BillS IIS Blog

Lot’s of new software for IIS, ASP.NET, AJAX and PHP this week

bills — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:13:44 GMT

Wow, what a week of innovation for the Microsoft Web Platform. This week we released a ton of new software which, if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out. Here is a quick overview:

IIS Search Engine Optimization v1 final release!

The IIS team shipped the final release of IIS SEO toolkit which makes it easier to optimize your Website for search engines. It acts like a mini-search engine on your computer, scans your site and then provides useful tips for how to improve the relevance of your site to search engines. This tool is now out of beta and available for download through Web PI.

ASP.NET MVC 2 beta!

The ASP.NET team has been hard at work on the second release of MVC, which is now available to beta test. Phil has a great blog post on the release with links to the download page, readme notes and the source code. There are a bunch of new features in MVC 2 including AsyncController, expression based helpers, improvements with client validation, all new areas support, and more. Read more on Phil’s blog.

ASP.NET AJAX Library beta!

The ASP.NET AJAX team also has some exciting news with the release of the ASP.NET AJAX Library beta. James has a terrific blog post with the news This is the first project accepted into the new CodePlex Foundation! (more on that later) The ASP.NET AJAX Library has a new portal at www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary with tutorials, samples, and more. Read James’ post about the news and check it out!

IIS Application Request Router 2 final release!

The IIS team also released the final version of the IIS Application Request Router v2. This is a super powerful module that provides routing and load balancing capabilities for Windows and IIS. It makes it easy to create and manage an entire cluster of Web servers. Mai-lan has a lot of info on the release in her blog post and you can download ARR v2 using Web PI today.

PHP WinCache module final release - faster PHP on Windows!

The PHP team announced today the final release of the Windows Cache Extension for PHP, or WinCache for short, which makes PHP run much, much faster on Windows. The iBuildings guys released a benchmark showing how the WinCache extension speeds up PHP by as much as 2x over standard PHP. The other exciting part of this announcement is that the sources for the extension are now available under an open source BSD license and the source code is maintained and host on http://pecl.php.net/packages/wincache/ If you install PHP using Web PI, you automatically get WinCache.

IIS 7.5 Launched with Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2

bills — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:02:17 GMT

Since the Windows 2008 Server launch last March, the IIS team has shipped a bunch of new features that plug-in to IIS7 and in parallel worked on IIS 7.5, launching today in the Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 release.

IIS 7.5 includes many bug fixes, improvements and new features, and is definitely worth grabbing. If you haven’t tried IIS7 yet, check out the many reasons to try it. If you’re already using IIS7 and want to know what’s new in IIS 7.5, Mai-lan just posted an update to her blog with a nice summary. Note: the IIS Extensions which are not already included in IIS 7.5 will install and work on Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2!

ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 are here!

bills — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:56:07 GMT

The ASP.NET and Web tools for Visual Studio teams have been cranking away on this release all year long and we’re excited to launch Beta 2 today! MSDN subscribers can download it today…it will be available for everyone on Wednesday.

There are a ton of new features in this release, this MSDN page gives a good overview. Here are some highlights for Web developers:

Numerous improvements to Web Forms including more control over viewstate, meta tag control, new browser support, routing support for clean URLs, more control over HTML with FormView and ListView controls, filtering support in data source controls, better Web standards support and accessibility
New Dynamic Data features including a RAD experience for quickly building a data-driven site, automatic validation, field template support for GridView and DetailsView controls.
Visual Studio has undergone a face lift and now supports simpler, code optimized view, multi-mon support, enhanced multi-targeting and more..
Visual Web Developer has better support for HTML, CSS and JavaScript including auto-completion for tag names, IntelliSense for HTML and Jscript snippets, and more…
Visual Studio also natively supports the Web Deployment Tool, a powerful new packaging and deployment model for Web applications. Check out Vishal’s blog (PM for these features) for a bunch more info on this as well.
Auto-start Web Applications
And much more…

All said this is an impressive release and now is a great time to try it out and provide your feedback!

Microsoft Ajax Library Preview 6

bills — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:13:28 GMT

The ASP.NET team has been cranking away on more AJAX goodness…this time with a significant update to the Microsoft Ajax Library – Preview 6. This update includes updates to our client-side AJAX library that can be used with any type of Web application as well as deep support within ASP.NET for AJAX across ASP.NET 2.0, 3.5 and 4.0…for both Web Forms and MVC style projects.

In addition to the updated AJAX support, the team is shipping a cool new AJAX minifier tool which reduces the size of your JavaScript files to improve performance.

