New IIS7 modules, Hosting roadshow, MSDN magazine, IIS7 Resource Kit, and more

I've haven't had a chance to post much over the past few weeks – its pretty frustrating at times to look at the ever-increasing backlog of juicy IIS7 topics that I want to cover and no time to actually do them justice.

I've been working on a few interesting things lately, that have been taking my extra time.

Hosting roadshow
First, there is the hosting roadshow that Brett is putting together, which is packed with key know-how to help hosters leverage powerful IIS7 hosting features, and best practices for managing the server.  This is yet another sign of the comittment that the IIS team had made to improving the quality, and availability of IIS-based hosting with IIS7. 

The roadshow will be of great help in explaining the many hosting platform improvements that we rolled out in Windows Server 2008 beta 3, which have already found overwhelming success with many hosting companies that are currently offerring free IIS7 hosting.

I am putting together a couple IIS7 modules that will be part of the show, so if you are attending, you'll see those there.  I may be posting these for download on the blog as well in the upcoming months.

MSDN magazine, and making PHP apps sing on IIS7
Second, I've been working on an MSDN magazine article about enhancing PHP applications on IIS7, by combining the power of the ASP.NET Integrated pipeline with the new FastCGI-based PHP support.  There are a few really cool and never-before-seen demos there, so be sure to check it out when it comes out in November.

As part of this, I also put together a few interesting PHP integration pieces that I didn't end up putting in the article.  You can already check out the first one, the IIS authentication plugin for Wordpress, and I'll be posting the others soon.

IIS7 Resource Kit
Also, I've been working on the IIS7 Resource Kit book, where I'll be contributing one or two chapters.  I've been meaning to write an IIS7 book for years as we were developing the product, but unfortunately I never found this time.  So, I figured I'll write one or two chapters on my favorite topics in this one, and let others cover some of the other features I designed/worked on 🙂

You can read a little more about the IIS7 resource kit from Brett's blog (yes, he is driving this too!).

New IIS7 modules
Finally, I got a few IIS7 modules in progress that should be very helpful in boosting functionality of your IIS7 applications.  I am putting the finishing touches on these and should be releasing them soon, so stay tuned.

As I was writing this post, I also saw Microsoft.com's Top 10 things they love about IIS7.  It's really great to see them blogging about this – we've worked very closely with the Microsoft.com OPS guys since very early stages of IIS7, making sure that they can fully deploy and leverage the server.  Now, they are giving us the validation that only the 3rd largest enterprise web site in the world can, and we love it.

I couldnt also help but smile at the mention of AppCmd, Integrated Pipeline, and Output Caching as some of their top favorites, as those are some of the IIS7 features I designed/drove during the development cycle.  The mention of great application compatibility also made me remember the countless hours spent investigating existing apps and inventing ways to keep the new ASP.NET integration engine compatible with existing apps, while still supporting the powerful new functionality of Integrated mode.  The Microsoft.com guys themselves showed us a couple of particularly painful problems that we were convinced we couldn't address, until they said "you have to do it" and we found a way.

With IIS7 is not even at RTM yet, I love hearing success stories of production deployments, as they validate our work for this most ambitious release of IIS yet.  If you got a success story, be sure to share it!

Stay tuned for more cool stuff coming this month …