Nikhil Kothari's Weblog : First Look at IIS7

For the past year, the team has been working on IIS7 alongside Whidbey. Finally, an overview of whats coming down the road has been published. My own top-three features (which I demo'd at an MVP summit last November) are:

Componentized web core allowing you to customize the functionality of the web server (at a very granular level) to fit your specific needs.
Managed extensibility model for extending the server using the familiar HttpModules and HttpHandlers model from ASP.NET along with a unified pipeline (so one, and only one, auth, authz, custom errors etc. model).
Unified configuration model for both IIS and traditional ASP.NET settings, and a brand new cool UI for managing and diagnosing the server to go along with the unification.

Check out the full article... What makes your top-three list?

Posted on Tuesday, 2/1/2005 @ 2:47 PM | #ASP.NET

Comments

5 comments have been posted.

Dan Guidara

Posted on 2/2/2005 @ 4:15 PM

Is there any way to see a demo of the new IIS7 features via a webcast?

Milan Negovan

Posted on 2/2/2005 @ 7:26 PM

A unified pipeline sounds great. I'm a big believer in HttpModules and HttpHandlers. I even wrote an online generator of them to get folks up to speed with minimal coding (http://aspnetresources.com/tools/pipeline.aspx).

David Taylor

Posted on 2/5/2005 @ 6:56 PM

I definately love the unified IHttpModule IHttpHandler system, and love the unified config system. It was always very hard to teach beginners how to correctly configure an ASP.NET application, and quite frankly one of the best things about Visual Studio 2005 is the inclusion of Cassini, so at least beginners will not have to understand IIS. But the best solution is bridging the two config systems as per IIS 7.

Could you let us know how you have done this?
a) Does IIS have the ability to configure a virtual directory from settings in a web.config file instead of the IIS Metabase (is this what you mean by distributed configuration?)
or
b) Is there some new config format for IIS and does ASP.NET pull the information it needs from this new IIS format (and are you deprecating the stuff in web.config)

I hope the answer is "a".

Secondly, I would be interested in any information as to if you have further integrated the caching capabilities of IIS 7 and ASP.NET. As you know there was many ways that ASP.NET and the IIS Kernel Mode caching could be better integrated; and I am interested if you have planned any of that work?

David Taylor

Posted on 2/5/2005 @ 6:59 PM

Hey Nikhil,

I just noticed you are showing our email addresses in your blog. This is really not a good idea as it will just be scraped! Could you either keep that as private informaiton for yourself; or else just provide a simple form where you wrap up sending a message to that user, rather than directly expose people (like my) email address :-)

Thanks,

David Taylor

Jason N. Gaylord

Posted on 5/26/2005 @ 8:00 AM

I saw an overview of IIS 7 yesterday and blogged about it here:

http://www.windowsadvice.com/blogs/jason_n_gaylord/archive/2005/05/25/Overview_Of_IIS_7_Alpha.aspx

There are definately some really cool features. Nikhil, make sure that Brett, Bill, Richard, and Scott all know they have a very cool product!

The discussion on this post has been closed. Please use my contact form to provide comments.