You can download the release from the CodePlex project and read more information on the team blogs below:

Scott – Announcing Microsoft Ajax Library…
Bertrand – Entirely unobtrusive and imperative templates…
James – How the Script Loader…will make your life wonderful

Also check out the Channel9 interview with Stephen Walther on the new release! Enjoy ~

IIS Media Services 3.0 Released!

bills — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:26:58 GMT

IIS Media Services 3.0 has been released and is now available as a free download for Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2! Chris Knowlton has a comprehensive post on the release and all the details, here is a quick summary:

IIS Media Services, an integrated HTTP-based media delivery platform, delivers true HD (720p+) streaming and provides real-time logging to measure media investments. By offering a complete media delivery platform together with a traditional Web server, rich dynamic Web sites can now be managed and administered from a single Web platform. IIS Media Services offers the highest quality streaming media experience available on the Web.

Server Features:

With this release, the key elements of the IIS media server platform now include:

· Smooth Streaming, adaptive streaming of media over HTTP

· Live Smooth Streaming, for live adaptive streaming of broadcast events

· Bit Rate Throttling, meters the speed that media is delivered to a player

· Web Playlists, secure sequencing of media content

· Advanced Logging, with real-time client- and server-side logging

· Application Request Routing (ARR), providing HTTP proxying and caching

Client / SDK Features:

We have also released a Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit, which allows developers to easily create Smooth Streaming experiences using Silverlight. Supported features include PlayReady, DVR controls, instant replay, slow motion, multiple camera angles, alternate audio tracks, content protection, ad integration, in-stream data feeds, and more.

Download IIS Media Services today, and let us know what you think in our Forum.

Available Jobs: I’m looking for an AWESOME design engineer

bills — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:13:00 GMT

I am looking for a super-star designer, to work full time @ Microsoft and report directly to me. This position will oversee the design architecture and visual branding of some of the most important visual assets of the Microsoft Web Platform. I am looking for an experienced, senior designer who can work in a dynamic team environment and do it all, from prototyping new looks and experiences to managing design-related contractor or vendor resources as well as someone who doesn’t mind rolling up their sleeves when necessary to implement the nitty-gritty details in HTML and CSS for large traffic sites.

I’m looking for someone who can infuse our products with an attractive and compelling design that speaks to simplicity, ease-of-use and great aesthetics. In this position you will oversee the visual design for both the user interface of some of our key products as well as the design for our high traffic community sites http://www.iis.net and http://www.asp.net. You will have the opportunity to work directly with developers, program managers, testers and product management across all of my teams including IIS, ASP.NET, and Visual Web Developer Express.

If you’re interested in applying, send me your resume and a link to your portfolio for review. thanks!

Error connecting to SQL Server from Windows 7 / Windows 2008 R2 with ASP.NET

bills — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:41:00 GMT

Just ran into this and thought I’d share. If you are trying to connect to a "user instance" of SQL Server from your Web application running on Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 and you’re getting a message that looks like this:

Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to failure in retrieving the user's local application data path. Please make sure the user has a local user profile on the computer. The connection will be closed.

I can probably help you out.

Note: this error only happens if you have User Instance=true in your connection string. The IIS team made a change to the default identity of the worker process. Starting with IIS 7.5, Application Pools run with a unique identity based on the Application Pool name, rather than NetworkService – the default identity for IIS6 and IIS7. The primary reason for this change is to increase the security of IIS and Application Pools by default, providing a much better sandbox between Applications and other Windows services by default.

Unfortunately, the new identity does not have a user profile, and as you can see from the error, this causes the SqlClient data stack to fail. There are a few things you can do to "fix" this error: 1) switch back to NetworkService 2) switch to a user account that has a local profile (like a real user / domain user account). To do that, fire open IIS Manager and browse to Application Pools node for your computer. Click on the AppPool for the application you are trying to run and select the “Advanced Settings” task (in yellow on right). Select identity and choose NetworkService as a built-in account, or select “Custom account” and type in the user/password.

If you’re a command-line person, you can do it this way (all on one line):

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set config  
-section:system.applicationHost/applicationPools /[name='YOUR_APPPPOOL_NAME_HERE'].processModel.identityType:"NetworkService"  
/commit:apphost

A big day for Web pros: WebsiteSpark, Web PI and more!

bills — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:11:43 GMT

Today we’re launching a number of really cool things for Web developers.

WebsiteSpark

WebsiteSpark is a program designed to jumpstart Web development for individuals or small companies who make a living on the Web. The program is free to join and runs for three years with no cost obligations other than a $100 program fee, payable on exit. What is in it for you?

