter the Tatrix

2008-08-05T12:32:04.050625-04:00

Update for WebDAV may be hard to find.

Solution: IIS7 WebDAV Module Tweaks « Enter the Tatrix