IIS 7.0 Beta3 Ships with a Go-Live License

This week we shipped IIS 7.0 Beta 3 as part of the Windows "Longhorn" Server release.  IIS 7.0 is the biggest release of IIS in the history of the product, and brings with it major improvements to the Microsoft web-server stack.  This article and this blog post list just a few of the major improvements it delivers.

New IIS 7.0 Beta3 Features

This week's IIS 7.0 Beta3 release introduces a bunch of new features and capabilities above and beyond what shipped in the IIS 7.0 release that came with Windows Vista.  These include:

  • Web Farm Shared Configuration: You can now configure your web-servers to be stateless, and centralize all configuration, code and content across web farms (making it much easier to scale out and manage).  Learn more about how to use this new feature here.
  • Delegated Remote Administration: You can now use the IIS7 admin tool to remotely manage web-servers over HTTP/SSL.  Server administrators can now lock down and "delegate" settings to site administrators - enabling much more fine-grained control over who can manage sites on the machine (ideal for hosted scenarios).
  • Automatic Application Pool Isolation: IIS 7.0 makes it much easier to provision and isolate application pool worker processes on the web-server.  This is ideal for hosting scenarios, as well as enterprise scenarios where you want complete isolation and sandboxing between applications.
  • Built-in FastCGI Support for PHP and other extensions: In addition to providing rich .NET extensibility, IIS 7.0 now ships with built-in support for FastCGI extensions - making it easy to use with dynamic web server frameworks like PHP.
  • New FTP Server: The new IIS7 FTP Server now adds support for secure publishing with FTP/SSL, host header FTP support, integrated admin tool support, and support for plugable authentication (using the same provider model as the ASP.NET Membership system).

Make sure to check out Bill Staples' blog post here to learn more about all the above features.

IIS 7.0 Go Live License

After months of stress testing in our labs, we think IS7 is now ready for broad customer deployments.  To facilitate this, Microsoft is now offering a special Go-Live License for IIS7 and Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta3.  This allows you to deploy IIS7 servers into production environments immediately (note: we have already deployed www.microsoft.com on this build).

You can learn more about the IIS7 go-live license, as well as how to freely download Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta3 here.

Alternatively, you can also sign-up for a free IIS7 Beta Hosting Account from one of several web hosters who have deployed IIS7 Beta3 already.  You can learn more about their free IIS7 offers here.

Hope this helps,

Scott

20 Comments

  • Hey Scott,

    that's great news - hopefully it'll pick up quickly so the masses can actually start using it.

    one question though, do you know of any FTP client which supports secure transfers properly?

  • Greetings Scott, Always intresting information to be found and read on your blog!

    Keep up the good work.

    My Question is, What will the difference between the IIS in Vista and Longhorn?
    Since if i understand and did see in my Vista is that i got a IIS 7 and if IIS 7 Beta 3 are now shipped in Longhorn, what is it Vista has?

    /Best Regards
    Marcus

  • I have a spec - I need to make a grid control in ASP.NET application that should be as rich as the one .NET has for Windows apps. So I thought (1) would it be possible to run windows .net smart client app in web browser frame and (2) make user asp.net session be accessible to the smart client.

    I have a web-app, all I need is just to add one island of desktop richness to it, and hopefully make this island share user session with the hosting web-app.

    I searched the Internet for smart client in browser frame and all I found was WPF/E. I put the WPF/E sample on my web-site.

  • Hi Scott,

    It's awesome that IIS7 will provide a shared web configuration file. Has there been any thought on including a Shared Output caching system for those of us in WebFarms? Is Microsoft going to address the issue that it's possible to have various servers in the same farm deliver pages with different datasets? While I know we can utilize SQL Cache Dependencies, it just seem like something that should be implemented at the server level and optimized there.

    Thanks!

  • I'd love to see IIS 7 as a standalone upgrade for Windows Server 2003 & 2000 and for Windows XP Professional. Is that possible?

  • Great, when will it be finally released? thanks!

  • wow what a news. cant wait to use IIS 7 for my site. nay Idea when it will release?

  • Hi Scott,

    Will the IIS in Windows Vista get a "refresh" when Longhorn ships?

    -Lenard

  • Scott,

    Thanks for the Update on IIS7.

    You mentioned before in other posts regarding URL Rewriting that IIS7 would have features that allow you to do this natively.

    Has this been discussed or implemented yet? We're re-writing some major software and it's release date is in the new year, which is after 2007's release. If this is natively supported, I might try and get my managers persmision for me to develop the software geared towards 2007.

    Thanks.

  • Does this new version allow sessions to be persisted on all subdomains for a single domain

    e.g. microsoft.com and mail.microsoft.com can all utilize the same session data?

  • Hi Scott,

    The new features in IIS 7 are fantastic, especially in regards to the shared configuration. Has there been any discussion at the Microsoft camp in regards to Output caching on a web farm?

    While the performance is fantastic, scaling it out is not as easy as you can have different cached version on different servers depending on when the content was cached on each.

    Although you can use cache dependencies, there are a number of limitations there as well. IT would also be nice to provide an API to expire cached content from the web server instead of a timed cache. Please let me know you thoughts.

    Thanks!!

  • Scott,

    What about providing a dual Auth mode???

  • hi
    I have a question .
    Does the IIS 7 can used on the windows xp or 2003?

    Thanks

  • Hi Scott, what about webdav on IIS7 ? It seems slightly dead, no words on it!!!

  • Hi Brian H. Madsen -

    There are several good FTP clients out there that support FTP/SSL. In fact, most modern ones do support it. Try a search for "CuteFTP", "WS_FTP", and "Core FTP" - they all work with FTP/SSL.

  • Hi Mike -

    IIS7 is currently on Windows Vista, and we plan to ship it for Longhorn Server later this year. No plans to ship it on win2k3 or xp.

  • Will we see new versions of the Visual Studio Express tools as a part of the Visual Studio "Orcas" Launch?

    I think this was one of the best marketing and technology decisions Microsoft ever made as it introduced Visual Studio (legally) to thousands of student and hobbyist developers who wouldn't normally be able to, or have the desire to, spend the $400 for Visual Studio.

  • Hi Keith,

    Yes - there will definitely be a refresh of the free express editions of Visual Studio with the "Orcas" release.

    These will include the new features being added to "Orcas". For web development this includes the new HTML designer, Javascript intellisense, and the new LINQ data designers.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott

  • So since it supports FCGI, does that mean Ruby on Rails might work better (or at all?) with IIS?

  • Hi Paul,

    In theory the FCGI module for Rails should work with IIS7. Note that Rails doesn't work that well with FCGI (even on Apache), so it comes with some caveats.

    But the goal is for any FCGI module to be able to run well on IIS7.

    Thanks,

    Scott

Comments have been disabled for this content.