Windows Web Server 2008 R2 – 4 processor licenses for production use!
SQL Server 2008 – 4 processor licenses for production use!
Expression Studio 3 – 1 license including Expression Web, Blend and Sketchflow
Expression Web – 2 licenses
Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition – 3 licenses
DotNetPanel control panel (to manage your servers, and allow your customers to manage their site!)

Beyond just software you also get free support, training and Microsoft will even help drive business your way. Anyone can join as long as 1) you build web sites or applications for other people and 2) your company has less than 10 employees. If you meet these requirements, sign-up today! As part of the sign-up process you will need a referral code. Contact me if you need a code, I’d be happy to sponsor you into the program! Read more about the program on the WebsiteSpark portal.

Web Platform Installer 2

I’m also happy to announce that the Web Platform Installer 2.0 is available in final release form! The Web Platform Installer (sometimes called Web PI) makes it easy to install the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform including IIS, ASP.NET, Visual Web Developer, SQL Express and more! New for the final release, we’ve fixed many bugs, improved usability, added new products including Expression Web, Azure Tools and the latest releases also being announced today. We’re also launching WebPI in 9 different languages and allow users around the world to access the Web Platform in their regional language. Look for more components of the Microsoft Web Platform to be added to Web PI v2 over time. Web PI also makes it super easy to install any of the Web applications in the Windows Web App Gallery. Web PI can also now install both PHP and MySQL for applications that require it. Install Web PI today!

Trivia: since launching the Windows Web Application Gallery at MIX in March 2009 – just 5 months ago – Web PI has installed more than 840,000 applications! Do you have a killer Web application just waiting to be discovered by the masses? Want Microsoft to drive users to your community? Submit your Web app to the gallery today!

Web Deployment Tool

The IIS team just released the final 1.0 version of the Web Deployment Tool, a super powerful deployment technology that you are going to see a lot of going forward. It is like a swiss army knife for Web masters. It can migrate sites or entire servers from IIS6 to IIS7. It can synchronize Web sites or applications between multiple servers. You can package a Web site or application and then push it out to your entire server farm. It knows how to not only replicate content, but also configuration, databases, COM dll, GAC assemblies, certificates, ACLs, and a whole lot more. After about three years of development I’m super excited to see this thing in final release form. It is already being integrated into Visual Studio 2010 and from there you’ll be able to not only build but also package and deploy your applications with just a few clicks of the mouse. Other teams around Microsoft are picking this thing up and integrating it as well, so you definitely want to get up to speed with this tool. Download it today!!

Database Manager 1.0

The IIS team just released the 1.0 version of Database Manager, and IIS Manager extension that makes it super easy to manage your database, local or remote, from within the IIS Manager tool. This thing rocks! It supports SQL Server and MySQL and is one powerful tool, and completely free. Check it out!

Search Engine Optimization Toolkit – Beta 2

The IIS team also announced the released the beta 2 of the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit, another IIS Manager extension that makes it possible to learn things about your site you can’t find anywhere else. It crawls your Web site, local or remote, and reports on dozens of well known but hard to discover issues that cause your site to be less relevant to search engines. This version includes many bugs fixes and new features over the previous release, definitely check it out and send feedback to the team on the forums.

Application Request Routing 2 – Release Candidate

The IIS team is also releasing a Release Candidate of the 2.0 version of the Application Request Routing extension for IIS7/IIS7.5, which provides built-in routing, load balancing, proxying and caching support on the IIS platform. This release includes an all-new disk cache option, bug fixes and performance improvements. Read more about the release in the learn portal. This powerful extension is available for free, download it today!

Microsoft Launches New Open Source CodePlex Foundation

bills — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:54:25 GMT

Microsoft’s strategy with open source has evolved over the past several years as we strive to make Windows the platform of choice for customers. My team has participated in that process first hand, we’ve worked hard with the PHP community to ensure PHP runs great on Windows, integrated PHP installation into the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, and engaged some of the most popular PHP applications like WordPress, Drupal, and SugarCRM to ensure customers have a great experience running these applications on Windows and IIS. We’ve also worked closely with the jQuery project to make it a natural part of building applications with ASP.NET.

Today I am happy to be a part of the announcement that Microsoft is sponsoring an open source foundation aptly named CodePlex Foundation, whose mission is to “enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities”. I believe the foundation will make it easier for Microsoft and other commercial software companies to participate in open source. You can read more about the announcement in my interview with Peter Galli on Port25 and learn more about the foundation at http://codeplex.org.

The CodePlex Foundation is a completely separate organization from Microsoft. To help form the foundation, we have formed an interim board of directors comprised of three Microsoft employees and three non-Microsoft employees, and elected Sam Ramji as the President of the Board. Microsoft has also donated $1 million US dollars to help the foundation get started and is transferring the use rights to the “CodePlex” term, along with the codeplex.org domain name to the CodePlex Foundation.

