Bill Staples - An hour discovering IIS 7

Synopsis: IE 7 team have ripped of the .htaccess file's abilities on Apache. Created a prettier admin UI and made it so the web.config file has a race problem where two sources can overwrite each other's changes (the admin tool overwriting notepad's changes for example). New extension mechanism, managed extensions...

that started out pretty slow.  The first 20 minutes I didn't see a single thing exciting.

 

then about half way through, it picked up and turned out to be a pretty intense video - I love the IIS Modules, that adds alot more options than the straight HttpModules and handlers we had before.

can't wait to test it out

wow  - Scoble brought up the Search feature question at about 40 minutes in - sad to see that Longhorn server *might* bring this in.


Until then you can just use .Search, I go well past 15 million pages, full ranking control, spidering, crawling, stemming, reporting, and it runs on top of community server so it has the entire community server api.  And its open source and free   My previous version (Nata1) can go past 100,000 pages and is also free, drag and drop in less than 5 minutes

I do think that the indexer should be built into IIS and should allow you to spider, and crawl the file system, and that should be free with IIS.

Great video...but what about hosting? What new features are there for hosting providers? What about management programmability? Have you improved the WMI provider for IIS7? I'm tired of having to drop down to ADSI or ABO to work around bugs in WMI for IIS6.

6 words: Thank you! Thank you! Thank You!

This is great.  I can finally manage my sites without remoting to the box and I love taking out the bloat I don't need.  I think this is the most excited I have been for the release of Longhorn...that is until we see some Longhorn Media Center videos...hint...hint

Prior to .NET 2.0 Beta 2, there was a managed assembly encapsulating the Metabase. Scott Guthrie told me this feature was pulled from scope for the release. Any updates on this feature?

Nata1 wrote:

wow  - Scoble brought up the Search feature question at about 40 minutes in - sad to see that Longhorn server *might* bring this in.

Heh.  I was actually chuckling when Scoble went, "Oooh, is that an RSS feed?".

Scoble, you're too obsessed .


mVPstar

Is this going to be backported to Server 2003 or is this a longhorn only feature?

javamaker wrote:

why even bother asking the question? You pay for the new features..

Sure would be cool if auto makers gave you free upgrades...

Comment removed at user's request.

IE 7 team have ripped of the .htaccess file's abilities on Apache

IE 7 ?? Were you watching a different interview?  Don't even get started on "ripping off" when it comes to software.  The backbone of the software industry as a whole was (and is) built on "reuse" of ideas, methods, and approaches.  When it's taken from friendly sources it's called "inspiration".  When taken from a foe, it's called "ripping off".  Give me a break.  If this held true for cars, only one maker would have round wheels.  The others would have to ship with square, triangle and octagonal wheels so they wouldn't be "ripping off" their competitors.  Sheesh. :O

Well said, skatterbrain.

But I have the same questions as mrichman... so call to Channel9 team: please consider a future video about the improvements of IIS7 in a hosting environment!

Modularization and custom handlers looks very interesting.

Re: default documents... there are, naturally, tricks you can do to emulate a default index.html even if you're not an admin, like

default.asp:
<%
    Dim q
    q = Request.QueryString
    If q = "" Then
        Response.Redirect "index.html"
    Else
        Response.Redirect "index.html?" & q ' already URLEncoded
    End If
%>

What I find interesting is the Microsoft's journey from decentralized, text-based configuration files (INI-Files) to centralized, binary configuration files (Registry, Metabase) back to decentralized, text-based config files (app.config, web.config).

One thing I always loved about UNIX is the degree of control you can have over your system by just using a text editor. No RegEdit or IIS console.

Good to see MS changing it's mind on this issue and returning to text file based configuration. Even better that they are using XML files. One thing I hate about UNIX is the myriad of different file formats you have to remember. Editors with schema-based Intellisense will make editing these files a breeze. Hint: This would be a great new feature for Notepad in Vista.

mawcc wrote:

This would be a great new feature for Notepad in Vista.

Nooooo!  Make a standalone XMLEditor instead.

mawcc wrote:

One thing I always loved about UNIX is the degree of control you can have over your system by just using a text editor. No RegEdit or IIS console.

While the simplicity of doing configuration with just a text editor is appealing, I still prefer a GUI for most things...Especially late at night or early in the morning (depending on your point of view) to at least curb the possiblity of making stupid mistakes.

I also enjoy being able to practically clone a server just by copying the xml file.

I can't help replying to the post about Microsoft "ripping off" stuff...People complain when Microsoft doesn't keep up, and they complain when Microsoft does keep up, and they complain when Microsoft is ahead...well, never mind, I guess I really don't know how to reply to that.


Keep up the good work guys!

You won't hear me complaining

As for the config files, it's thanks to XML that this can be good, the myriad of formats on unix/linux is a real PITA!

But they should only be complementary, the most important strength of windows is its GUI.

So MS, I'm very excited about these configuration files, but PLEASE don't forget to create a nice configuration GUI for everything as well !!!

Will the role manager support PKI? One-factor authentication is very insecure these days.

Some great new features - love the new GUI.

And how powerful does the "web.config" become !   

Although I could see someone accidentally clobbering the config file for "a site" with the config file for "my application" - rather than merging into the same file...    oops !

With plugging modules in/out of IIS - how does that relate to FTP ??. 
From the video, you'll be able to include (or exclude) many different modules - does that include FTP ??   (if it IS a module).

Imagine if someone would want to run a purely FTP server - not serve up pages (or ASP.NET) or any other such stuff...

Basically, how does FTP slot into IIS ??   Or are they separate ??

With all this talk about XML config files, will the C9 ever go into the development of the Installation/Deployment config XML files and related systems? I heard a long while ago that it would be a great help to people in my line of work that have to maintain a large number of machines/installs. Thanks, and keep up the great work!

Nice changes so far. But one thing that seems to slip through the craks every release is changes to the ftp server.  I am a network admin for a very large company that also does hosting, and i am using a 3rd party ftp software because the ftp server that comes with iis6 is not all good. I have used every release of iis and it doesn't seem like anything has changed.

Please look at some of the other 3rd party ftp software makers and bring some of those features into iis 6 and 7.

Notepad?  What about replacing SYSEDIT instead?