As is the case with most of my blog posting of late, it’s well.. late and in a big queue, but seeing this is relatively time sensitive and the fact that I’m over the moon again.  I thought I’d jot a quick post.

Last Thursday (1st July 2010), I was very pleased to receive an email from Microsoft to inform me that I had been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for 2010 – Internet Information Services (IIS).  This is the third consecutive year I have received this and as I’ve mentioned before I am extremely humble to be associated with a great group of technical people around the globe.  I’ll be aiming to continue my efforts to help the community and deliver as much content as I can to aid and spread knowledge. 

Finally I am uploading my slides and links to demos from the session I delivered at NxtGenUG Manchester on the 21st April, for those who attended thanks for coming along I hope you enjoyed the session, and I’d like to offer a massive apology for taking so long to post the slides and links to the demos.  My session covered the Web Deployment Tool including the integration in VS2010 and I also covered the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit.  Download the slides from my Slides & Resources page.

MS Deploy Resources

• Web Deployment Team Blog - http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/
• Vishal R Joshi at PDC – http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT56
• Vishal’s Blog - http://www.vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/
• Scott Hanselmann at Mix10 – http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/FT14
• MSDN Guide to XDT -- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465326.aspx
• MS Podcast on Web Deploy - http://www.microsoft.com/events/podcasts/default.aspx?pageId=x5283
• Vishal has also posted his snippets from his PDC session  - XML Document Transform XDT Snippets For VS2010

SEO Toolkit Resources

• IIS.Net – Main IIS Resource Site
• Carlos Aguilar’s Blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/carlosag
• IIS SEO Toolkit – Crawler Module Extensibility

This morning Scott Guthrie announced a new program to help Small Web Development Companies (10 employees or less) and individual Web Developers who develop Web Sites and Services.  The program runs for three years is free to join, all that is payable is a $100 fee on exit.  Benefits of the program include:

• Windows Web Server 2008 R2 – licenses;
• SQL Server 2008 licenses;
• 1 Expression Studio 3 license;
• 2 Expression Web licenses;
• 3 Visual Studio 2008 Professional licenses
• and more…

For full details of the announcement see Scott Guthrie’s blog post and to register visit the WebsiteSpark portal.

Announcements from the IIS Team

Today has been a day for announcements with the IIS Team also announcing a list of new releases – Bill Staples has full details of the releases – which are:

• Final Release of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2 –this is a great application which helps to install all of the components that you need to get started on the Microsoft Web Platform and with some great community apps, for example the great BlogEngine.Net on which I run this blog;
• Final Release of the Web Deployment Tool 1.0 – something I’ve delivered sessions on in the past and will be reviewing the final changes now I’m back from my holiday;
• Final Release of Database Manager 1.0 – a great extension for the IIS Manager which enables easy management of your databases;
• Search Engine Optimization Toolkit – Beta 2 – Another great IIS extension which I have started to look at and will post more on soon;
• Application Request Routing 2 – Release Candidate;

For more information refer to iis.net and to Bill’s blog post, I’m off to read up on today’s great announcements.

I have been using Internet Explorer 8.0 since the release of Beta 1.  IE 8 requires more standards compliance in the code of web pages for them to display correctly.  Today I was catching up on my RSS Feeds and came across this very useful article - Configuring IIS to work around webpage display issues in Internet Explorer 8.0 and this article discusses the use of adding a HTTP Response Header which then informs IE to run in IE Compatibility mode, therefore rendering the page as it would render in Internet Explorer 7.

The article gives complete details of how to set this up on IIS6 and 7 (integrated and classic mode) and it is very straight forward.  I have implemented it on our live webserver but not on our development server - so we can fix the issues rather than relying on compatibility mode.  Also the default is to set this for your entire server, i.e. any sites, applications and pages served.  However by adding this remove tag into the root web.config of a site you can remove the use of the HTTP Response Header from that particular site and the site will run in true mode (remember to place the httpProtocol element within the system.webServer element in your configuration):

<system.webServer>
  <httpProtocol>
    <customHeaders>
      <remove name="X-UA-Compatible"/>
    </customHeaders>
  </httpProtocol>
</system.webServer>

I must stress I definitely see this as a temporary workaround and only as a backup plan to buy you a little time to sort out the rendering issues!  I would always advocate coding your XHTML and CSS to correct standards!!  Standards Compliance has many added benefits including search engine optimisation and accessibility benefits for users of your sites!!

Last night Alan Dean came up to VBUG in Newcastle to speak on ASP.Net MVC Framework.  One of the discussion points we had was any potential issues for hosting sites on IIS due to the routing and url rewrite elements of the MVC Framework.  I wasn't clear on the implications, and I hadn't seen much traffic personally on the issue.  So with a task of downloading ASP.Net MVC Framework Preview 5 so I could have a good look at it and understand it all as an alternative to Webforms, and looking into the implications and workarounds for hosting within versions of IIS I went of in search of information.

