IIS

WebMatrix - a complete Web development stack that integrates a Web server, Database and more

Chris Crowe — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 01:49:26 GMT

WebMatrix includes a complete Web development stack that integrates a Web server (IIS Developer Express), database (Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0), programming model (ASP.NET Web pages with Razor syntax), and a tool (WebMatrix Beta) into a seamless experience. You can use WebMatrix to streamline the way you create an ASP.NET Web site from templates, or by starting a new Web site by using the world’s most popular free and open source (ASP.NET or PHP) apps like DotNetNuke, Umbraco, WordPress, or Joomla!. With WebMatrix you can code your Web sites, customize them, optimize them for good search engine ranking, test them, and deploy them to an Internet hosting company, all through the tool.

Learn more about WebMatrix through:

What is WebMatrix?
Investigate the top 10 features of WebMatrix.
Download WebMatrix Beta.
More about IIS Developer Express.
More about Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0.

For additional resources, visit:

Learn more about WebMatrix Beta. More resources, links to forums and feedback channels.
Visit the forums on the IIS Web site or the ASP.NET Web site.
File a bug or suggestion on WebMatrix Beta.
Learn to program the Web using ASP.NET Web pages with Razor syntax.
Download applications with WebMatrix and the Web Application Gallery.
Review the FAQs for Open Source and Free Web applications.

IIS7.0 Web Dav Module Bug

Chris Crowe — Tue, 19 May 2009 23:52:30 GMT

There is a bug in the IIS7 Web Dav Module shown below

The bug is that if you have a file or folder with an ampersand “&” character it will cause an error when using Windows Explorer. We installed this on a Windows 2008 Server 32 bit version at work and opened it up to users.

When a user browsed a folder with a file or child folder that contained an ampersand they received the following message

The fix is to either install WebDav 7.5 for IIS 7.0 or to install a hotfix. This hotfix rollup resolves the following issues that occur when you use the WebDAV module for IIS 7.0:

The PROPFIND responses are truncated at 4 megabytes (MB).
Some characters are not escaped correctly in the PROPFIND responses.
Virtual Directory enumeration does not work as expected.
Plus signs are converted to spaces in PUT request URLs.
The WebDAV handler mapping is not added when you reinstall the WebDAV module.
Request filtering settings are not configured when you enable WebDAV by using the UI.

A hotfix rollup is available for the out-of-band WebDAV module for IIS 7.0
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/957001

WebDav 7.5 for IIS 7.0 Module : 32Bit Version
http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1621

WebDav 7.5 for IIS 7.0 Module : 64Bit Version
http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&i=1618&g=6

WebDav 7.5 for IIS 7.0 Documentation
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=105146

Code Camp in Christchurch, New Zealand in November 2007

Chris Crowe — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 07:28:33 GMT

I see that there is now offical talk of a Code Camp in Christchurch, New Zealand in November 2007 which is good to see. I hope for some confirmed dates soon.

This is great news as the Mainland as we call it (the South Island of New Zealand) has never had a Code Camp before.

For pre-registrations and more details see http://dot.net.nz/Default.aspx?tabid=108

The theme of the code camp is Next generation, back to basics.

New releases of C#, VB, .Net, ASP and SQL are iminent. This code camp will focus on getting up to speed with all of this, plus cover migration stratigies and many non-technology specific topics such as Architecture and Development Life Cycle. Hopefully something for everyone - noobs, gurus, youg and old.

I have been asked to speak on IIS 7 and will be providing a session on this somewhere over the two day event.

I also spoke to Daniel Wissa ( at TechEd 2007) who runs the Christchurch .NET user group with Peter Jones [MVP] about running a shared session some time this year on Windows Vista Gadget Development. The code camp may be a good time for this session as well.

I am trying to get some sponser support as well - but I will keep it quiet until I know the result.

IIS7 Access Denied when using the IIS 7 Manager

Chris Crowe — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:43:50 GMT

While working on IIS 7 this morning I got the following error while trying to save some configuration settings to my Default Web Site

"
There was an error while performing this operation.

