Before the flight: Native Output Cache, PHP and FastCGI, and other stuff

I am sitting on a stack of juicy topics I've been meaning to post about, but I ran out of time taking care of last minute business before leaving the office for the long-awaited Thanksgiving vacation.

So, in the meantime, here are some interesting stuff to check out:

IIS7's Native Output Cache

- Kanwal, our test development engineer, has beaten me to posting about our new IIS7 native output cache feature. 

This is somewhat of a favorite of mine, so it hurts a bit not being the first one to give it thorough blog coverage ... Actually, I gave the first public demo of it during our PHP event last month when we first announced our PHP efforts.  Bill liked the impact it had so much, that he included it in his demo during the PHPCon keynote where we announced our FastCGI project and Zend collaboration. 

The native output cache in IIS7 was inspired by the ASP.NET Output Cache, which I owned in the ASP.NET 2.0 timeframe.   It is essentially a faster version of it, with much fewer features (no cache dependencies, validation callbacks, or fancy http1.1 client caching support), but still capable of caching dynamic content AND able to provide much better control of memory usage then the ASP.NET cache. 

Anyway, I am glad the word is getting out.  It is one of the greatest performance improvements IIS7 will offer in Longhorn server - in our internal benchmarks, we are seeing 500%+ improvements in dynamic content throughput with it on.  Go read about it.

PHP and IIS FastCGI

Earlier this month, Microsoft and Zend (the PHP company) announced their collaboration to provide better support for PHP on Windows and IIS platform.

Read more about this on Bill's blog.  Again, my thunder gets stolen, but this time, its my fault - I refused to be the one to go to the conference and give the demo

Watch for some news soon about:
- A new PHP distribution becoming available from PHP.NET that significantly improves core PHP performance on Windows
- Beta of the IIS FastCGI project, with fixes of the many issues found by the community in the FastCGI technology preview release we did earlier this month.

This is getting very exciting.  As much as I am looking forward to a vacation, I am also looking forward to coming back and working on this stuff.  It's going to kick ass.

Play with IIS7 in Vista

By the way, did you know that IIS is not for Windows Server anymore?  As soon as you get your hands on Windows Vista, you can set up your home server and play with the same features that will be available (albeit with much greater performance) in the Longhorn server release.

I am currently writing an article for MSDN magazine about the coolest features of IIS7 you can take take advantage of in Vista - and its amazing that all this stuff is going to be available on your desktop in a few months.  Check it out in January when the OS / magazine comes out.

Now, its time to finish packing and catch a cab to the airport.  Until December ...