IIS Diagnostics Toolkit January 2006 Released

After a six month delay (for the gory details, see this entry and this entry), we finally released the updated version of the IIS Diagnostics Toolkit January 2006 on Friday the 13th on January 2006. Superstitions aside, it can be found here:

https://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/iis/diagnostictools/default.mspx

All I can say is that I am glad that it is finally all over and that Chris and I survived. After dragging the project to near completion and getting DebugDiag to properly build within the NT Build Environment (which is necessary for Windows OOB to build and sign-off on the binaries such that we can put it on Microsoft Download Center), I still ended up doing the last bit of technical fixup of the MSI to locate the missing ')' which silently syntax errors and causes the MSI to not function completely correctly. But, who cares about counting those details when you finally get the job done? :-)

Now, creating the "a la carte" version of the Toolkit (i.e. a separate MSI for each of the tools collected inside the toolkit) is still left on my plate, though last I heard the IIS Diagnostics branch in Windows OOB mysteriously died again... so it may take a little longer. But hey, you already have the "full monte" version, so we are just talking about disk space and red-tape administrivia here...

The most important updates in this release are:

  1. DebugDiag 1.0 RTM - Yes, the final, non-beta binaries. No need to sign up for MS Betaplace anymore. It is a totally free download.

    I encourage everyone to use it as a first debugging step (however, notice that general troubleshooting may not start with debugging... so I do not recommend jumping to it for everything because that is not its purpose).

  2. WFetch 1.4 - The new "Raw" checkbox allows you to switch between seeing either the "raw" data coming over the wire, or the decrypted, decompressed, and de-chunked entity body.

    Yeah, we also fixed several bugs which prevented WFetch from de-chunking properly as well as de-compressing without crashing, so it should hopefully work a bit better.

  3. SSLDiag - Updated to be aware of SSL Host header support in IIS6 on Windows Server 2003 SP1, and it also contains SelfSSL (from the IIS Resource Kit Tools) on the commandline, with bug fixes made since that release. Yes, this was the easiest way for us to "fix" SelfSSL bugs and get it to you. Updating the IIS Resource Kit Tools would have been a huge ball of yarn all its own...

  4. TraceDiag - There is finally a tool to help you gather/view the ETW Trace events of IIS6 added in Windows Server 2003 SP1. But no, we cannot help you make sense of it because, uh, sometimes it eludes even us. ;-)

    You will have to wait for IIS7 where we finally sat down and made this information digested and ACTIONABLE, not simply gathered and available.

Enjoy!

//David