Details:

Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))
"

The error message displayed was not that friendly but I got a general idea - unable to save my changes!

There are a couple of clues :

Only occurs while saving - so sounds permissions related
The line in the status bar says "Configuration: 'Default Web Site' web.config". What this means is that the UI is going to save the changes to the web.config file in the home directory of the 'default web site'

Apon checking the web.config file I noticed that the Read Only attribute was set, and this was causing the issue above, maybe the UI should check if the web.config file is marked as read only and warn the user - I will suggest this to the IIS product team.

Starting and Stopping a Web Site And Application Pool

Chris Crowe — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 06:50:24 GMT

I had a request last week for the following:

I'm trying to do the following:

Stop a IIS website
Stop an App Pool
Start the App Pool
Start the Website

From what I can see here, I can use the example for the "starting an application pool" for the steps 2 & 3.

I have found that you can use iisweb.vbs to do steps 1 & 4.

But how link them in the order above?

Hope you can give me some pointers

The following code sample in VBScript allows you to do that with the following points of interest.

The Default Web Site is assumed - WebSiteID = 1, you can change this to any other web site by changing the ID with the ID of the other web site. There is a script called FindWeb.VBS or you can look at the log folder name and get the web site id from that - see http://blog.crowe.co.nz/archive/2007/08/04/IIS-Web-Site-Identifiers.aspx
There is only 1 site using the AppPool - well not technically true, if you run this and there is more than one web site using the app pool then it will be down while the app pool restarts.

Here is the code, save to StopAndStartSiteAndAppPool.VBS file and then run in a CMD.EXE prompt using the following syntax:

cscript StopAndStartSiteAndAppPool.VBS

Option Explicit

Dim WebSiteID, objWebSite, ObjAppPool

WebSiteID = "1"
Set objWebSite = GetObject("IIS://localhost/W3SVC/" & WebSiteID)
WScript.Echo "Stopping Web Site : " & objWebSite.ServerComment \
objWebSite.Stop()

wscript.echo "Stopping Application Pool : " & objWebSite.AppPoolID
Set objAppPool = GetObject("IIS://localhost/W3SVC/AppPools/" & objWebSite.AppPoolID)
objAppPool.Stop()

wscript.echo "Starting Application Pool : " & objWebSite.AppPoolID
objAppPool.Start()

WScript.Echo "Starting Web Site : " & objWebSite.ServerComment
objWebSite.Start()

You can also view/save the script from here.

Microsoft.com Operations Team Opens Up On Deploying IIS7 Early

Chris Crowe — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 20:02:08 GMT

I met up with Eric Woersching (who is a Technical Program Manager for IIS) while at TechEd in Auckland this last week and found that he had a great post on how the Microsoft.com Ops team installed IIS 7 and Windows Server 2008 into their environment .

There is a 38 Minute video available on his blog site that is well worth a look if you are interested in this type of migration which I assume we all are as we will all have to do this at some point.

For more details see http://blogs.iis.net/ewoersch/archive/2007/06/27/video-microsoft-com-operations-team-opens-up-on-deploying-iis7-early.aspx

To learn more about how the Ops Team for MSCom uses IIS to host and manage one of the busiest sites in the world, check out their team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/mscom.

IIS Product Team

Chris Crowe — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 06:52:43 GMT

I was talking with Eric Deily today at TechEd New Zealand in Auckland and he was discussing the size of the IIS product team.

Te team basically consists of :

8 or 9 Product Managers
18 Testers
16 Developers

I would have assumed that there would be more than this but I always knew it was a small team.

IIS Web Site Identifiers

Chris Crowe — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 23:15:12 GMT

Normally you do not need to be concerned about web site identifiers, these are the actual ID's that reference the web site to IIS. Normally we just use the web site description such as Default Web Site or in my case blog.crowe.co.nz or something similar.

But if you are interested in writing scripts you normally reference sites using the Web Site Instance ID.

