Longhorn Server Beta 3 is out of the door!

You may have noticed a lapse in activity on my blog - for the past month or two, I've been completely heads down in the last SB3 bugs, security analysis, and final rounds of DCR planning for IIS7.  We are getting closer and closer to RTM, and I am excited to see the feedback for all the work we have been doing as more people try out IIS7 and deploy with it. 

However, I just have to break the silence to blog about the Longhorn Server Beta 3, which is out today!

The Server Beta 3 is a key release for IIS7 - we are probably one of the few if not the only team in Windows to put so much work into the product during the Longhorn server milestone, focused on improving the production hosting features of the server, enhancing security, and increasing performance.

Here are some of the things that you get in SB3's IIS7:

1. Go live license - you can deploy the IIS7 web server in production!
2. Improved performance across virtually all server scenarios / workloads.  We've spent months improving the performance and scalability of the server, increasing site density, reducing memory footprint, and improving server throughput.
3. Production hosting of PHP applications with FastCGI, which is now part of the server!  If you have other FastCGI - enabled applications like Ruby on Rails, you can use those as well (although they have received limited testing - so we welcome your feedback).
4. Improved hosting support with automatic application pool isolation.
5. Centralized UNC configuration support allowing you to host server configuration in a central UNC location to simplify deployment and management.
6. New FTP server!  After years of having the same old FTP server, we are finally providing a brand new and improved FTP server, with managed extensibility to allow many exciting scenarios in the complete extensibility spirit of IIS7.
7. And of course, hundreds of fixes for issues reported since Vista RTM in both IIS7 and the ASP.NET Integrated Pipeline.

You can read more about some of these in Bill's blog - http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2007/04/25/what-s-new-in-iis7-beta-3.aspx.

We are also publishing a revised set of content to help you navigate through the new features - you can find these here: http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=7.  Part of this is a new center for developers (where you will see a lot of my stuff :)) - http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=7&subtabid=711. 

As soon as I free up a bit, I will be stepping up the content on the blog and writing a few more articles for IIS.NET to provide some in-depth content on some of these features, and how to take advantage of them. 

In the meantime, I invite you to download the beta and try it out:

As always, please leave comments and hit us up at forums.iis.net.