« IE 7 + Internationalized domain names | ^ Main | Where is the UI heading? Desktop 2.0? »


IIS 7 will be great!

I am watching How Developers can Extend IIS 7 on Channel 9 and it is pretty interesting. IIS will definitely make ground in the market with IIS 7. It makes moves where IIS 6 didn’t and allows much more support for developers.

I’ll highlight a few of the areas that peaked my interest.

  1. IIS 7 is completely modularized. The directory browser, cache engine, etc, etc, etc are all completely separate modules. Each of these modules can be replaced by your own custom managed or native code. (Both examples below can be seen here.)
    1. Example 1: At 13 minutes he shows a Virtual Earth site he created regarding his climbing trips and other places. It is a picture-centric app which brings up a copyright issue. He wanted to put a copyright message on all of the images so he wrote a handler for jpegs which add a Copyright XXXXXX message to the bottom left corner of the images. It was 60 or so lines of code! How sweet is that?!?!?
    2. Example 2: At 29 minutes he shows how he wrote his own directory browsing handler. His handler displayed thumbnails vs the normal listing text listing for files. It took just a short amount of code and the page looked great, in comparison.
  2. The UI is extensible as well. Taking Example 1 above, the IIS 7 UI was updated to allow a user to update the config for the copyright handler he created. Now the server admin can update the handler code without touching code.
  3. You can centralize the storage of your config files OR have them delegated to certain levels. The admin can restrict access to certain extensible features (perfect for “hosted” environments).
  4. IIS 7 will allow 10 requests simultaneous requests for the “developer” version. That’s pretty coo. This is similar to how Flash Media Server handles the development version.
  5. There is a new command line tool (appcmd) that you can use to configure/manage your setup.
  6. Custom tracing with rules allows you to only show tracing for the things you want. He speaks on this around 34:46.
    1. Example 1: You can traces for files that end in *.blah.
    2. How about tracing for processes that take longer than 20 seconds? Ok.
  7. You can use WMI scripting as well. This is shown at 26 minutes.
  8. IIS.net is a new site dedicated to IIS. It isn’t only for IIS 7 either. You can find IIS 5 and 6 information as well. You can even test drive IIS 7 on Virtual Labs for free here.

What do you think? I’m very impressed.

Posted by John C. Bland II on August 6, 2006 7:45 AM |

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://mt.katapultmedia.com/mt-tb.cgi/199

Post a comment