IIS7 is a major upgrade of IIS, and will ship in both Windows Vista as well as Windows Longhorn Server.  It includes a ton of new functionality, including some very rich integration with ASP.NET.  This includes:

1) The ability to now have HttpModules and HttpHandlers participate in all requests to a server.  You no longer need to map requests to the ASP.NET ISAPI in order to write managed modules that participate in requests.  This makes building modules for flexible authentication, authorization, logging, url-rewriting, auditing, etc. super easy with .NET.  You could even now have an ASP.NET HttpModule provide forms-authentication to a PHP or JSP page (in addition to .htm files and static files like images and movies).

2) Integration of the ASP.NET configuration system with IIS.  IIS now uses the same web.config configuration model as ASP.NET, which means you can have both ASP.NET and IIS configuration settings in the same file together.  You can now set things like default pages, IIS security, logging, etc within a web.config file and xcopy/ftp it to a server.  This should simplify deployment and installation of applications considerably.  It also enables "delegated administration" for hosting scenarios -- where a hoster provides the application developer the ability to configure certain settings in their web.config file without requiring full admin privledges.

3) An integrated Admin UI tool that manages both IIS and ASP.NET settings together.  Included within this rich GUI is support for things like the Membership, Roles and Profile providers (so you can create/delete users directly within the GUI tool -- regardless of what provider is configured).  The admin tool also supports remote delegated admin over http -- which means you can point the rich-client admin tool at a shared hoster server and manage your users/roles/profile settings remotely over http (which is pretty cool).

4) Much better request auditing and error debugging.  We have a new feature we call "Failed Request Event Buffering" (affectionately known as "FREB"), which allows administrators to configure applications to automatically save request information anytime an error occurs during a request, or if a request takes longer than a specified amount of time to complete (note: if the request completes ok this information can then be just thrown away -- and so doesn't fill up your disk log).  This allows you to easily go in after the fact and see what exactly happened during a request that failed, as well as analyze any error exceptions.  This can even capture tracing messages generated within ASP.NET or within any component or class library that uses System.Diagnostics -- which makes it much easier for developers and admins to instrument and analyze what is going on with systems at runtimes.

5) Much better configuration APIs and command-line tools.  In addition to new config and admin APIs (including a nifty one that you can use to get a listing of all "active" requests being processed by the server -- as well as what state they are in), we now have a great command-line admin story that you can use to set/modify/retrieve all configuration information as well as manage the server (start/stop individual apps, lookup their health state, register new apps, refresh SSL certs, etc).  The command-line tool and APIs are also extensible, so you can plug in your own providers and extensions to them.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/04/20/443513.aspx

Prior to this pricing announcement, Visual Studio Express Editions were promotionally discounted to be free for one year, starting on November 7^th, 2005. With this announcement, the promotional discount for Visual Studio Express is now permanent and Express will continue to be free.

Also there is a number of starter kits released...

Visual Studio 2005 provides some capabilities for visually editing the styles for elements in an HTML or ASP.NET page. For example, in Design view, you can right-click a control or element, and then choose Style to display the Style Builder dialog box. Although the style builder enables you to create and edit in-line styles, there's no way to edit the styles that are inherited from a linked style sheet.  The new CSS Properties window provides this capability — it enables you to edit both in-line styles and styles in linked style sheets.

The CSS Properties window is an add-in package to Visual Studio 2005. It does not change the behavior of any feature in Visual Studio 2005; it simply adds additional functionality specific to editing CSS in Design view.

Features

Using the CSS Properties window, you can do the following:

• Display in-line styles and styles inherited from <style> blocks and linked style sheets.
• Edit in-line styles and styles in linked style sheets. (The CSS Properties window displays styles from <style> blocks, but does not enable you to edit them.)
• Display drop-down lists of styles and values to help you create valid style definitions.
• Drag style settings between different elements and to and from a style sheet.
• Edit styles for multiple elements.

For more details see http://www.asp.net/sandbox/app_sandman.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=1

You can download the plugin from http://blogs.msdn.com/mikhailarkhipov/archive/2006/04/17/577471.aspx

Note: The page above has a large white space so you will need to scroll to the bottom to see more details...

• Enterprise
• Enterprise Evaluation
• Developer
• Standard
• Workgroup

Download Link

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=cb6c71ea-d649-47ff-9176-e7cac58fd4bc&amp;displaylang=en

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916940

Basically the browsershots.org site will allow you to submit your web site and have its clients render your site using a number of different browsers and you can then see how your site looks on different operation systems and browsers and browser versions.

The day I visited the following browsers were supported.

• Epiphany 1.4.8
• Firefox 1.0.4
• Firefox 1.5.0
• Galeon 1.3.20
• Konqueror 3.3
• Mozilla 1.7.8
• MSIE 6.0
• MSIE 7.0 Beta
• Opera 8.50
• Safari 2.0

There is a limit in the size of the queue to around 60 minutes which means that only the browsers that are available within the 60 minutes will take your job when you submit it.

This service is free for you to use because of the way the site works.

Basically they have a server sitting around with a big pipe to the Internet and clients ( nice people who will do the automated screen captures) will accept a job and the client will then use their browser to browse to the site in question and produce a PNG graphic. The client will then submit the image to the central server which stores it so you can view it later.

You can see my site in the following browsers below:

I came across an interesting site today http://clustrmaps.com

See at a glance where your site's visitors are located: instantaneously, even when the numbers are enormous! Visitors don't need to click on anything: just viewing your page is sufficient.

