To learn more about IIS 8 Head on over to iis.net

http://www.iis.net/learn/get-started/whats-new-in-iis-8

The key Items I am excited about:

• Centralized SSL support (tutorial to come)
• Managing both ASP.NET 3.5 and ASP.NET 4.5 applications
• CPU Throttling and sandbox / application throttling

So if you are interested in testing it out, head over and download the VHD / ISO

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/evalcenter/hh670538.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/06/28/introducing-iis-express.aspx

It is a cross between the built in Developer web server (Casinni) and a full blown IIS install on your PC.  This is extremely helpful for those who are still using XP or Vista and need to have the features of IIS7.   In a corporate enviroment many developers are still on XP as an OS.  They are limited to the local IIS 5.1 features or they have to use the built in ASP.net developer web server that is included in Visual Studio.

Both of these options miss key elements that reside on the desitination servers that developers publish to.  What happens is that a deveroper cannot fully test features or their applications because of the limitations of their local machine.

Items like URL rewrite, SSL, host headers, and endpoints cannot be re-created on local machines.  It sounds like IIS Express will be a great tool to help eliminate these issues.  Of course if you have IIS7 available and are running Win 7 you don’t have these problems.  However,that is not the case for many Developers in a larger corporate environment.

We are looking forward to this new tool to test and see how well it works.  For anyone who has tried to write a WCF service on XP they will quickly understand the value of this tool.

This great post over at iis.net by Thomas Deml that explains the new features of selfssl7 and has a link to download this tool:

Download selfSSL7

SelfSSL7 has the following features:

• The site name SSL is to be configured on
• The IP address
• The port
• Add as a trusted root certificate
• Export to a pfx file
• One or more configurable common name
• Configurable expiration date
• Configurable key size

You can see all the examples of use and features at Thomas Deml’s post ( http://blogs.iis.net/thomad/archive/2010/04/16/setting-up-ssl-made-easy.aspx)

What a great new tool.  We are excited to use this to secure our internal applications and use it for testing.  I hope the IIS team keeps up the great work and continues to push out tools like this.

A great thanks to the dotnetpanel / websitepanel team for opening up this project.    After reading some of the forums it is unclear of why this was turned open source, but I’m sure we will hear more in the next few months.

This is a great tool that is now available for everyone.  Source can be downloaded from sourceforge.

http://www.websitepanel.net/

There is a great article on IIS.net that talks about the methods to install PHP on IIS.

http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appsxml=&appid=PHP;PHP;PHP

In the recent months I have found that the Web Platform Installer is the best method to accomplish this.

http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx?appsxml=&appid=PHP;PHP;PHP

I would love to hear comments from others on their experiences.  PHP on IIS5 or IIS6.  I know that performance on IIS7 with cache has been great so far.

Remember that SQL express only allows up to 4 GIG databases and 1 Gig Memory. (SQL edition comparison)

This quick instruction sheet will show you how to install SQL Express Advanced edition and the client tools (SQL manager).

1st – obtain the download (SQL express download) – Select the SQL Express with Advanced Services

2nd – Once you select the install button, the package with either launch Web Platform installer or install web platform installer)

3rd – Install the client tools.  For some reason each attempt I have made to install the advanced services the client tools (sql manager) was not installed.    To install the client tools: Open Web Platform Installer

Select Web Platform on the left tabs

Then select the Customize link under the Database section

Once you have completed this you can add the Management tools.

Good luck and happy SQL’ing.

• Installing FTP
• Host Header FTP sites
• Securing FTP (SSL)
• Logging and parsing logs

If you have any additional questions for FTP on IIS please send us a message or hit the forums.

For more information regarding FTP 7.5 and the new features please head over to iis.net to read up on what the new product will do.

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/310/what-is-new-for-microsoft-and-ftp-75/

We plan to have some real-world examples and conditions in our series.  Look for the upcoming posts.

Alex Zambelli breaks down all the elements and some high-level changes from the 2008 Olympics.  Great work guys.

Article – http://blogs.iis.net/alexzam/archive/2010/02/16/streaming-the-olympics-how-we-got-here.aspx

Alex’s blog – http://alexzambelli.com

Many people have emailed me about how to setup and ssl on their development environment or internal sites without paying for a certificate.  Here are the steps to secure your local IIS server (windows 2003) with a self signing ssl.

You will need to download the IIS 6.0 Resource kit from Microsoft – (here)

Install just the selfssl (or everything if you want to use the resource kit)

Download the resource kit.  Execute the iis60rkt.exe and select next on welcome page. You will have to agree to the license.  Select Next, and select the Custom install option to just install the SelfSSL 1.0 program.

Select your directory, for this example I will just use the default. C:\program files\iis resources\.  For this example I am only selecting the SelfSSL option

Select next to install and finish when it is done.

Install should be complete.

Create Certificate

We will now create a certificate.  Open a command (DOS) window. Start | run | cmd.  Change directory to the location where you installed the resource kit.  I chose the default location c:\program files\iis resources.  To do this type “cd c:\program files\iis resources\selfssl” in the Command window.

Once in the resource kit directory you can use the selfssl.exe program to create a certificate.  If you run the program “selfssl.exe /? “ You will see all the options available.

We will be using a few options to modify our certificate to allow for a FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain name) [/N:CN]and the correct Site ID [/S]

Before we can run the command and install the certificate we need to find the site id for the particular IIS site that we want to have the ssl bound to.   If you are running only one site on the server and it is default then you can use the /S:1 (default site) option.   I typically turn off the default site on my servers for security reasons and have more than one site running.  To find an IIS site id there are a few options.  I prefer the simple route of viewing the log file for that site and showing the properties there.

In this example I will be creating an SSL for the IIS web site (somedomain.com).  You can see from the image of my iis manager screen the site.

To find the site ID for this particular site (somedomain.com) we can right click and select properties.  From the site properties window under the “Web Site” tab select the logging properties button.

This will open the logging properties window.  On this window the log file name will include the Site ID

In this example the site ID we are going to be working with is 1341291934.  The log file name included the site ID after the starting W3SVC.

We now go back to our command window and will run the selfssl executable with the following commands.

Selfssl.exe /T /N:CN=somedomain.com /S: 1341291934

This command will create a certificate with the following options:
/T = Adds the local certificate to the trusted certificates list
/N:CN = the fully qualified domain name used for the site (somedomain.com) this would be your site name www.yourintranet.com
/S:1341291935 = Site ID (you got this from log file name on iis) 1 = the default site

You have now created an SSL certificate for the siteID you have chosen and can view the site properties and see your certificate will listen on Port 443 (SSL)

This is a simple and quick way to use SSL and encryption on your local sites and intranets.  I would not recommend using this method to secure a production server or a server on the Internet.  Please use a purchased signed SSL certificate.