Professional IIS 7.0

Introduction

Windows Server 2008 is the first update to Microsoft's server operating system in nearly five years, and among the major changes is the new Internet Information Services 7.0, which probably marks the biggest departure from previous IIS versions that we have ever seen.

Previous recent releases of IIS have concentrated on improving security and reliability and thus have mostly involved changes "under the hood." For administrators and developers, adaptation to the new products had been relatively simple.

With IIS 7.0, however, Microsoft has fundamentally changed the way the product works, with new configuration, delegated administration, and extensibility options designed to address perceived feature weakness compared to competing products. At the same time, IIS 7.0 now has new, real-time diagnostic and troubleshooting features and absorbs functionality from ASP.NET (such as caching and forms-based authentication), making this available across all requests.

With the addition of a brand-new FTP server and FastCGI support, IIS 7.0 leapfrogs its major competitors in feature and flexibility options and indicates a clear effort by Microsoft to capture more of the public-facing web server market, in addition to its existing strong presence in the corporate sphere.

For administrators and developers, the fundamental changes in the way that IIS 7.0 works, is administered, and can be extended mean that the knowledge required to fully take advantage of IIS 7.0's new features is substantially ...