Today Bill Staples announced the following:

I'm attending ZendCon today and giving a demo in the keynote presentation by Andi Gutmans, one of the creators of PHP, and co-founder of Zend.  I am really excited to announce a technical preview release of FastCGI for IIS, a new component for Microsoft's Web server platform.  This release is available immediately for download to Windows Vista, Windows Server codenamed "Longhorn" and previous versions of IIS including IIS 6.0 in Windows 2003 Server and IIS 5.1 in Windows XP.

This announcement coincides with a broader announcement regarding collaboration between Microsoft and Zend to improve performance and stability of PHP on the Windows platform. This effort aims to help PHP developers achieve improved performance on the Windows platform by leveraging the new IIS FastCGI feature together with Zend’s on-going work to improve the PHP engine on Windows. For more information regarding this announcement, see the news release on Zend's site.

Look for IIS in the news today, talking about this announcement.  eWeek.com just posted this news article: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2047535,00.asp

This project wouldn't have been possible without a lot of dedicated and hard working people.  The FastCGI feature itself only started development about 6 weeks ago and has come A LONG way in such a short period of time.  Special thanks go to Rick and Wade, Marchel and Cip, and Mike for working long hours, nights, and weekends to prepare the technical preview release now available on iis.net. 

 IIS 5/6 Forums: http://forums.iis.net/1103/ShowForum.aspx

Just posted to channel 9 is a chat with Andrew Lin, Group PM for the IIS team. Andrew is a very fast talking guy so listen up for deatils about the way cool new IIS 7 UI, his new role, and IIS 7 on Longhorn features.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=250395

-brett

Bill Staples is a very interesting guy. He's passionate about IIS, extermely bright and is one of those rare managers, like Scott Gutherie - that loves to evangelize about the product AND is good at it. Those qualities don't alwasy come in the same package. I meet with him pretty regularly in what we call internally "synch" meetings where two or more people meet and discuss their mutual ongoing activities. He's is the product unit manager for IIS which means he's pretty much in charge.

Anyway, he was showing me some stuff today including a demo of his blog report posted here: http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2006/10/23/How-I-fell-in-love-with-Vista-this-weekend-_2800_or-why-you_2700_re-gonna-love-IIS7_2F00_Vista-for-Web-development_2900_.aspx

In this test, IIS 7 on Vista gets 3800 GET requests per second! Screamin. Remember this is a client OS. This is using the new native output cache. Very cool. He also discusses why IIS 7 on Vista is by far the best web server developer and testing envionment we've ever shipped. There are of course a ton of reasons, but you should read it for yourself.

-brett

 Mike Volodarsky IIS Program Manager, .NET guru, and general funny guy has started up a blog he calls, appropriately enough, Server Side.

Mike knows a great deal about IIS 7 and .NET. This blog already contains several excellent posts so you're going to want to add this to your feeds.

Enjoy.

-brett

Link to server-side

If you're intrested in some of the new stuff coming out of Microsoft check out this just posted content:

Developing Rich Experiences with Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.0 and Visual Studio® 2005

https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerDetail.aspx?offerPriceId=109340

You might think, "why do I care about this if I just do IIS 7". The reason is that IIS 7 allows you to create applications using these technologies (aside from Avalon) and you WILL see IIS 7 applications that make heavy use of Workflow to track processes in applications as well as even determine which page to show in a web application. Imagine having an IIS 7 module that determined which pages to show based on a users membership level, region, lanugage, rights on the site, etc. CardSpace is a part of this too - and I keep saying this so get used to it - CARDSPACE IS HUGE. HUGE. In two-three years that is all you're gonna hear about. Finally Windows Communication Foundation - for web services has a big tie in to IIS 7 as it can host WCF services.

IIS 7 lets you take advantage of these technologies and offer them as modules or handlers to all your sites. Or extend them in an application to use in tracing and troublehsooting logs.

So, free training for developers intersted in this stuff. This will not be free after Vista ships.

After you've looked at this, look at IIS.net on how to write a managed module or handler and let me know if you have a cool idea about how to integrated IIS7 and .NET 3.0

-brett

Just a few minutes ago, Vista RC2 was posted to the TechBeta (connect.microsoft.com). It is on it's way to TechNet and MSDN by next week.

-brett

Mike Volodarsky on the IIS team has made a blog entry on his new blog mvolo.com.

He details work happening on IIS 7 on FastCGI to optimize PHP perfomance.

This is HUGE and now it's public.

http://mvolo.com/

Check it out!

IIS powered by logos are no official!

Enjoy

-brett