I've got a new job here at Microsoft as Technical Product Manager for Hosting Solutions. One of the first things up is a GIGANTIC roadshow we're producing for hosters to get hands on with IIS7. Best part is, I get to design the labs and content! I'm really excited to be working on this. The event is sadly only 1 day long, but is jammed with hands on labs and lectures so that attendees can go back and deploy IIS7 in their environment. The lab topics are IT Pro oriented rather than developer focused so don't sign up expecting to learn how to write an ihttp module. Do signgup if you're in the hosting industry and want to know how to deploy, configure, migrate apps, and troubleshoot IIS7. Of course, we're focusing on the new features rather than "this is a website.. it is used to deliver http content.." blah blah blah. Also, I try to keep marketing spin to a minimum.  My philoosphy has always been to let the technology sell itself.

It's worldwide and registraitons are open now for hosing industry personnnel.

REGISTER HERE!

Brett

Monster IIS7 and .NET program manager (who can't help but write code) Mike Volo has just posted a new tool to help you extend the IIS7 schema. This is a developer feature that allows you to add your own configuration items to IIS7. So you could write a module or handler and store the configuration for it write in apphost.config or a delegated web.config instead of in the system.web section of web.config only. In this way, you can use the IIS7 APIs to control, configure, deploy you app along with IIS7. You can also write your own extensions to the IIS UI and have them use your schema extensions so your additions are seamlessly integrated with the UI.

 Cool stuff, check it out.

Mike Volodarsky's ServerSide : IISSCHEMA.EXE - A tool to register IIS7 configuration sections

You've got to see this.

Check out www.msdewey.com

Try typing in tequila, and ghetto for a good laugh.

-brett

Just to let you know where things are at with IIS 7 in terms of stability and reliablity, Microsoft.com has converted to their entire infrastructure to it. They are consitently in the top 5 of avaibility on the interent and if you talked to them like do, you'd know they take that very seriously.

Eric Woershing recently did an interview with Chad Kraykovic and Jeff Towes over at MS.com (as we call it internally), which you can find here http://blogs.iis.net/ewoersch/archive/2007/06/27/video-microsoft-com-operations-team-opens-up-on-deploying-iis7-early.aspx. This is a very good interview that details many tips for those migrating a web farm to IIS 7. I suggest checking it out. Eric also did a great summary. I liked this so much that I'm trying to get some labs and training created based on their best practices. That would be very useful as it goes beyond just IIS7. Things like "do this with your scripts", "use DSFR for content replication", and other tips that have been proven to be useful at Microsoft.com would work for most enterprises and hosters.

Excited about this new project!

-brett

Robert McMurray has a new video just posted on Channel 9 on the FTP server.

He's the program manager for web publishing and does a great set of demos that illustate most all the bells and whistles in the new code (called FPT7 internally). It's pretty cool so check it out.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=319223

The big kahuna Bob Muglia anncounced at TechEd that the new Server Core SKU will have IIS7 on it.

This has been a frequent question I've recevied and I've meet customers that have heard all kinds of things, some correct and some incorrect. Finally, the details are out now and the Bill Staples gives a quick rundown at http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2007/06/04/iis7-on-server-core.aspx. Check it out.

In a nutshell, IIS7 on server core will run native code application such as classic ASP, PHP, Perl (fastcgi is supported), ISAPI etc. It will not run .NET applications, but you can expect that to chnage (but probably  not by RTM). There won't be a UI so you will have to adminster it using APPCMD or WMI (Powershell sadly requires .NET so won't be on the SKU).

I'd like to go on record saying that Server Core is going to bigger for IIS7 than people think. It's a great hosting SKU, and is also ideal for low maintenance, special function servers.

The one point I want to make about server core that is missed a lot is that you can still take advantage of the IIS7 modular pipeline using native code http modules written in C++. In fact, in My work with customers, it was clear that the use of native code to write modules is signficantly improved. Mike Volodarsky told me it was a lot more like using managed code that was possible in W2K3 due to changes in the APIs. (http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2006/10/07/IIS7-modules-vs.-IIS6-ISAPI-_2300_10_3A00_-C_2B002B00_-Class_2D00_based-encapsulation-model.aspx) This means that the core server is a great, high speed, special function server that can streamlined and customized to meet customers needs. Woot!

