IIS7 guaranteed to impress developers and IT Professionals

Internet Information Services 7 (IIS7) contains a goldmine of features that will impress both developers and IT Professionals.  I presented last night's Atlas talk using Vista RC1, which gave me an opportunity while preparing to explore IIS7 in a bit more detail.  I was so impressed with my experience that I modified my agenda to include some of the IIS7 developer features.

The first thing you'll notice about IIS7 is its componentization.  It's been split into over 40 modules, so that you can build custom, specialized servers.  The resulting benefits include improved performance, a reduced memory footprint, and a more secure server due to the reduced attack surface.

Last night I showed some of the highlights which developers will love in the new Administration UI, called Internet Information Services Manager.
 
IIS Manager enables you to configure, control and troubleshoot both IIS and ASP.NET.  In the image below (click to enlarge) you can see how both IIS and ASP.NET settings can be configured from this extensible Windows Forms application that provides a unified administration interface. 

The icons under ASP.NET in Features View can be used to work with the Membership, Roles and Profile providers in ASP.NET, doing things like adding Roles and Members, and even adding and customizing users.  Note how for each feature I get a series of Actions on the right, and that in the above image, I have 3 different sites which I can administer with the same tool.

The new diagnostics and troubleshooting functionality of IIS is very impressive, and very relevant to developers who must monitor a solution that is in production.  Using the IIS7 admin tool, developers can easily see the state of all Sites, AppPools, Worker Processes, and App Domains.  I can even see the currently-executing requests in real-time, and trace requests from start to finish in a single log file.

One useful feature is the ability to enable automatic tracing for all 'failed' requests (note the Failed Request Tracing icon above).  In the image below, you can see I've set up tracing on the 500, 401.1 and 404 error codes.  Failures result in a very thorough XML description of each request that went wrong.

These features only scratch the surface.  If you're interested in what's new in IIS7, there's a very comprehensive source of information at https://www.iis.net and I'd encourage you to take a look.  IIS is one of those technologies where both web developers and IT Pros meet, and the good news is that there's a lot of love in IIS7 for everyone. 

(And by the way, IIS will be getting even cooler in the future, with Waterford's Brian Delahunty joining the Microsoft team later this month!)