Latest Microsoft Blogs

Yesterday we shipped another awesome piece of software, this time for those who make their living running groups of Web servers.  Web Farm Framework is a free, fully supported, Microsoft product.  Web Farm Framework enables you to automate the installation and configuration of platform components across your cluster, and also makes it easy to synchronize content, configuration and other resources associated with your ASP.NET or PHP applications. Web Farm Framework 2 now supports integration with hardware load balancers, and enables you to orchestrate updates across your servers so that your site/application is never down or unavailable to customers .  For example, Web Farm Framework can automatically pull servers one-at-a-time...

Last week my team released a super powerful update to our Web Farm Framework project aimed at dramatically simplifying the complexity of managing a Web farm (many computers running one or more Web sites).  Web Farm Framework 2.0 (WFF) allows users to not only setup groups of servers and define routing rules using the built-in routing and load balancing support in ARR , but extends the management support to include many new powerful experiences, including: Automatic platform setup and provisioning of new nodes WFF integrates with Web Platform Installer and will automatically install all the required components to mirror the master node Application replication and synchronization across the Web server farm WFF integrates with Web Deploy and...

Wow, what a week of innovation for the Microsoft Web Platform.  This week we released a ton of new software which, if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out.  Here is a quick overview:   IIS Search Engine Optimization v1 final release! The IIS team shipped the final release of IIS SEO toolkit which makes it easier to optimize your Website for search engines .  It acts like a mini-search engine on your computer, scans your site and then provides useful tips for how to improve the relevance of your site to search engines.  This tool is now out of beta and available for download through Web PI .    ASP.NET MVC 2 beta! The ASP.NET team has been hard at work on the second release of MVC, which is now available...

Just ran into this and thought I’d share.  If you are trying to connect to SQL Server from your Web application running on Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 and you’re getting a message that looks like this: Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to failure in retrieving the user's local application data path. Please make sure the user has a local user profile on the computer. The connection will be closed. I can probably help you out.  The IIS team made a change to the default identity of the worker process.   Starting with IIS 7.5, Application Pools run with a unique identity based on the Application Pool name, rather than NetworkService – the default identity for IIS6 and IIS7.  The primary reason for...

Today we’re launching a number of really cool things for Web developers.   WebsiteSpark WebsiteSpark is a program designed to jumpstart Web development for individuals or small companies who make a living on the Web.  The program is free to join and runs for three years with no cost obligations other than a $100 program fee, payable on exit.  What is in it for you? Windows Web Server 2008 R2 – 4 processor licenses for production use! SQL Server 2008 – 4 processor licenses for production use! Expression Studio 3 – 1 license including Expression Web, Blend and Sketchflow Expression Web – 2 licenses Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition – 3 licenses DotNetPanel control panel (to manage your servers, and allow your customers to...

I’m excited to announce the immediate availability of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer v 1.0 .  The Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a simple tool that makes it very easy to download and install Microsoft's entire Web Platform in one step, including IIS, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework. Using the Web Platform Installer’s user interface, you can choose to install either specific products or the entire Microsoft Web Platform onto your computer. The Web PI also helps keep your products up to date by always offering the latest additions to the Web Platform. Web PI 1.0 supports Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista and of course Windows 2008.    Auto-update...

If you’ve ever tried to find information on how to install a particular IIS7 feature, or how to configure it using the IIS Manager tool, AppCmd.exe, the new Microsoft.Web.Administration interface or WMI provider, this post is for you.  Every IIS7 feature is now comprehensively documented on http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/   This IIS7 Technical Reference provides a list of all the built-in IIS7 features, alphabetized for quick access.  If you know the configuration name you are interested in, just type it into the URL…for example if you’re looking for information on the system.webServer <caching> setting, type: http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/system.webServer/caching and whoila, you now have a complete set of reference...

Choices abound for those looking for a place to run Web applications on Windows.  The purpose of this blog post is to show a quick walkthrough of how to setup your first Windows computer in the cloud on Amazon EC2.  If you’re already familiar with hosting and the cloud, skip the next few paragraphs.  The traditional approach is to use a Windows hosting provider, like DiscountASP.NET , MaximumASP.com , CrystalTech.com , etc.  These long-time Windows hosting providers offer a flat monthly fee for shared (Web site) and dedicated server (full server) offerings ranging from a few dollars a month to a few hundred dollars a month.  This works great for anyone who wants to set up everything from a simple family or community...

I’m excited to announce the availability of the Release Candidate version of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI).  Web PI is a free tool that makes it simple to download and install the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including IIS, ASP.NET, Visual Web Developer Express and SQL Server, along with a lot of cool IIS extensions like URL rewrite and ASP.NET MVC . Web PI offers a simple experience for downloading and installing the entire stack through a single installer to help you obtain the software you need to build and run a complete Web solution on the Microsoft Web platform, whether you are using Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Windows Server 2008. Run Web PI to get started, and then run it...

In case you haven’t already heard the news, ASP.NET will now be enabled on Windows Server Core starting with Windows Server 2008 R2.  If you're not familiar with Server Core, it is a low footprint Server installation option that lays down just the minimal footprint to boot up the server, it doesn't even install the  Shell!  This has several key benefits.  First, it means server core uses less disk and memory footprint.  In our testing, we see a little over 1GB disk footprint and the server runs well starting with just 512MB ram!  Of course, fewer features also means a lower attack surface and less frequent patching, as well as fewer things to manage.  When I announced IIS7 on Server Core supported last...