Anyway, just want to shout about this as the lid has been on for a bit and now the news is out.

----

About the tour- I did write a post to wrap up bit got lost before I posted it when I advertnently closed the windows. I hate it when that happens. Will re-do the wrap up later.

later,

brett

We arrived in Paris after a long wait at the Stockholm airport. The flight didn't leave till 7pm so we had the day to Sighsee? No, Sleep in? no - you guessed it - EMAIL!

We landed in Paris and took a 45 minute taxi ride to the hotel. Nice hotel in the Opera district. I think I saw a hint of Paris along the way but not really much. Isaac and I met with Olga Londer at 11:30pm and I went to be at 3am - got up at 7:30 for breakfast and another presentation.

Isaac is wrapping up now and we're headed out to the airport. Olga has some plan in mind to shuttle us to a train and see something of Paris before leaving. Not much but better than nothing.

Flying to Florence tonight, then up again for another show.

Must    sleep     soon.

-brett

Had a great day doing the tourist thing. Isaac and I took a bus/boat tour to see this really amazing city. Of course, I hear that for 7-8 months you only get about 7 hours of sunlight and it's cooler, so today in the 70's and bright sunlight - is Stockholm at it's best. There is lot going on here and people in general seem relaxed and healthy. http://www.stockholmtown.com/templates/substartpage____2405.aspx

We presented to a group of about 40 people and Isaac and I agreed it was the best presentation yet. I've settled into the rythme of the Security presentation which is my favorite topic and added some detail to the configuration talk that seems to put some pieces together that were missing overall. Funny how you have to do these things a few times to get them tuned up. When I was teaching IIS training before I joined Microsoft, I did the same course at least 20 times and then rewrote it to be more effective. I really like maturing content like that and try to the same for articles and such, providing there's time. That's one thing that bugs me about working on a continous stream of content related deadlines at Microsoft (or anywhere else), is that there is not usually the oppotunity to really evolve content to the next level. Like if you work on a class (such as MOC 2295a to which I was major contributor), you just don't get the opportunity to go back and reorganize to a higher level. So I'm enjoying the oppotunity to present the same content muliple times.

Now it's time for the spring to finish line. At 7 we take off of for Paris and present on Weds, then leave WEDS eve for Florence and present on Thurs, then leave bright and early Friday back to the states. Yikes! 

-brett

Getting up at 6am the next day, it's off to Stockholm. You can tell immediatly that we're back in Scandinavia as the design of the airport resembles Copenhagen and Amsterdam, all brushed steel, glass, and wooden floors. It looks sleek, but seems somewhat sterile to me after Warsaw. The ended quickly in the 30 minute drive to Stockholm featuring a very lush landscape.  It reminded me of Seattle in that way.

Stockholm is a throughly modern city. Arts, shops, pedestrain walkways, local resuarants and transit are all blended very well to create a very browseable experience. You can walk for a very long time and find a lot of interesting places. This is an area just outside the hotel in front of a theatre, bookstore, shopping complex. That's live theatre, not movies.

After a good nights sleep I'm feeling more or less adjusted to the time zone. Tomorrows a holiday in the US but and while our friends are taking the day off we're delivering the 3rd presentation of the tour. <sarcasm> Poor us, having to work on the holiday in Stockholm </sarcasm>. Will post more later!

-brett

I didn't know what to expect in Warsaw. We arrived still suffering from jet lag and glad to be checked into a really beautiful Marriot in the center of Warsaw. The view from my room was stunning.

We didn't have a lot of time. Walking around there are a great many things to see but I spend most of my time getting ready for the next day. We were going to be filmed and webcast throughout the day so presentations needed to be especially smooth.

We arrived at Microsoft Poland and met our host Jan Walkiewicz , shown here with Isaac.