One thumbnail map on your site shows it all: We provide (free) the HTML that gives you a thumbnail map, like the one on the left. When it loads, it increments a counter and shows the locations of all the visitors to your page, cumulatively (even for huge numbers). Clicking on it zooms in to a big world map, and (optionally) lets you zoom in to the continents, as in the example below.

No hidden extras: For light users (under 2500 visitors daily - that is me) the service is free, forever, and stores cumulative totals up to many hundreds of thousands of visitors. Paying users get extra features.

The following ASP script will allow you to view all services on a particular computer and their current state (Started, Stopped, Starting, Stopping etc)

Important

By default you will not be able to run the script because the IUSR_ computer account does not have the correct permissions to perform this action.

If you do try to run this script with the standard IUSR_ account you will get the following error.

HTTP 500.100 - Internal Server Error - ASP error Internet Information Services Technical Information (for support personnel) Error Type: (0x80041003) /service/Default.asp, line 4   Page: GET /service/Default.asp

 

Line 4 was this line in the source file: set objService = GetObject("winmgmts:")

The way I worked around this was to create a new local account on the IIS server (in my case Windows XP) called "MyASPService". I gave this account no special permissions or anything else just created the new account.

You then create a new directory in your web site called "MyServices" or what ever name you want.

In the Internet Information Server manager you then configure this directory by changing the default anonymous user account from the IUSR_ account to your new "MyASPService" account as shown below.

When you now request the page in the browser it will now use the new MyASPService account and it will work.

Example Outputt

The Dhcp service is Running

---

Service Name	Service Caption	Service State
Adobe LM Service	Adobe LM Service	Stopped
Alerter	Alerter	Stopped
ALG	Application Layer Gateway Service	Running
AppMgmt	Application Management	Stopped
aspnet_state	ASP.NET State Service	Stopped
AudioSrv	Windows Audio	Running
BITS	Background Intelligent Transfer Service	Stopped
Browser	Computer Browser	Running
CacheMgr	Sophos Cache Manager	Running
CiSvc	Indexing Service	Stopped
ClipSrv	ClipBook	Stopped
clr_optimization_v2.0.50215_32	.NET Runtime Optimization Service v2.0.50215_X86	Stopped
clr_optimization_v2.0.50727_32	.NET Runtime Optimization Service v2.0.50727_X86	Stopped
COMSysApp	COM+ System Application	Running

I have been getting very frustrated with the Visual Studio 2005 code editor being very very slow. I found a reference to a potential fix to this issue.

Typing into the VS.NET 2005 code editor can be extremely slow.

Test

Open a project (C#) in VS.NET 2005 and go to the code editor.

Place your cursor between functions and just hold down the "1" key for about 5 seconds.

How many key presses got recorded? in my case about 45 and they only appeared after another 5 seconds, now follow the steps below and then repeat.

Potential Fix

The Navigation Bar appears to be causing this excessive slow down. Do you even know what the Navigation bar is? THe Navigation bar is displayed at the top of the code window and updates so you can jump to a function or definition of an object directly instead of searching or scrolling.

I have seen these Navigation bars since VB days but I never use them so I have no problem with turning them off.

In VS.NET 2005 select Tools - Options to open the Options dialog.

Scroll down to the Text Editor node and then select C# and then the general tab.

Now remove the check next to the navigation bar.

Click OK

Is it faster?

On my computer I now get about 135 characters in 5 seconds.

Reference : http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=154948&SiteID=1

The following script will allow you to process all physcial and virtual directories for a particular web site and show what authentication methods are enabled.

Each directory will have one or more of the following to determine the authentication methods enabled.

• A = Anonymous
• B = Basic
• D = Digest
• N = NTLM
• S = SSL
• S128 = SSL 128 Bit

You must specify the web site instance id when calling the script. In the case of Windows XP Pro there is (by default) only one web site which has an instance ID of 1. If you are running multiple web sites on a Server OS or you have created multiple web sites on XP pro then you can find the web site instance ID by the following method.

• Right click the web site, select properties, on the web site tab under logging click the Properties button, part of the log file name will contain the web site #
  
  example log filename: W3SVC1\exyymmdd.log  - the web site is 1
                                   W3SVC45\exyymmdd.log - the web site is 45

Calling Usage:   cscript EnumAuthenticationMethods.vbs  InstanceID

Example Output

You can download the source for this script here (just rename to .VBS from the .TXT file that it is now)

I saw a request on the Microsoft.Public.InetServer.IIS newsgroup today and so I modified a prevously written script I wrote on www.iisfaq.com to do the task.

Question

• I'm running an IIS 5.1 web server at home (Windows XP Pro), and what I was hoping to do is list all of the directories for a web site which have anonymous access disabled

Answer

The following script will allow you to process all physcial and virtual directories for a particular web site and show if they allow anonymous access or not.

You must specify the web site instance id.

In the case of Windows XP Pro there is (by default) only one web site which has an instance ID of 1.

If you are running multiple web sites on a Server OS or you have created multiple web sites on XP pro then you can find the web site instance ID by the following method.

• Right click the web site, select properties, on the web site tab under logging click the Properties button, part of the log file name will contain the web site #
  
  example log filename: W3SVC1\exyymmdd.log  - the web site is 1
                                   W3SVC45\exyymmdd.log - the web site is 45

Calling Usage:   cscript EnumAnonymousAccessDiabled.vbs  InstanceID

Example Output

You can download the source for this script here (just rename to .VBS from the .TXT file that it is now)