Archives
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Calling Web Services from Silverlight using IIS 7.0 and ARR
During this PDC I attended Ian's presentation about WPF and Silverlight where he demonstrated the high degree of compatibility that can be achieved between a WPF desktop application and a Silverlight application. One of the differences that he demonstrated was when your application consumed Web Services since Silverlight applications execute in a sandboxed environment they are not allowed to call random Web Services or issue HTTP requests to servers that are not the originating server, or a server that exposes a cross-domain manifest stating that it is allowed to be called by clients from that domain.
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Creating a Setup Project for IIS Extensions using Visual Studio 2008
IIS 7 provides a rich extensibility model, whether extending the server or the user interface, one critical thing is provide a simple setup application that can install all the required files, add any registration information required, and modify the server settings as required by the extension.
Visual Studio 2008 provides a set of project types called Setup and Deployment projects specifically for this kind of applications. The output generated for these projects is an MSI that can perform several actions for you, including copying files, adding files to the GAC, adding registry keys, and many more.
In this document we will create a setup project to install a hypothetical runtime Server Module that also includes a User Interface extension for IIS Manager.
Our setup will basically perform the following actions:
• Copy the required files, including three DLL’s and an html page.
• Add a couple of registry keys.
• Add the managed assemblies to the GAC
• Modify applicationHost.config to register a new module
• Modify administration.config to register a new UI extensibility for InetMgr
• Create a new sample application that exposes the html pages
• Finally, we will remove the changes from both configuration files during uninstall -
Microsoft Web Platform Installer Beta Released
Today we are releasing a new Web Site at http://www.microsoft.com/web/ where users can get a one stop shop for learning about the Microsoft Web Platform. This is part of a bigger effort to make it easier to get started with building and running Web Applications on Windows and IIS.
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Using IIS Manager Users Authentication in your Web Application
Today in the IIS.NET Forums a question was asked if it was possible to use the same IIS Manager Users authentication in the context of a Web Application so that you could have say something like WebDAV using the same credentials as you use when using IIS Manager Remote Administration.
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Modifying IIS 7.0 Administration.config using Javascript and AHADMIN
AHADMIN is the COM API that IIS 7.0 uses for reading and writing its configuration system. One of the not so well known features is that you can also use the same API to manage Administration.config by calling the SetMetadata method and specifying that you will be targeting Administration.config. What this ends up doing is using an IAppHostPathMapper built-in mapper that will re-map the files so that you can manage Administration.config easily.
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"EXCEL.EXE is not a valid Win32 application" problem in Windows Vista
Every now and then after leaving my computer running for several weeks I would get a weird error message when trying to launch Excel saying something like:
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IIS 7.0 and URL Rewrite, make your Web Site SEO
In the past few days I've been reading a bit about SEO and trying to understand more about what makes a Web Site be SEO (Search-Engine-Optimized) and what are some of the typical headaches when trying to achieve that as well as how we can implement them in IIS.
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Configuring SSL using Javascript in IIS 7.0
In IIS 7.0 the configuration system has a nice feature that lets you extend it using what we sometimes refer as dynamic properties. This properties rather than being hard-coded in XML in some .config file they are implemented by COM interface that whenever a tool queries its value, the configuration system will create an instance of such a COM object and will query its value (through the IAppHostPropertyExtension interface). In our configuration system we used this capability to surface some runtime features such as the state of an Application Pool. We also used this feature to expose the SSL Certificate configured in a site binding. Furthermore, this extensibility also allows us to expose methods that provide functionality in a very similar way (through the IAppHostMethodExtension interface). We used this capability to provide functionality such as recycling an Application Pool, restarting a Site, or adding a certificate to a binding.
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Application Request Routing and the IIS 7.0 Web Management Service
Yesterday I was having a conversation with Anil Ruia who happens to be the ARR (Application Request Routing) developer and based on customer feedback we discussed the idea of using ARR in the context of Remote Management in IIS which solves a question that several people asked me before and thought it would be fun to try it out.
