SP's are a necessity, but what I want to know is what have they done to improve IIS 7? Here's what the release notes for SP1 RC says:

IIS was included in some Windows Vista SKUs to enable web-based developers to write and test their applications. IIS in Windows Server 2008 is a significant server role which requires Internet-level scalability and performance requirements. The IIS7 components have gone through significant performance and reliability enhancements since Windows Vista originally shipped, in order to be a large-scale server component. These changes do not affect most Windows Vista users who do not even have the IIS7 components installed, however because Windows Vista and Windows Server are aligned, these changes are included in Windows Vista SP1.

You can find the "complete" change log here: http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsvista/en/library/005f921e-f706-401e-abb5-eec42ea0a03e1033.mspx?mfr=true

So does this mean that there is a full UI and ftp support? The current IIS available in Vista is very limited by this. You can configure most of the stuff in config files (like I did with http redirect and logging bandwidth and referrers), but I would at least expect the features found in IIS 6 to be available from the UI in IIS 7. I've googled around to find some  more info, but nothing yet. I guess I'll have to install the RC to find out. Not sure if I want to risk it though...

Christian Weyer has an article on MSDN Mag together with Steve Maine and Dominick Baier about using Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) for non http protocols. Actually it's about much more than that, but that is what I found interesting. Hosting WCF services in WAS gives you the possibility to use NetTcp, Named Pipes and MSMQ protocols. For more info about WAS you should read the article. Anyway, using WAS as a host for WCF services sounds like a good idea. You don't have to create and maintain your own NT Service and you get stuff like "on-demand activation, process health monitoring, enterprise-class manageability and rapid failure protection" for free. But then you also get some lifetime management "features":

"...WAS does demand activation (as you know, the "A" in "WAS" stands for activation). This means that the application domain hosting a service only gets created when a request message comes in. Application domains shut down again after a configurable idle period. There are also several reasons why WAS or the ASP.NET runtime may decide to recycle the application domain or even the whole worker process."

So I suspect there would be some overhead of creating and shutting down the app domain, unless you can set the idle period to infinite of course. And then you have the recycle bit... Hmmm.... Do I want that?

If I were asked: "WAS or NT Service?", I think I'll go for the NT Service, unless there's something I totally missed out on here... which definitely could be the case <smile>.

If you want to try this out you might find these code samples interesting in addition to the article mentioned.

I'm using SmarterStats for my blog statistics and have been annoyed by two things for a while. I get no statistics for bandwidth and referers. I looked around on the web and found that these things are actually not logged in IIS by default. I found this article describing how to enable it in IIS 6. Now I had to find out how to do the same thing in IIS 7. As I and others have mentioned earlier, IIS 7 in Vista don't have much UI yet, so most of the work is done in config files. I checked out the schema and came up with this:

<sites>
  <site name="Default Web Site" id="1">
    <application path="/" applicationPool="ASP.NET 1.1">
      <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="…" />
    </application>
    <bindings>
      <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:80:" />
    </bindings>
    <logFile logExtFileFlags="Date, Time, ClientIP, UserName, ServerIP, Method, UriStem, UriQuery, HttpStatus, Win32Status, ServerPort, UserAgent, HttpSubStatus, BytesSent, BytesRecv, Referer" />

  </site>
</sites>

After these changes I went into SmarterStats and found values for both bandwidth and referers. Fantastic!

Don't forget to register for MSDN Live in Bergen 13. February! It's no surprise that Ajax and IIS 7 attract a lot of people to this event, so register now before it's full. You don't want to become the guy, who wasn't there, would you? ;) You can even pick up some Tips & Tricks for VS 2005. If this Tips & Tricks session is the same as at TechEd, you'll have to see it!

When I moved my blog from Blogger to DasBlog I wanted to keep rss.xml and atom.xml, and redirect them to the new DasBlog url’s. I googled a bit but didn’t find much. And the ones I found I wasn’t able to use (maybe because I’m running Vista RC2). Anyway, last night enough was enough and I decided to put this to an end. I started to look at IIS’s config file applicationHost.config (usually found at C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config) and one section got my attention: <httpRedirect enabled="false" />

The problem was finding schema documentation for this element. After a while I found this (http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=2&subtabid=25&i=946&p=24). To solve my problem I used this:

<httpRedirect     enabled="true"

exactDestination="true”

httpResponseStatus="Permanent">

        <add      wildcard="/rss.xml"

destination="/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss" />

        <add      wildcard="/atom.xml"

destination="/SyndicationService.asmx/GetAtom" />

</httpRedirect>

So if you have a similar problem I hope this helps.

Update:
I upgraded to Vista Release and suddenly the redirect didn't work anymore. I tried and tried and tried and gave up. I tried again and came over this:

That nailed it. Don't know why I didn't see this before, but it would be nice though if the error message said something about enabling this feature.