IIS7: Gettin' Ready...Are you Ready?
For months, in fact years, the IIS team has found itself fighting an uphill battle with IIS7 and customers. It is a proven fact that you can build amazing technology with a bucket-full of wanted features but until it is "real" - it is mostly hot air. For quite some time, IIS7 hasn't been a real thing - the thing that you can get your hands on and deploy. It is the moving target of "buzz words" and flashy demos to pull out the oohhs and ahhhs. Buckle up podro - only the strong survive.
The date: Wednesday, April 25th, 2007. The mission: Learn and deploy IIS7
T-2: Here Comes IIS.NET Navigation
The rush of shipping software and beating deadlines is second to none, at least for me. It is 10:36 PM and I am still focused on pushing through on stage 1 of what should certainly be a whirlwind of weeklong events as finally - and I do mean finally - we release Window Server Codename "Longhorn" Beta 3. For over 9 weeks, my life has been consumed by a date other than "tax day" and it was April 25th. It was the doomsday of put-it-up or don't collect $200 (monopoly folks) - less than 36 hours away and I think we are about to rock the world. There is no rush like knowing that, while deployments are the key to the game, your role in the grand scheme of things is to bring customers to the product - or as I like to say - the rubber to the road.
On Wednesday, we will release our next major update to IIS.NET for the IIS community and most, if not all, of this update is about IIS7. The theme is without a doubt simple - It's Ready! A few weeks of torturous demands and unbelievable hours will finally culminate with relief, joy, and satisfaction. Our sweat and tears is your gain - and WE LOVE IT!
We (IIS.NET team) have several goals leading up to this big release of Longhorn server where we go "public" as they say. Head-to-head with Apache, laser-focused on deployments, and driven by community, Beta 3 is like no release before for IIS.NET. We have the foundation set for the community to submit cool, useful tools in the DownloadCENTER. We have the perfect desktop suite of tools for IIS7 development with Visual Studio 2005 and Windows Vista (e.g. IIS7). Last, we finally have a Serveri for the magic you build with the impemending release. To make the learning curve short, we focused heavily on content and building the perfect pipeline to complement content creation and we opened the doors.
The results are a site driven by content awareness - from the homepage to the physical content we will ensure you are perfectly centered on what is the meat of IIS.NET - CONTENT. Yes, there are ads. Yes, there are graphics. However, In a couple of days we will release a major update that introduces powerful navigation features in most places on the site to raise your awareness of the great quality of content we have available for IIS7. The TechCENTER, our card catalog of content, is cool but in-your-face all the time is the only way to git 'r done.
Are we READY? Sheesh...
Are you serious? You better believe we are ready - the question is whether you are. We're releasing content all over the place with cool support directly from the product group in the forums and we know we are ready, are you? Go Live on IIS7 and we will know...