Professional IIS 7.0

Chapter 5. Administration Tools

In this chapter, we examine the various tools Microsoft has included to administer IIS 7.0. In building IIS 7.0, Microsoft had to completely revamp the toolset used to manage IIS. They replaced the old IIS Manager MMC with a completely new IIS Manager application that provides greater functionality for its expanded role. This new admin tool allows developers and administrators to add their own extensions and tweaks to it through its extensibility features. In addition to these major changes to the administrative tools, they added the ability to set web server configuration through files in the web site. They added to the functionality of the web.config file and introduced the applicationHost.config file. Through these files, the developer can completely set up and adjust the web site. They also took the venerable command-line interface (CLI) and added to it with the AppCmd.exe tool, which allows complete control over every aspect of IIS.

In this chapter, you will learn about the IIS Manager, configuration settings, and command-line management using AppCmd.exe.

Key Characteristics

IIS 7.0 was built with the following characteristics in mind:

• Simple to use—As previously mentioned, IIS 7.0 does not use the same metabase scheme as previous versions of IIS, but rather uses a series of plain-text XML files for configuration. With IIS 7.0, the state is in the files, thus a change to the files results in an immediate change to the server, site, or application ...