First thoughts on IIS 7 and Hosting

So Microsoft released it and I was reluctant to embrace it until I could collect some real feedback. And I since I started talking to my friends who are web administrators, developers or running web hosting business, all I hear is “IIS7 Rocks!”.

Yes, it impressed me much as well when I decided to check it out. And there are several reasons for that. Here I list them for my readers what I was able to find & test on my own or gather from my hosting friends.

Most of the people I discussed were all praises about IIS7. I asked them, why they thinks that the IT pros should go for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0? And the most common statement I got from them is-

“Because it is the next-generation technology for Web development, hosting, and management.The developers are very happy.”

And here are some of the reasons why:

• The very user friendly IIS Manager. It has an integrated Admin UI tool that manages both IIS and ASP.NET settings together. Included within this rich GUI is support for things like the Membership, Roles and Profile providers.The admin tool also supports remote delegated admin over http -- which means you can point the rich-client admin tool at a shared hoster server and manage your users/roles/profile settings remotely over http.
• Windows PowerShell to manage your Web sites and application pools.
• The capability to host non-Microsoft language Web application with FastCGI
• APS.NET features, like forms authentication, can now be applied to any content types; including asp, html, and php pages.
• No more Metabase. You can now configure IIS7 websites using the web.config file which means application deployment and configuration is a lot easier. you can have both ASP.NET and IIS configuration settings in the same file together. Allows things like default pages, IIS security, logging, etc within a web.config file and xcopy/ftp it to a server.
• Much better configuration APIs and command-line tools, which are also extensible, so you can plug in your own providers and extensions to them.
• Much better request auditing and error debugging. A new feature we call "Failed Request Event Buffering" which allows administrators to configure applications to automatically save request information anytime an error occurs during a request, or if a request takes longer than a specified amount of time to complete.

Supported and deprecated components in IIS 7

Supported components

• AJAX 3.5
• ASPEmail
• ASPJPeg
• ASPNETEmail
• ASPNETMX
• ASPNETPOP3
• ASPTear
• ASPUpload
• CDO
• CyberSource
• JMail (free version)
• OWC 11
• /n software IP*Works! Internet Toolkit v8 .NET Edition
• Report Viewer Control
• Richer Components - RichTextBox 3.x, RichMessageBoard 3.x

Unsupported Features

• .NET framework 1.1
• FrontPage Server Extensions
• AJAX 1.0
• MySQL database
• Access ODBC Tool
• Livestats
• Analog Web Statistic

Unsupported Components

• /n software iBiz Integrator ASP.NET suite
• /n software IP*Works! ASP.NET & ASP components v6
• Graphic Server .NET 3.5
• Obout Treeview
• Richer Components (RichSlider, RichHelpTip, RichDatePicker)
• Verisign PayFlow Pro Component
• WebSuperGoo ABCPDF.NET
• WSE 2.0
• WSE 3.0

Interesting? I am impressed.

IIS 7.0 has been designed to be the most secure and flexible web and application platform from Microsoft. With the redesign of IIS, Microsoft has really focused on making the IIS 7.0 a better web server for everyone, from IT Professionals, Developers to Web Hosters. It is going to be a huge benefit for web application frameworks like PHP which expect single-threaded environments. It lets them run fast and reliably on Windows, and begin take advantage of all the cool features of IIS.

To sum up I’ll try to highlight some of the main reasons why I believe IIS 7.0 is a strong product:

• The product is more secure – only the binaries needed are installed
• It’s extendable in a flexible way, because of the new modular architecture
• It’s easier to scale-out – because of the simplicity in configuration, based on xml files
• Better performance – due to the improvements to the core of IIS (http.sys)

There are plenty of opportunities for trying out IIS 7.0 yourself and getting familiar with it. Try it. And share your experience.

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