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Back again
For the past month its been pretty quiet in my blog since I have been a little bit busy with the best thing that has happened in my life, my first baby Sofia was borne and today we are celebrating her first month. Days have been incredibly full of love, fun and joy (but certainly not of sleep). Now nights are much better, sleeping for a few hours now and back at work with lots of enthusiasm for the upcoming work in IIS and the incredibly exiting times at the team. So now by blog should show a bit more activity moving forward.
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Very funny blog to read, Linux Hater's blog
One of the things I try to regularly do is to read blogs that are not necessarily pro-Microsoft and one of my favorite ones is Miguel de Icaza's blog. The other day I was reading one blog post that caught my attention about a blog he says he is a "fan of" named "Linux Hater's blog". So of course I decided to give that a read and went and started reading the entries in there, and I just could not stop laughing and laughing, and before I noticed I had been reading for almost an hour. I do have to warn though, the vocabulary used is their entries is ...um... lets say fluid?.
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IIS 7.0 Remote Administration and Database Manager Video
DiscountASP.net published a very nice video that shows how you can enable IIS Manager and Database Manager and other modules for their customers.
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Adding ASP.NET Tracing to IIS 7.0 Failed Request Tracing
IIS 7.0 Failed Request Tracing (for historical reasons internally we refer to it as FREB, since it used to be called Failed Request Event Buffering, and there are no "good-sounding-decent" acronyms for the new name) is probably the best diagnosing tool that IIS has ever had (that doesn't require Debugging skills), in a simplistic way it exposes all the interesting events that happen during the request processing in a way that allows you to really understand what went wrong with any request. To learn more you can go to http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/266/troubleshooting-failed-requests-using-tracing-in-iis7/.
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Mapping a different file extension for ASPX Pages in IIS 7.0
Today I read a question in one of the IIS.NET forums - although I'm not sure if this is what they really wanted to know - I figured it might be useful to understand how to do this anyway. Several times users does not like exposing their ASP.NET pages using the default .aspx file extension (sometimes because of legacy reasons, where they try to minimize the risk of generating broken links when moving from a different technology, to preserve the validity of previous search-engines-indexes and sometimes for the false sense of security or whatever).
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DiscountASP.net releases new IIS 7.0 Manager modules
DiscountASP.net who has been a very close partner of the IIS Team leading several offerings of our platform - including IIS Manager Remote Delegated Access to the Web Site and many other cool tools - has just built and released yet another cool module that extends the IIS Manager capabilities by having a GAC Viewer for their customers.
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IIS 7.0 Site ID Computation
In my previous post I mentioned that IIS Manager (more specifically Microsoft.Web.Administration) has two algorithms for assigning a Site ID when no ID is specified.
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Faster IIS Web Sites Provisioning using Microsoft Web Administration
Yesterday I got an email about some performance numbers that one of our customers were running into when creating remotely Web Sites, Applications, Application Pools and other tasks in IIS using Microsoft.Web.Administration. In case you don't know Microsoft.Web.Administration is a .NET library that exposes the IIS Configuration System.
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Extending the IIS Configuration System using COM
Today I was going to post about extending the IIS Configuration, in particular about a feature that not everybody knows that allows you to extend the IIS Configuration System using dynamic code. What this means is that instead of hard-coding the configuration using XML in a .config file, your configuration can be provided by a COM object that implements IAppHostPropertyExtension, IAppHostElementExtension and IAppHostMethodExtension.
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IIS Admin Pack: Database Manager
OK, this blog entry sat in my drafts for more than a month now, but finally today I will be talking about another cool feature of the IIS Admin Pack, Database Manager.
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URL Rewrite Technical Preview 1 available
Today we are releasing a very cool feature that lots of customers have really been asking for, URL Rewrite Module is now available for download at:
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New Articles for Building IIS Manager Extensions Published in IIS.NET
Gurpreet Singh who is a developer in my team published last week a couple of articles on how to extend IIS Manager 7:
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IIS Admin Pack Technical Preview 2 Released
Today we are releasing the Technical Preview 2 of the IIS Admin Pack, it is an update of the release we made on February.
