Remove zombie websites from your IIS server

Zombie websites get created whenever the root application of a website is removed, orphaning the rest of the application content in your website. Because IIS requires the root of the website to be an application, this effectively renders the website inaccessible: It cannot serve requests It does not show up in InetMgr It will likely … [Read more…]

Connecting to IIS 7.0 configuration remotely with Microsoft.Web.Administration

As you know, IIS 7.0 provides a number of ways to manage configuration other then MWA, including IIS Configuration COM objects for script, IIS Configuration COM objects from .NET or native clients, WMI, the IIS Manager tool (inetmgr.exe), and AppCmd. While all of these can be used to manage an IIS 7.0 box remotely (AppCmd with … [Read more…]

Backing up and restoring IIS 7.0 shared configuration

I blogged a long time back about using AppCmd to back up and restore IIS 7.0 server configuration.   Bill also just posted about backing up and restoring configuration, where he does a great job of telling you why you need to make backups and the options you got between manual AppCmd backups and leveraging … [Read more…]

Finding your way around IIS 7 configuration sections with AppCmd

The IIS 7 configuration system contains 50+ configuration sections (100+ if you count .NET Framework configuration), 477 attributes, and 57 collections.  This can make it pretty challenging to figure out exactly what IIS 7 configuration section needs to be used to turn on some particular behavior, and then exactly syntax the configuration in that section should … [Read more…]

Fastest way to create IIS7 websites, applications, and application pools

IIS7 provides quite a few ways to create websites, applications, and application pools.  The simplest way of course is to use the new GUI Administration tool, where your new website is always a few mouse-clicks away. But, what if you need to create 10, 100, or even 10,000 websites?  Unless you own a farm of … [Read more…]

IISSCHEMA.EXE – A tool to register IIS7 configuration sections

Download: iisschema.zip A very cool aspect of IIS7’s end-to-end extensibility is the ability to define your own configuration sections for your custom web server modules and handlers, that reside in the standard IIS configuration files side by side with IIS configuration.  These configuration sections can then be read/written with all the standard IIS configuration APIs and … [Read more…]

Anatomy of an IIS7 configuration path

If you have worked with IIS6 and previous versions of IIS, you are most likely familiar with the IIS metabase paths.  You know, the ones that look like LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT.  These metabase paths serve as a mechanism to identify a part of the IIS website hierarchy, or a url therein, for the purposes of read/writing their … [Read more…]