I haven't seen the reviews yet, but I think the presentations went pretty well. Isaac was unhappy that one of his demos had a BSOD caused by a known issue with Virtual PC that may blue screen when running after after the OS goes to sleep on a laptop. He recovered gracefully, but still - that's high on the list of things you'd rather not have happen during a demo. Aside from that the audience of about 100 people seemed to be pretty happy.

 I know we felt pretty good with they way things went. If I find the links to the webcasts, I'll post them here.

Next stop - Stockholm.

We had good time presenting the wonders of IIS 7 to an astonished audience of about 34 people in Copenhagen. OK, perhaps astonished is a bit overdone, but they definitley liked what they saw in IIS 7. Very good questions from the audience which I am told is quite unusual for for a Danish audience, so that was seen as a sign of high interest. Unfortunately, we lost some time during the day due to a malfunction of the video projector at the facility hosting the event. The guys there tried to pawn if off on Vista. There was a time, about a year ago, when Vista didn't play well with some latopts and external monitor ports, but I've not had a problem like that in a long while. So we brought in another laptop and even an XP system, and no go on the projector. Eventually, the wheeled in another one but we lost about an hour overall Of course, that wasn't helping the mood of the audience. I did my best to talk through the overview without showing much,  picture/1K words, etc, so they got the 1K words version of most of the overview.

Oh by the way, to the one guy who was asking "If I have a 200 websites on a server and each has a 5 host headers, how do I find the site that has a specfiic host header", the answer is APPCMD list sites|findstr "host header you're looking for". Simple! Even so, I think it's a great idea to expose the host header info in the UI and will ask the IIS team to add that to the list of things to consider.

This morning, Isaac and I headed to the airport and now we're in Warsaw Poland. What a very intersting place! It would take a year to explore just the downtown center area we are in. It's a beautful day and it's only 1:50pm but I'm dog tired after only 4 hours sleep, again. Not quite adjusted to the 9 hours time difference from here to Seattle.

Anyway, we'er going to the Microsoft office at 5 to do a little rehearsal and then back the hotel for a looooong sleeeeep.  I hear we have 100 people signed up for the presentation tomorrow so really looking forward to it.

Later,

B

But what happened to Day 1? Heck if I know. Somewhere between take off and landing a lot of hours disappeared! We arrived in Copenhagen at 1pm yesterday. Found this sign hanging in the airport. Something you won't see in the US! Can I get a piece of this dollar drops action?

.

Certainly feels like the home of IKEA around here as the design is all very modern. I like modern, so all the glass, brushed steel, wood floors, and sleek lines look good to me. Here's a picture of my room. You can see the uber modern design. The steel tubes on the right and left have a motion sensor in them. When you stand up at night, a little light comes on at the base the illumates the floor.

S

Strong architecture and design is everywhere which is in stark contrast the very old buildings, chuches, and 6 story brick residendial buildings that line the streets. A odd mix visually. As you walk along the pedestrian malls (which are rambling outdoor shopping areas that are very popular), it's a distinctive mashup kind of experinece. As you walk, you'll pass by a local bakery followed by a lingerie store, next to a local bar, then Burger King, lingerie, Gucci, jamacian importsn, lingerie, then an Italian/Mexican restuarnt that you can't quite identify as an italian/mexican restaruant in any distinctive way.

Going to work on some demos for tomorrow's presentation. Will told me to brush up on the new FTP server as that was popular topic on his part of the tour.

More photos and trip reports to come.

Later,

Brett

So here are the dates, locations, registraion pages and speakers for the IIS7 EMEA roadshow. Some of the links might not be running yet, but this is what I have. We are putting the final touches on the presentations today and sending off Will and Rick tommorrow. Isaac and I leave the following week for Denmark and are really looking forward to it.

I know some of you may be asking "but what about <insert your country here>"? I am but a lowely speaker and my duties do not include such important tasks as choosing what locations to present at. That is evidently a complex task that falls to more capabale hands, thankfully, as I am terrible at this kind of task. Some countries do their events, others can't work with these dates, etc. etc. I can't believe that I finally get to go to Paris and I have 1 day, most of which is tied up in work! Arrrrgh. I am going to be in the city with Louvre and can't go! That is cruel and unusual punishment. Oh well. That's the price you pay sometimes to be an evangelist.