I feel lucky to be a part of the interim board of directors as we spend the next 100 days working together with the board of advisors, partners and you to structure how the foundation will work. We don’t have all of the answers and need your help to make it a success. You can read more about how to participate here: http://codeplex.org/participate.aspx

As always, I look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions about the new foundation.

New Experiences @MIX from the Microsoft Web Platform

bills — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:19:49 GMT

Today is a BIG day for the Microsoft Web Platform and a BIG day for the WEB. I’m down in Las Vegas at MIX and I just got off stage from the keynote where I demo’d just one of the many exciting and cool new things that make the Microsoft Web Platform better than ever. For example:

Using the new Web Platform Installer 2.0 beta, you can now download and install all of the technologies that make up the Microsoft Web Platform, and some of the world’s most popular Web applications, in one simple tool.
With the new Windows Web App Gallery, you can now discover world-class ASP.NET and PHP applications, read reviews from the community, and submit your own comments, as well as launch installation of an application in one click right from the browser.
With IIS Media Services, a free addition to the IIS7 Web server, you can now provide high definition audio and video streams LIVE and on demand.
With the final release of ASP.NET MVC 1.0, you can now build applications in the popular Modal-View-Controller paradigm, have complete control over your HTML and CSS, and build inherently testable applications
With the upcoming Visual Studio 10 release, we announced you can now package and deploy applications from right within the Visual Studio development environment, including support for multiple deployment configuration targets
In conjunction with the Silverlight 3 release, we’re also shipping a beta of Silverlight Tools 3, a Visual Studio development environment for building Silverlight Applications.
The IIS team is also introducing 10 new IIS7 extensions which extend the capabilities of the already powerful Web server to do things like:

Built-in Database management support, integrated with IIS Manager
Application Request Routing (ARR v2 beta) which includes advanced routing and load balancing capabilities, built-in to IIS7, including all-new proxy/cache support
Brand new content publishing features with FTP 7.5 and WebDAV 7.5
The final release of the IIS7 PowerShell support for managing the Web server from the command line using PowerShell
Web server migration, Web farm synchronization and application packaging and deployment support using the release candidate version of the Web Deployment tool.

With Commerce Server 2009, you can now more easily deploy enterprise-grade commerce-enabled sites using built-in SharePoint support.

All said, this is an amazing amount of innovation and I’m very proud of my team and the many hours they put into creating these very compelling new experiences. Try it out today, and tell us what you think!

More Tips and Troubleshooting Help for Classic ASP Developers

bills — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:10:18 GMT

Back in May of 2007 I posted a tips for Classic ASP developers post which has since received more than 50 comments and 85,000 views. Robert McMurray just posted a set of fabulous tutorials for Classic ASP developers. If you’re out there and having issues with Classic ASP and IIS7 and need some help, you’re not alone! Read these articles to get help:

Classic ASP is not installed by default on IIS 7.0 and IIS 7.5

In IIS 7.0 and 7.5, the classic version of ASP is not installed by default. Because of this, you might see HTTP 404 errors when you try to browse to an ASP page on your server, or you might see the source code for your ASP page displayed in your browser window ...

Using Classic ASP with Microsoft Access Databases on IIS 7.0 and IIS 7.5

Note: Microsoft Access databases have been popular for many years with developers who use Active Server Pages (ASP) for small-scale applications, but Microsoft Access databases are not designed for scalability, therefore Access databases should only be used ...

Classic ASP script error messages are no longer shown in a Web browser by default

In earlier versions of IIS, error messages from classic ASP scripts were sent to a Web browser, by default. Because these error messages might reveal sensitive information to malicious users, IIS 7.0 disables this feature by default. When your classic ASP ...

Using Failed Request Tracing to troubleshoot Classic ASP errors

One of the great troubleshooting features that is built in to IIS 7.0 is Failed Request Tracing, which lets you configure tracing rules on your server that will create detailed troubleshooting log files for custom failure conditions that you define. For example ...

Classic ASP parent paths are disabled by default

Classic ASP Parent Paths let developers use relative addresses that contain ".." in the paths to files or folders. For example, the following code excerpt illustrates an ASP page that maps a parent path: % Response.Write Server.MapPath("../example.asp")%> ...

