I've blogged several times in the past about how cool IIS 7.0 is. Many of my posts have highlighted some of the rich new ASP.NET and .NET developer opportunities it brings (integrated pipeline, unified web.config configuration, integrated admin tool experience, etc). It is really going to open up huge developer opportunities and provide an immensely customizable web-server for people to use.
In addition to focusing on .NET developer features, we are also working hard to enable non-.NET development stacks to easily integrate with the web server. Earlier today Bill Staples (who runs the IIS team) demoed a great new FastCGI module for IIS7 at the ZendCon PHP Conference being held this week:
We've been working closely with Zend this past fall on improving PHP support on top of IIS, and with this new module PHP developers will be able to get dramatically better performance, scalability and reliability when running on Windows (sometimes as much as 25x faster than the old PHP CGI module for IIS).
They'll also be able to easily integrate with the cool new IIS7 features that are coming (for example: take advantage of the new output caching features), as well as integrate nicely with ASP.NET. For example: You could have ASP.NET provide the membership and role management features for a site, while still writing many pages within it in PHP (since with IIS7 an ASP.NET HttpModule can execute for any request to the web-server, and so the Forms Authentication, Role Management and other features are no longer restricted to urls mapped to ASP.NET).
To learn more about the IIS 7.0 FastCGI module and how to use it with PHP, make sure to check out Bill's great tutorial walkthrough here. Rick also has a great blog post about how the module works here. Also make sure to subscribe to Mike's blog and the www.iis.net blog feed here.
Hope this helps,
Scott