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IIS 7.0 Talk at ASP.NET Connections at Orlando
Last Monday I gave a presentation at the ASP.NET Connections event in Orlando, the title was IIS 7.0 for ASP.NET Developers. I just wish I had more time to stay at Orlando, weather was great, especially considering that Sunday I was watching Snow in Redmond and then Monday and Tuesday I was around 80 degrees in sunny Orlando.
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Not getting IntelliSense in your web.config for system.webServer sections in Visual Studio 2008?
Today I was playing a bit with Visual Studio 2008 and was surprised to see that I was not getting IntelliSense in my web.config. As you might already know IntelliSense in Xml in Visual Studio is implemented by using a set of schemas that are stored in a folder inside the VS folder, something like: \Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Xml\Schemas. After looking to the files it was easy to understand what was going on, turns out I was developing using .NET 2.0 settings and Visual Studio now ships different schemas for Web.config files depending on the settings that you are using: DotNetConfig.xsd, DotNetConfig20.xsd and DotNetConfig30.xsd.
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How to register a new Section Definition using Microsoft.Web.Administration
Today I was asked how can someone would be able to add a new section definition using Microsoft.Web.Administration, so I thought I would post something quickly here just to show how this could be achieved.
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Host your own Web Server in your application using IIS 7.0 Hostable Web Core
IIS 7.0 includes a very cool feature that is not so well known called Hostable WebCore (HWC). This feature basically allows you to host the entire IIS functionality within your own process. This gives you the power to implement scenarios where you can customize entirely the functionality that you want "your Web Server" to expose, as well as control the lifetime of it without impacting any other application running on the site. This provides a very nice model for automating tests that need to run inside IIS in a more controlled environment.
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IIS Admin Pack: Configuration Editor
Today I will be talking about one of the features included in the new IIS Admin Pack called Configuration Editor.
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IIS 7.0 Admin Pack: Request Filtering
My last post talked about the Technical Preview release of the IIS 7.0 Admin Pack, and how it includes 7 new features that will help you manage your IIS 7.0.
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IIS Admin Pack Technical Preview 1 Released
I'm really exited to announce that today we released the Technical Preview of the IIS Admin Pack and it includes 7 new features for IIS Manager that will help you in a bunch of different scenarios.
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Search your configuration sections in web.config files using IIS 7.0 API's
In IIS 7.0 we have the great functionality to allow you to configure the Web Server settings in a distributed way, including the IIS configuration along with the ASP.NET configuration in the web.config files by using Configuration Sections. For example, the following shows a web.config adding a default document (home.aspx) to a Web Application inside my Default Web Site:
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IIS 7.0 Manager for Windows XP, 2003 and Vista SP1
Last Wednesday we released the IIS Manager 7.0 client for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista SP1.
This is basically the IIS 7.0 Manager GUI that provides the ability to connect remotely to a Windows Server 2008 running the Web Management Service (WMSVC) to manage IIS 7.0 remotely. -
Windows Live Writer Plugin to insert Colorized Code
When I installed Windows Live Writer for the first time I was skeptical of having a different blog writer, so far I was very happy using Microsoft Word 2007 as my blog editor. However I decided to give it a try and see what I could get from it.
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Using Microsoft.Web.Administration in Windows PowerShell
A couple of months ago I wrote about using LINQ with Microsoft.Web.Administration to manage and query IIS 7.0 configuration. Somebody came back to me and said that LINQ was very cool but that it was very much Developer oriented and that in a production server without VS or .NET 3.5 it wouldn't be an option. Indeed that is a very valid comment and so I decided to show similar stuff with a tool that is available in Windows and its more IT oriented, Windows PowerShell.
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Looking for an Icon Editor?
If you are like me and every now and then develop applications that you want to create an icon for, and you don't have the money to spend on a nice commercial tool (or rather spend it in Halo 3, RockBand or Guitar Hero III), then you probably face the problem that tools don't tend to support saving bitmaps as icons.
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Backgammon and Connect4 for Windows Mobile
During the holidays my wife and I went back to visit our families in Mexico City where we are originally from. Again, during the flights I had enough spare time to build a couple of my favorite games, Backgammon and Connect4.