I'll be posting pictures, stories and other details as they occur.

Later.

Brett

I'm going on a roadtrip to Europe for two weeks to present a 1 day class on IIS 7! There are actually two teams of two and I'm on the 2nd team leaving in two weeks for two weeks. (see http://blogs.iis.net/rickjames/archive/2007/05/06/iis-7-talks-reykjavik-and-london.aspx). This is going to be fun! Or course, getting the content together is part of the gig and that's a challenge as I am really hard nosed about getting it right. My style is a lot more informational and less marketing focused than some would like, but my belief is that if have a good product, you don't need a lot of hype. And IIS 7 is a good product.

As I study some of the demos we're doing and talk to the IIS program mangers, I learn more about some of the stuff under the covers that isn't getting a lot of press. Security is one of those topics and as luck would have it, is my particular most interested topic. Imagine that.

Did you know that IIS 7 has built in a new feature called URL Authorization that allows you to restrict access to content without using file permissions? You can simply entire a rule in the UI or directly in the .config file that says deny user="Bob" and Bob will be denied access. The cool part of this is that if you copy the content to another server (and this feature is delegeated), then your security rules move with the content. Think about that for bit. No more managing NTFS permissions on a per sever basis. You could just assign permissions for the worker process identity to have access to the content (and maybe the IUSR account <maybe? Yes maybe. You can tell IIS 7 to use the worker process identity for anon access!).

This is huge and it works with any content, not just .NET.

Just one of the many new security features built into IIS7 we'll be showing on the roadshow. I'm so psyched about the new security improvements that I'll be posting some screencasts on channel 9. But hey, you don't need to wait. It's not a special builld or anything. URLAuthorizatin is in Beta 3 Just download beta3 and check it out for yourself!

http://www.iis.net/articles/view.aspx/Managing-IIS7/Configuring-Security/URL-Authorization/Understanding-IIS7-URL-Authorization?tabid=1

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/longhorn/audsel.mspx

I'll be posting pictures, quotes and details from the trip so stay tuned.

Finally I can talk about this!

Beta 3 was just signed off and will be posted very soon to connect.microsoft.com.

There is so much coolness in IIS 7 in Beta 3 that's hard to know where to start.

We've had several customers beating up this build pretty hard, including Microsoft.com. This is a good build for the web server platform (can't speak about the rest of it cause I don't know, but from the looks of things, it's all good).

What to look for in IIS7 Beta 3:

Of course, you've heard all about the modular pipeline. Right? what! Snap out of it! This is a big deal.

Shared configuration: You can now configure multiple IIS 7 servers to share a single application host config file. Whohoo! No more metabase replication.

Remote Administration: This is coolness in action. Use https from within IIS manager to connect to another IIS manager. Since it's https, it's firewall friendly and special ports need to be open. You authenticate to the remote IIS manager using Windows users, or you can define users in the IIS manger that are stored in Administration.config (encrypted credentials of course)

Disable Anon user: So if you disable the anon user in IIS7, anon access is still allowed, but you don't use the built in IUSR account. All anon access occurs as the process identity. If you give each process a unique identity, you also give it a unique anon users when this is enabled. Add sandoxing and shared config, and you have a nice package for web farms with secure pools. 

App Pool Sandbox: This takes a while to explain, but essentially, each pool winds up with a configuration file that contains only the settings for that pool and can only be read by that pool.  In this way, an applicaiton pool cannot revert to self and read the configuration of any other pool.

