HostingCon 2008

I had an opportunity to attend HostingCon at the Navy Pier in Chicago this week.  Microsoft was a Platinum Sponsor and had a pretty large booth that included an XBox 360 setup with Rock Band.  The hosting community is a fun bunch of folks so it was a great time to have folks come buy, discuss some technology, and play a little Rock Band.  Some of the Google folks came over and played Rock Band with a few Microsoft employees.  Everyone walking by seemed to get a big kick out of that photo opportunity:-)

I staffed the booth for Silverlight and Expression Studio, which drew a lot of interest from the hosting community.  I also had an opportunity to present on Microsoft's web platform (Windows Server 2008/IIS 7 as the platform, Windows Live Services such as Silverlight Streaming, and ASP.NET/Silverlight as the user experience) with my teammate Tito Leverette on Wednesday morning.  Hosters have traditionally had to support both the Windows and Linux platform.  Part of that need is because of the lackluster performance of PHP on Windows.  With FastCgi baked into IIS 7, PHP performs MUCH better on Windows than in the past.

Part of my demo was showing a PHP application running on IIS 7 with .NET forms authentication and a .NET HttpModule that dynamically adds a copyright to images.  the HttpModule was based on this coding walk through.

Here is a screenshot of QDig running on IIS:

This is the standard version of QDig that you can download from the Internet running on the unmodified Windows version of PHP.  QDig was my quick test app to see if I could get things working, which actually was pretty easy to do. 

Next I tried out Wordpress, which was also pretty easy to setup as well but to make it interesting I added .NET Forms Authentication as well as the ImageCopyright HttpModule described above.  Here is a snapshot of the .NET features that can be configured into a virtual directory:

Here is a screenshot of my .NET Users database for the WordPress directory:

The membership database is stored in SQL Server but is completely configurable.  Here's a screenshot of me logging into Wordpress with Forms Authentication:

Notice that the logon page is a .aspx.  the page is very simple to create, consisting of a couple of ASP.NET server controls (Login and LoginStatus):

<%@ Page language="c#" %>   
<form id="Form1" runat="server">   
        <asp:LoginStatus runat="server" />       
        <asp:Login runat="server" />   
</form>

Once logged on, you can see the Copyright notice written over any images on the page pointed out with the red arrow in the figure below.

If I scroll down on the page, there is another blog post with an embedded iFrame that points to a basic Silverlight video player showing a video I uploaded to the Windows Live Silverlight Streaming Service:

For more information, check out the IIS.net web site for details on how to set this up or drop me an email via my blog.