A look at the IIS7 web server in MSDN magazine

The march edition of MSDN magazine is live, containing my article about the IIS7 web server in Windows Vista.  The article is an overview of the many features and architectural changes in IIS7, that hopefully will point people towards the specific things that they may want to learn more about and try.

It's all about the IIS7 in Windows Vista, so that means you can start using all of those features today.  Some things covered:

  1. Componentized web server architecture
  2. The new C++ and .NET extensibility models
  3. The diagnostics and runtime monitoring features
  4. The new configuration and management APIs
  5. New security features

You can read the article at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/03/IIS7/default.aspx.

Writing it was a bit of a challenge because of there being so much to talk about, and only so little space / time.  So, I hope you will find the right balance of depth and breadth. 

Like I mention in the article, I am open to requests for more coverage on any topics of interest from the overview that I can cover on the blog.  So, looking forward to your comments …

9 Comments

  1. Anonymous

    Can you tell more about RSCA? Can it help to diagnose errors such as “Object reference not set to an instance of an object”. It is easy to track them in debug mode with source code available. But on production server debugging is disabled and there is no way to say in which source line this error has occured.

  2. Mike Volodarsky

    Bazile, RSCA is a way to send and receive data from a worker process at runtime. By default, it implements functionality such as getting the list of running worker processes, and the child appdomains and currently executing requests. You can also use it to implement custom messages to your modules inside the worker process.

    It doesnt help with request diagnostics – use the tracing / FREB feature for that, and the detailed errors provided by IIS / ASP.NET. Learn more about all of these at http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=7&subtabid=76.

  3. Anonymous

    Mike,

    “You can also use it to implement custom messages to your modules inside the worker process.”

    I have played with RSCA before but haven’t seen that feature – sounds interesting.

    Could you explain?

    cheers, dominick

  4. Mike Volodarsky

    Kevin,

    The only way to do this right now is by running “netsh http flush logbuffer”, which will flush the logs for all sites on the machine. Http.sys provides no runtime API for doing this currently …

  5. Anonymous

    Does all windows vista edition comes with IIS 7.0 ?. I am thinking to get the Home Premium edition.
    Thanks

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