Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Extending the IIS Administration Tool

The ability to extend the IIS configuration to support custom modules provides the IIS developer with a unique capacity to develop custom web service plug-ins with a seamless interface to the core system.

In the previous section, the custom configuration support provided for the sample “BlockLinks” module requires that the end-user edit the IIS configuration files directly in order to control the module behavior.

IIS 8.0 also provides extensibility to the Administration Tool GUI to support simple and intuitive configuration support for your custom modules.

This section provides an example of how to implement GUI control of the permitBookmarks configuration item created in the previous section.

Creating an IIS Administration Tool Extension

As previously mentioned, this walkthrough is based on Microsoft Visual Studio 2012. It is quite possible to use other IDE titles and versions by simply translating the various steps to the equivalent for your selected IDE.

During this example, you will note that the relevant custom GUI component is also called a module despite the fact that these objects are very different from the HttpModule encountered in previous sections.

This example is accomplished by the following general stages:

1. Create a new project.

2. Add namespace references.

3. Create a configuration dialog.

4. Add the control to the IIS Administration Tool.

5. Build and install.

Creating a New Project

Start by creating a new project: ...