I immediately thought that with IIS7 and applications running in Integrated Mode, which is the mode I aim to run all of my applications on IIS7 in, there should be no configuration changes or modifications required since ASP.Net is part of the pipeline so all requests are processed by ASP.Net by default.  In classic mode ASP.Net requests are processed through the aspnet_isapi.dll as they would be in IIS6 so unless files are mapped to the ASP.Net Isapi filter then they wouldn't be processed.  In reading up about ASP.Net MVC on the ASP.Net website I found a great tutorial on Using ASP.NET MVC with Different Versions of IIS - hopefully this will be of help to you looking to configure and use the ASP.Net MVC Framework on IIS.

In IIS6 when creating a virtual directory it was possible to set the virtual directory to actually add as a redirect to another page or site.  In IIS7 this is still possible however it needs to be achieved slightly differently.  Lets take an example.  Say you have a website and you are running a number of offers and would like to offer users the option of navigating to them through a short path such as domain/offer1, domain/offer2 etc then you would have in IIS6 set these Virtual Directories up with dummy Physical Paths, e.g. the root of the parent site, and set the option to redirect to a URL.

In IIS7 because the configuration is stored in a web.config file in the physical path of the virtual directory, this can cause the redirections to be overwritten, i.e. if you set up the redirection of domain/offer1 to go to domain/offers/offer1 and then go and set up domain/offer2 to go to domain/offers/offer2 you will find that both redirections go to domain/offers/offer2 because the value in the web.config file has been overwritten by the second redirect rule.  In order to achieve the desired effect and get the redirections to work, you need to actually add the redirections to the applicationhost.config file and set a location tag for the site you are working in.  This is currently not possible in the User Interface but is possible to achieve using the APPCMD utility.  Here are the steps to achieve this.

1. Open an elevated command prompt

2. then run the following command -

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config "nameofsite/virtualdirectoryname" -section:system.webServer/httpRedirect -enabled:true -destination:destinationofredirect -commitpath:apphost

an example of this command would be:

c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config "Default Web Site/offer1" -section:system.webServer/httpRedirect -enabled:true -destination:Offers/Offer1/default.aspx" -commitpath:apphost

The key element here in this command is the commitpath directive which adds sets the configuration in the applicationhost.config:

<location path="Default Web Site/Offer1">
  <system.webServer>
    <httpRedirect enabled="true" destination="Offers/Offer1/default.aspx" />"
  </system.webServer>
</location>

Hope this clears it up :).

This afternoon I received an email from Microsoft telling me that I've been awarded the 2008 Microsoft MVP award for my efforts in the Internet Information Services Community over the past year.  This is a great honour to be classified in the same group as the many other great MVPs who do great work throughout the community.  I hope I can continue in the same way in the coming months and years.

On the evening of Wednesday 2nd July 2008, I'll be presenting a session on IIS 7.0 for ASP.Net Developers at Black Marble's Community Evening in Bradford.  This event is part of a full day of sessions which Black Marble are hosting.  In the morning they're hosting a session on Overview of the current and future states of Microsoft’s Real World SOA and Business Process Automation platform and in the afternoon they are hosting a TechNet in the North session - Microsoft's Vision for Unified Communications - delivered by James O'Neill and then I will be completing the day with the community element.

The abstract for my session is as follows:

IIS7 for ASP.NET Developers

One of the biggest and best new features of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista is Internet Information Server 7.0.  IIS 7.0 is the latest and most significant release of Microsoft's Web Server. With this release comes a new extensibility model which gives developers more options than ever before, more diagnostic tools with which developers can debug and locate issues. During the session Andrew will investigate the new architecture, look at extending, configuring and developing for IIS7, take a look at its management user interface, and introduce the debugging and diagnostic facilities within IIS7.

For more information and to register for this event go to - http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Andy%20Westgarth%20on%20IIS7

Steve Schofield, IIS MVP, recently set up a new site - http://www.appcmd.com - which is a great resource for commonly used appcmd scripts.  Appcmd is the new command line administration utility for IIS7.  I've used the Tech Preview of the PowerShell provider for IIS and I use the IIS7 Manager a lot but I still like to work with APPCMD an awful lot and this new site is definitely going to be top of my list for daily checks to see any new content.  Go take a look and let Steve know what you think.  Also if you have any favourite APPCMD Scripts also let Steve know and they may get posted.  Thanks for starting this site Steve, it's a great resource.

I've been taking a look at the web stats from my blog over the past few days and have noticed a lot of hits on a previous post - FrontPage Server Extensions for IIS7 and thought I would follow that up with a link to a great series of blog posts which Robert McMurray has been writing recently about Life after FrontPage Server Extensions  Hope this post helps anyone searching for info on IIS 7 and FPSE and the ways forward.