Extensible UI: The UI is not just new from IIS6, it's a platform in and of itself that can be modifed and updated. Look to Carlos' blog and the downloads page on IIS.net for new extensions that are already available. http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1328

Are you ready for this: New FTP server! released at the same time as beta 3 is a long awaited new FTP server AND yes,  it supports FTP with SSL (FTPS as I recall as opposed to SFTP). You will find this as a seperate donwload on IIS.net soon. It is not built into longhorn. When you install this puppy you will see first hand  that we aren't kidding about IIS 7 extensiblity. There will be new UI icons and configuration features. In the past, this is something that only Microsoft or a few ISVs would do (modify the UI and IIS configuration), but since the UI is a Winform app, extensiblity is built in, and the IIS 7 schema can be extended with just an XML snippet. Developers are going to be adding all kinds of newness to the IIS Manager. BTW, if you install FTP on Longhorn using the Server Manager or package manager command line, you get the old FTP server in the MMC console.

I know you asking "where can I get more info" and the answer is that papers are being uploaded to IIS.net very soon. Questions? Ask on the IIS.net forums.

I got to go, but I'm really psyched about this release. There is a lot more to talk about so stay tuned.

PS. Bill Staples just posted an annoucment to his blog. http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2007/04/25/what-s-new-in-iis7-beta-3.aspx

-brett

Longhorn Beta 3 is coming very soon.

It features a solid implmentation of IIS 7 that has features you've not seen before! It will be broadly available, AND there will be a Go Live liscense available that allows you to put it into production. Production? This build is very solid and if you've been waiting for a base build to test, this is it.

Stay tuned.

-brett

What can 1 person and web server do anyway? Make a million bucks? Listen to this interview with Markus Frind from PlentyofFish.com about how he moved from a home busienss to a Web 2.0 phenom

http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/IIS_Show

Interesting stats from his server: http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/aspnet-and-iis-2-million-pageviews-per-hour/

Finally a document on HTTP.sys!

 Just got a ping from the http.sys team alerting me to this link where you'll find a paper on http.sys on Vista and Longhorn.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=311f4be8-9983-4ab0-9685-f1bfec1e7d62&displaylang=en

-bret

In a couple of days, I'll be posting an interveiw twith  Markus Frind, owner of Plentyoffish.com to the IIS show on Channel 9. I love this interview because it shows what one person can do with a IIS web server, ASP.net and a DSL line.

In the interview you’ll hear Marcus explain how he started Plentyoffish.com in his home as a part-time project. It grew to 12 million page views per day and in 2004 became his full time business. The site runs on Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition, 31 million page pages - 2 million page views per hour at peak, 40-50K concurrent users – on ONE IIS 6 server at 65% capacity.

Link to ASP.net and IIS 2 million pageviews per hour « The Paradigm Shift

Ben Galbraith*  reports on a recent presentation by Bill Staples and Carlos Aguilar at the MTS Summit - a conference Microsoft holds every year for industy influentials. 

 "I walked away fairly impressed with this one. Who doesn’t love Apache, but IIS7 seems to trump it pretty handily in both configurability, manageability, and extensibility."

http://galbraiths.org/blog/2007/03/27/mts07-bill-staples-and-carlos-aguilar-on-iis7/

*Ben Galbraith is a frequent speaker, independent consultant, conference producer, and author of several books. He is an experienced CEO, CTO, and Software Architect, and is presently involved in a number of business ventures.

Check out this new content on ZDNet on IIS

http://news.zdnet.com/2036-11363_22-6153477.html

First PHP...now RoR!

Mike Volodarsky on the IIS team has released an update to the FastCGI beta available on IIS.net that allows Ruby on Rails to run on IIS. The team is lookng for feedback and assitance with identifying problems. If you are interested, check out Mike's post at
http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/02/18/10-steps-to-get-Ruby-on-Rails-running-on-Windows-with-IIS-FastCGI.aspx 

-brett

Some companies can't wait to get a good thing going! Applied.net is offering free IIS 7 hosting.

http://www.appliedi.net/iis7-hosting/

-brett

For the last year, I've been working mostly on developer oriented topics involoving IIS 7. The team I work on has experts on topics like Powershell, Cardspace, Atlas, WWF, WPF, and I'm the iis guy. We've produced an applicaiton that shows off all these tecnologies working together in an application called Dinner Now. It has been posted to CodePlex and you can see it at http://www.codeplex.com/DinnerNow.

