Windows Server 2008: The Definitive Guide

Managing IIS Graphically

The graphical management utility for IIS, called Internet Information Services Manager, has been radically redesigned from the tools and consoles available in IIS 6 and Windows Server 2003. Figure 8-5 illustrates the new appearance of this tool. Here's a quick tour of what to notice:

Figure 8-5. An introduction to the redesigned IIS Manager in Windows Server 2008

• Note the presence of an address bar, like the one in Internet Explorer, when you first open IIS Manager. You can see a breadcrumb-like trail of your progress through the various screens, helping you find where you are and how you arrived there.

• On the home page, you'll see the feature list occupying the menu pane. This list, which is dynamically generated, shows context-specific features that you may want to configure.

• Instead of the tab-frenzy feel of IIS 6, you get three types of pages in IIS Manager 7: list pages, where you can generally sort by a variety of fields; the task pane, which automatically changes and presents the most popular and/or likely options for your current context; and a property grid, which lists the attributes associated with any given object or feature in IIS Manager.

For now, let's step through creating a new web site, adjusting its properties, adding a virtual directory for an application, and creating a new application pool.

Creating a Site

Creating a new web site is one of the ...