In IIS 6 the IIS Manager shows you a column called Idenfitier and this is the actual ID that references the web site. This was not visible in Windows 2000 (IIS 5) or Windows XP (IIS 5.1) and we had to use different methods to see the identifier.

Using IIS 7 on Windows Vista you can see a column called ID which is the Web Site Instance ID

The Default Web Site always has an identifier of 1.

All other web sites on IIS 6 have web site idenfieir's that look like random numbers. The fact is that this is not the case and the identifier is generated based on the description of the web site. This is so that if you have a server farm as long as the descripiton is the same you will end up with the same web site identifier. See this article for more details on the way that these identifiers are generated.

Another way to identify the web site instance id is to look at the Logging Properties of a particular web site.

As you can see above the highlighted area shows the web site instance id. This is still a valid method for people using IIS 5 and IIS 5.1.

IIS 7 on Windows Vista does not include a logging configuration option - did they just forget it?

How about if you want to use a script to identify a web site?

IIS comes with a script called findweb.vbs that you can use to find a particular web site. This script is stored in c:\inetpub\adminscripts by default.

To use it you need to open a CMD.EXE command prompt and then use the cscript.exe utility to run the script. You also need to specify parameters to get the script to do what you want.

In this case I was interested in finding a web site called photos.crowe.co.nz

How about writing your own VB Script to list the site and the instance id?

Running the script above will display the web site Instance ID and the Description of the site.

IISxpress 2.1 for Windows 2003, Vista, XP and 2000 now available

Chris Crowe — Wed, 09 May 2007 06:41:34 GMT

You can now download IISxpress 2.1 for Windows Vista, 2003, XP and 2000 from the download area of RipCord Software. This version will also install and run on Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta 3 (build 6001).

The major features of this release are:

Now supports Windows Vista RTM and Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta 3.
Compression Cache - static content will be stored in the cache allowing for very fast compressed responses.
User-definable CPU Loading Model - on a multi-CPU system you can specify which CPU cores are used for compression tasks.
Update check - check that you have the latest version of the software.
The installer and all binaries are now signed to prevent tampering.

Screenshots:

The compression cache stores the most recent compressed responses. You can specify the size of the cache and the number of responses to store. Responses served from the cache can be up to 10 times faster than a full compression pass.

Specify the way IISxpress uses your CPUs for compression tasks. Select from Automatic, Manual or None. In Automatic mode IISxpress will allocate a CPU for each response. In Manual mode you specify which CPU cores IISxpress is allowed to use. When None is selected the Operating System manages the division of the compression tasks.

When you use IISxpress you can control which parts of your web sites are compressed. Here all the folders below FlexWiki will not be compressed (they are shown in red).

See http://www.ripcordsoftware.com/IISxpress/default.aspx

Enabling SSL on IIS 7.0 Using Self-Signed Certificates

Chris Crowe — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 02:08:49 GMT

Scott Guthrie has an article on using Self Signed Certificates with IIS and how to enable it in under 30 seconds.

Here is a primer...

SSL enables browsers to communicate with a web-server over a secure channel that prevents eavesdropping, tampering and message forgery. You should always use SSL for login pages where users are entering usernames/passwords, as well as for all other sensitive pages on sites (for example: account pages that show financial or personal information).

Configuring SSL on Windows with previous versions of IIS has been a pain. Figuring out how to install and manage a certificate, and then associate it with a web-site, is something I bet most web developers don't know how to enable.

The good news is that IIS 7.0 makes it radically easier to configure and enable SSL. IIS 7.0 also now has built-in support for creating "Self Signed Certificates" that enable you to easily create test/personal certificates that you can use to quickly SSL enable a site for development or test purposes.

Using IIS 7.0 you can SSL enable an existing web site in under 30 seconds. The below tutorial demonstrates how to-do this.

For the rest of the article see his article at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/04/06/tip-trick-enabling-ssl-on-iis7-using-self-signed-certificates.aspx