The IIS 7 portion is the copyright image handler that is documented on the End-to-End walkthrough on IIS.net under IIS7, Core. The applicaiton mimics an online service where you can order dinner to go from a variety of businesses and track the progress of the order. The handler puts a Dinner Now copyright on the pictures of the menu items offered by various restaurants.

It's a amibitious project and shows off the integration of various Microsoft technologies in a collaborative way we think is useful. Hopefully, you will too.

Thanks,

Brett

This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (17df264f-f786-4061-8760-1990c2f454bb)

Today, a new section was opened on the IIS.net website - the Dowload Center.

http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=3

As with many pouplar sites, the Download pages are a hot item where people browse for stuff they can use now. There has never been anything like for the Microsoft where both developers, partners, site users, and IIS Team members can post their bits for the world to see. Already, Bill Stapls has posted his Gallery demo (http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1325) that that shows off how managed handler that replaced the Direct Listing module in IIS7. When this module see listing of .jpg files, it will show them in a nice gallery that you can easily browse. This is much better than the typical list of files you you see when you get a directory listing delivered by IIS7. Replacing the IIS 7 directory listing module with a module that provides additional capabilites is meant to show of a simple but powerful idea about how you can use managed code in the process request pipleine to add features to IIS 7. Features that service any kind of content, not just .NET content.

There's soooo much to talk about with IIS 7 - it sort of jams up even a good talker like me. I mean I really like to talk about IIS 7 and I get sorta slammed with "where do I start!".

The Download center also has content for IIS 5 and 6 as well - so it's one stop shopping for downloadable content for IIs. Yeah!

-brett

So, many people will IIS 7 in hand beginning next week with Vista being available. For those of you have not seen it but are interested,you will need to take some time to get up to speed on the new UI and features. Of course, one of the most practical beneifts of IIS 7 on Vista is that you can make more than one website and it's not limited to 10 connections. It will process 10 requests at a time making it impractical to use as a server - but works great as dev platform.

Be sure to get the version of Vista that has the features you want! THEY ARE DIFFERENT. Here's the definitive list of differences on a feature by feature basis: Notice that Windows Authentication in particular is not available on several versions: http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=2&subtabid=25&i=1100

The IIS team is working fevershily on IIS 7 on Longhorn Server. It's not quite time to discuss the key features that will be on the server version that are not on Vista, but they are going to be very, very useful for enteprises and it won't impact your ability to develop code on Vista to run on IIS 7 in any core way. If you write an applicaiton on Vista to use IIS 7 features, it will run on IIS 7. In fact, our experience has shown that in many cases, ihttp handlers and ihttp modules for ASP.net run without modification. That is not always true as there are some differences in the environment between the core pipline of IIS 7 and the ASP.net pipeline in IIS6.

Keep in mind also that when you install IIS 7, you do NOT get an IIS 6 (or IIS 5.1) equivalent. IIS 7 is LESS enabled with a default install than in previous releases. Be sure to install the features you need using Turn on/Off Windows features or package manager. See details here: http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=2&subtabid=25&i=957

Mike Volodarsky has an article about this on IIS.net http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=2&subtabid=23&i=1223. His blog http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/ is also reqruied reading for IIS 7 devs.

Please post problems on IIS.net forums which the team montors. That is the best way, I hope, to get help for  your issues and report problems. It absoulety does happen that people report bugs there and they become fixes in the product. 

Thanks!

Brett

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=28bd5941-c458-46f1-b24d-f60151d875a3&displaylang=en

This release is rich with new features, including the following:

· IE7, Vista, and 64-bit Windows compatibility (currently targets only 32-bit processes, but works on 64-bit platforms)

· Leak rule improvements (dump on memory thresholds)

· Leak monitoring improvements (‘fasttrack’ feature, injection fixes)

· Analysis improvements (Data access components and socket support)

· Custom actions for crash rules (DebugDiag scripts)

· Managed call stack resolution

· Support for managed exceptions (such as System.DivideByZeroException)

· Support for debugger events (such as Module Load and Unload)

· Sample scripts included