APPL_PHYSICAL_PATH Server Variable on Windows Vista RTM

The original release of IIS 7.0 that shipped with Windows Vista returned a different value for the APPL_PHYSICAL_PATH server variable than that which was returned by previous

IIS7 request routing and load balancing module released!

bills — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 02:06:29 GMT

The Application Request Router (ARR) has reached final release and is now available as a free, fully-supported download for IIS7! ARR enables Web server administrators and hosting providers and to increase Web application reliability and scalability through rule-based routing and load balancing of HTTP server requests. With ARR, administrators can optimize resource utilization for application servers to reduce management costs for Web farms and shared hosting environments. Read more about the key scenarios and features of ARR on the IIS.net/extension site.

For more information on the ARR release, including new features just added as well as links to documentation and how-to get started, see Won’s blog post (Won ran the ARR project and is the Program Manager for the feature team).

Download ARR v1 today! You can download ARR, and all of the other cool IIS7 extensions, with the Web Platform Installer (Web PI). Web PI has been updated to include the ARR release and makes it super easy to install the entire platform – IIS, ASP.NET, SQL Express and even our development tools like Visual Web Developer Express. Web PI is always up to date with the latest new features and fixes for all the technologies that make up the Microsoft Web Platform. You can also find direct download links for X86 and x64 on Won’s blog post, if you prefer.

ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate build available now!

bills — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 05:30:39 GMT

The ASP.NET team just released the near-final build of ASP.NET MVC! Download it today! The tools team added a ton of new features in this release that you’ll want to check out – ScottGu outlines all of the new features and improvements in his gigantic post http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/01/27/asp-net-mvc-1-0-release-candidate-now-available.aspx

Working with the ASP.NET and Visual Web Developer tools team is a new adventure for me and I’ve been super impressed with the people and the products they are cranking out. MVC in particular is a very impressive project that offers a powerful alternative to the traditional ASP.NET webforms model of development. If you haven’t checked out ASP.NET before, or haven’t had time to look at MVC, now is a great time to do it. You’ll want to start with the following links:

Microsoft Web Platform Installer v1.0 Released!

bills — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:03:49 GMT

I’m excited to announce the immediate availability of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer v 1.0. The Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a simple tool that makes it very easy to download and install Microsoft's entire Web Platform in one step, including IIS, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework. Using the Web Platform Installer’s user interface, you can choose to install either specific products or the entire Microsoft Web Platform onto your computer. The Web PI also helps keep your products up to date by always offering the latest additions to the Web Platform. Web PI 1.0 supports Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista and of course Windows 2008.

Auto-update your Release Candidate build!

One of the cool new features we put into the Release Candidate is the ability of Web PI to upgrade itself. Try it today – if you installed the Web PI RC release in November or December, simply launch the tool again and you will see a prompt indicating that a new release is available. Say “yes” and Web PI will automatically download and install the final release version, and launch it for you!

Install clean

Been waiting for the final product? Wait no longer… if you haven’t tried Web PI yet, today is your lucky day…simply visit http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/WebPlatformInstaller.aspx and click the “Install Now” button. It will download and install Web PI in one click and away you go. Even if you think you already have IIS and ASP.NET installed, **get this tool** I can almost guarantee you there will be new features available for IIS or ASP.NET that you haven’t seen before..and if there aren’t today, there will be soon.

Get Ready for MIX…

If you think Web PI v1.0 is cool….just wait for MIX. ;)

Now Online: Comprehensive IIS7 Technical Reference

bills — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 06:33:50 GMT

If you’ve ever tried to find information on how to install a particular IIS7 feature, or how to configure it using the IIS Manager tool, AppCmd.exe, the new Microsoft.Web.Administration interface or WMI provider, this post is for you.

Every IIS7 feature is now comprehensively documented on http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/

This IIS7 Technical Reference provides a list of all the built-in IIS7 features, alphabetized for quick access. If you know the configuration name you are interested in, just type it into the URL…for example if you’re looking for information on the system.webServer <caching> setting, type: http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/system.webServer/caching and whoila, you now have a complete set of reference material on the subject. Literally hundreds of pages of documentation are now freely available at http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/ and super easy to access.

Each topic has a quick summary of what the feature is, how to install the feature as well as a quick “how-to” article (with pictures) on locating and using the feature inside IIS Manager. Each feature is carefully documented with comprehensive information on the configuration section behind each feature including information on each attribute, it’s type and default value as well as sample configuration. And perhaps best of all, every topic also has sample code for how to use the feature from AppCmd.exe, C#, VB.NET, JavaScript and VBScript! No more scavenging the forums or live search for sample code!

This reference guide could not have happened without a lot of hard work by many, especially Robert McMurray and Pete Harris (the mysterious man behind the iis.net site). Many thanks to them, we hope you enjoy this new section on our community site!