Scott Guthrie - Talking ASP.NET and IIS 7.0, Part II

I'd have been more interested to hear what Scott would say to a PHP developer as most people who use Apache don't really care about it much - they just use it because it's free, runs on a free OS and works, but it's difficult to get excited about a web server. PHP is something people do get excited about.

<facetious remark>
hmmm... 8,000 security reviews at 30-180 minutes per review?

Using my supreme maths skillz I predict ASP.Net 2 and IIS 7.0 will ship to customers in between 166.67 and 1,000 days.

</facetious remark>

Actually, that sounds about right anyway...

rhm wrote:

I'd have been more interested to hear what Scott would say to a PHP developer as most people who use Apache don't really care about it much - they just use it because it's free, runs on a free OS and works, but it's difficult to get excited about a web server. PHP is something people do get excited about.

I'd guess it depends on your priorities.  ASP.Net is great unless your customers run on something other than Windows.  PHP is great unless you want something you can scale easily.

I'm just curious as to what Scott's "elevator pitch" is for ASP.NET.

There is positive feeling of intimacy when you know you are programming on the same tool-level as the platform you are using. C programmers feel very close to Unix because of this. C++ users feel close to a Windows OS because of this. And now, because of Scott and his posse, ASP.NET developers can have that feeling as well: ASP.NET is almost all managed code---and we are writing managed code...

Will IIS 7.0 work on Windows XP (SP2)?

I was blown away with worker processes and host headers in IIS6 three years ago, and the prospect of dev'ing mods in managed code for IIS7 just sounds fun. With the scrapping of dynamic image generation from ASP.NET 2.0 I hope these types of mods will find their way into IIS 7.0 mods.. 

I 'left' php (although Rasmus, Zeev and Andi are great guys) for ASP.NET because of the event driven first class object model present in the Framework, and it just keeps getting better. The fact that the Framework itself will be ported out in time to Linux and Mac boxes makes it that much more interesting to dev now in ASP.NET than in php. 

Having to dev n-tier MVC architectures, or component-based entities in php was just a pain, and with WebServices, ASP.NET and IIS it is just plain fun nowadays. I enjoy stuff like Intellisense, sensible debugging, and not having to write alternating grid code. (All stuff you can't do easily for free with php by the way..)  Add to that the power to easily consume XML, and (to Scott's probable dismay) run any XSLT transformations on incoming data easily, well, php doesn;t look so pretty any more...  

The only thing I'd like to really see is the ditching of 'X-Powered By: ASP.NET' headers (Since I like to cloak my IIS server as a "Sun One Webserver" on header queries.. and a mechanism to save/restore ip addresses I'm blocking (Right now having to reenter 200+ IP's Im not blocking at the router level, but am blocking for a particular site, isn't much fun. (perhaps web.config could include forbidden ip's?)

Also, just a thought that now that "Allaire-cum-Macromedia-cum-Adobe" will now be working to get more mobile app support, I'd surely like to see IIS7 with better built-in support for common stuff like Flash, .mp3's and such.. Maybe this will all change with XAML and Avalon; but the ability to drop in an IIS module for something like a video jukebox in about a minute sounds appealing...
 
At any rate, Scott still rates Triple A in my book.    Thanks Scobie for the awesome Channel 9 video.
  

How much managed code in IIS 7?  Is that 90% too?  TIA

 Will IIS 7.0 work on Windows XP (SP2)?