Hoster Poster

If you haven't heard, the new Web SKU is a special, low-priced version of Windows that is focused exclusively on Internet-based Web serving. We've added a lot of new features and support for hardware compared to the old Windows 2003 Web edition. For more details about the SKU, check out Bill Staples' blog post at http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2008/04/15/windows-web-server-2008-and-sql-server-2005.aspx.

One thing to note is if you want SQL Server 2005 on Web SKU. The installer blocks on Windows Web Server 2008 but we are providing a patch that will allow you to proceed with the installation. Before attempting to install SQL Server 2005, please download and install the patch from the Download Center page found at: SQL Server 2005 Installer Hotfix for Windows Web Server 2008 x86/x64.

On IIS 6.0, there are no mime types for Silverlight by default (IIS6 was released a good deal prior to Silverlight and as with any type of content, you need to configure your web server to support it)... so you might experience that your app appears to be stuck waiting to download, but in reality it was not able to serve the request due to mime types.

Here are instructions in http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/262/silverlight/, and a handy script, for configuring IIS 6.0 mime types to enable Silverlight.

IIS7 on Windows Server 2008 includes the appropriate mime types by default.

There are two settings you should be aware of for hosting that relate to delegation of errors.

1. Delegating ASP's scriptErrorSentToBrowser setting:

You should definitely turn on the ASP script errors, otherwise your customers won't see the useful errors from Classic ASP that IIS 6.0 showed. What your customers will see is the generic error, “An error occurred on the server when processing the URL. Please contact the system administrator.”

This is because detailed ASP error messages are not sent to the browser by default for security reasons. In order to see the details of the error message, you may need to enable sending error messages to the browser. 

The article http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/209/asp/ explains the steps to safely delegate this setting to customers to enable them to get error information in the browser.

2. Delegating errorMode in httpErrors: 

The error modes control how much detail the customer can see, and it is possible to unlock specific attributes so the customer can control only the aspects of this setting that you want to allow.

Hey everyone, long time since the last blog post but we're still here and we have some great news to report. The IIS team just released the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool on www.iis.net. It is a command-line tool that provides support for deploying, synchronizing and migrating IIS 6.0 and 7.0. It supports moving configuration, content, SSL certificates and other types of data associated with a web server. You can choose to sync a single site or the entire web server. It's pretty flexible, as you'll discover from the documentation.

However - it is a technical preview, so it shouldn't be used for production servers and it may change quite a bit before it ships as a finished tool. The team is interested in feedback from the hosting community, so give it a try and let them know what you think or if you find any issues.

Check out this post for more details and to learn more from the team that built the tool: http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/archive/2008/01/22/welcome-to-the-web-deployment-team-blog.aspx

Microsoft has just announced the Go Live release of its FastCGI Extension for IIS 5.1/6.0 (FastCGI Extension). This FastCGI Extension release is supported on IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 for a fully scalable production environment and IIS 5.1 on Windows XP in order to support developers who build their Web applications on Windows client machines. This provides developers easy access to build and deploy a broader range of Web applications on the Microsoft platform. Here's the full announcement for even more information about the release.

If you're hosting the .NET Framework 3.5 (Beta 2) or planning on it, keep in mind there is some additional work required for the Beta 2 bits. The attached document describes two issues (and their corresponding workarounds) when hosting ASP.NET websites using .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 under Medium or partial trust. The issues and workarounds apply only to .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2, and will be addressed in the final version of the product.

The first issue is for developers and this section explains what they need to change so they can create partial trust applications in Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2.  The second issue covers what a hoster needs to enable in Code Access Security on the server in order to host an ASP.NET application in partial trust that leverages LINQ. Specifically, there are flags needed for the ReflectionPermission and this is covered in the LINQ features section starting on page 4.

Matt Gibbs made a post in his blog for developers and hosters can share this information with their customers.

We're releasing a draft version of our shared hosting guidance for Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0.

Currently it covers mainly IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET 2.0, but we will be adding more content for other components.

If anyone needs this in the Word 2003 format, just let us know.

The IIS team has announced that Windows Server Codename "Longhorn" Server Beta 3 has reached a high level of quality and is ready for your testing. You can test awesome new hosting features in IIS 7 and roll it out for beta hosting.

Find out how to get the bits!

One thing you can do to help save memory usage is to enable the WorkstationGC. The GC, or garbage collector, manages the memory for appDomains.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911716

Yesterday was the second day at the Hosting Summit. There are folks from around the world here. We started off with great keynotes from Michael O'Hara and John Zanni, and of course, a hilarious spoof of Devil Wears Prada from the Exchange team. Highlights include WBH 4.5 being released and the HMC solution being driven by a new group run by Dave Thompson, with the horizon showing cool things like a migration kit from 3.5 to 4.0.

Being a technology blog, our focus is on Technology for Hosting - the presentation from Scott Guthrie was very good, Bill Staples did some amazing demos of IIS 7 and in a later session expanded on the benefits of IIS 7 for hosters. The key message being that IIS 7 is built for hosting. There are a number of design changes and features around hosting, isolation and performance. For IIS 7 Server Beta 3, there will be a go live license enabling hosters to go into production with IIS 7. Dan Winn from SQL followed up with an overview of SQL, a demo of the Publishing Wizard and info about what SQL editions to use for shared, dedicated and virtual dedicated. Their team is also working on hosting guidance for SQL and a web administration tool.

What a day... now onto Day 3, the final day!

[Edit: Corrected link to the video]