BillS IIS Blog
Bill's blog on IIS and the Microsoft Web Platform
-
Real-time XHTML Validator for IIS7
TheJoyOfCode.com guys have posted a great blog entry which demonstrates the power of IIS7's integrated pipeline, and provides a useful new feature for Web developers on IIS7. Last February, they wrote an ASP.NET module that could dynamically validate markup generated by your ASPX pages for valid XHTML. It is a a really useful cool, and makes it really simple to test your pages for browser compatibility and compliance. The only downside: since it is an ASP.NET module, on all versions of IIS prior to IIS7, it would only work for ASP.NET content.
IIS7 changes that, by allowing modules and handlers to be written using managed code for all types of content. Using the same IHttpModule and IHttpHandler APIs, developers can now write managed code extensions to the Web server which can intercept and serve all types of requests. And best of all, we built the extensibility model to be as compatible as possible with existing ASP.NET extensions. With a few simple configuration changes, your ASP.NET modules and handlers can now work with all types of content.The JoyOfCode.com guys show off how in their blog post XHTML Validator for All. Using the new IIS7 Admin tool, they wire up their module for a static HTML application. Without a single code change, their XHTML Validator works perfectly with static HTML pages, classic ASP, or even PHP! Check it out! -
PowerShell Rocks!
-
Introducing IIS Stats v1.0 for Windows Sidebar
-
Where do I go for IIS Support?
This is a question that I'm surprised doesn't come up more often. I guess, like many of you, I take pride in figuring things out on my own. I hate asking for help and admitting I don't know the answer. And we've all had the unfortunate experience of calling a support line for help and getting someone who we just *know* is even more clueless than we are. :)
-
Where's the beef?
When I was a kid, this was one of my favorite TV commercials. It always cracked me up for some reason. While trying to decide on an appropriate title for this blog, I remembered the commercial and was happy to find it preserved for future generations on WikiPedia and YouTube.
-
PHP on IIS7 w/FastCGI
I'm attending ZendCon today and giving a demo in the keynote presentation by Andi Gutmans, one of the creators of PHP, and co-founder of Zend. I'm psyched to show off IIS7 and PHP along-side Andi!
-
Microsoft Announces Collaboration with Zend to Improve PHP on Windows and IIS
I'm attending ZendCon today and giving a demo in the keynote presentation by Andi Gutmans, one of the creators of PHP, and co-founder of Zend. I am really excited to be a part of the announcement of technical collaboration between Microsoft and Zend to enhance the performance and reliability of PHP on Windows and IIS. You can read more details about the agreement in today's Press Release. There are so many good things about this project, I wanted to share my personal view on why I think this is such an exciting announcement for the broader Web community.
-
Why you're gonna love IIS7/Vista for Web development
I had an interesting experience this weekend. I fell in love with IIS7 on Vista. You know the feeling, I'm sure you've had it before. That feeling when you finally see something or someone for their full potential, and you start dreaming of all the things you want to do together. This weekend I had that moment with Vista for the first time.
-
Improving Custom Errors for IIS7 Server
Another one of my favorite features is the IIS7 Detailed Errors feature. Thomas wrote a great article titled Understanding Custom and Detailed Errors which provides a good overview of this simple, yet powerful feature. (though it needs to be updated for RC1+)
-
Making Failed Request Tracing More Approachable
One of my favorite IIS7 features is something we call "FREB", which originally stood for "Failed Request Event Buffering". We've given it a more friedly name now: 'failed request tracing', but everyone around here still calls it freb. It is a really awesome feature that essentially allows you to configure IIS to "watch for" certain error coditions and provide you detailed trace information about the request. This makes it much easier to diagnose failures than in past versions of IIS, especially those hard to repro issues that seem to only happen at 3am when you should be sleeping. IIS will not only log all of the IIS trace events we've sprinkled through our code, but ASP.NET trace events, and even your own page trace events! It is one powerful feature.