On IIS 7 Being a Competitive Product with Visual Studio.NET Integration - and WSCF

Of all the Microsoft Tech Gurus whose blogs and articles I regularly read (and there are dozens at this counting) , David Wang is one of my favorites. David's focus is 100% Internet Information Services. He has a succinct way of describing a scenario and providing a detailed response that is both enlightening and refreshing to read. He provides information. He debunks myths. And - he teaches you a lot about IIS that you absolutely cannot find elsewhere.

According to David, MS is planning on doing integration with Visual Studio to provide wizards and code project templates to allow developers to write modules to extend IIS functionality. This includes native code (ISAPI, Global Modules, and Handlers) as well as managed code (Managed Modules and Handlers). He expects this to establish IIS as a legitimate target for developers to enrich web server functionality.

And as Wang explains, it gets better. Not only will you get Visual Studio integration to easily start a project and code templates to help write the extensibility modules, you will even have WiX templates to allow you to quickly compile your extensibility modules and configuration into a MSI package and then deploy it to other machines.

IIS Grows Up in the Marketplace

David says that Microsoft simply has not focused on producing a web server product but rather a platform to support all its other server products. But - that focus is changing with IIS 7.0 with additional modules and this new ability to easily create your own -- like URL Rewriter, Request Forwarder, Virtual Websites, and CustomAuth. We aren't talking about ASP.NET URL Rewriting here - we are talking IIS URL Rewriting.
Wang finishes by opining that it is not that Microsoft cannot do it; it is that he and his group were never directed / mandated to do it.


Apache is already declining in market share according to the latest Netcraft surveys. Let's see what happens when IIS 7 comes on board.


Object-Oriented Contract-First class design for .NET 2.0? Think WSCF

Readers may have caught on that I'm a big proponent of Contract - First - (read the story here to see why).

Christian and Buddhike of ThinkTecture have their WSCF implmentation


  • Design your contract's data, messages and interface

  • Generate code from the contract


    • New in Version 0.6:

  • Full support for Visual Studio 2005

  • Support for .NET Framework 2.0

  • Generation of partial classes

  • Support for Nullable types

  • Support for SOAP 1.2 binding

  • Pascal case conversion is now optional

  • Option for generating old or new async calling code

  • Option for generating explicit order identifiers on particle members

  • Option for generating improved data binding code available

  • Option for generating List types instead of Collections

  • Option for generating the optional element specified flag handling code

  • Improved error handling

  • Improved support for generating code from SSL-hosted WSDLs

  • The ?wsdl feature can be enabled to return the modeled WSDL

  • Users can now resize the WSDL wizard dialog box

  • WSCF windows can now be closed using the ESC key

  • Added a new feature to the command line tools to let it overwrite the existing files


    • Comments

    1. Anonymous4:45 PM

      Glad to see you are happy about IIS, Peter. I'm on the IIS UE team (no where near as smart as David is) and am looking forward to rolling out a few samples of my own. My opinion is obviously a bit biased, but the platform IIS 7 provides is unlike anything in existence today (no, I meant in a GOOD way!) This release combines the guts of the http.sys listener up to the glory of ATLAS-enhancing modules -- all on a secure-by-default platform.

      ReplyDelete
    2. peterbromberg5:13 PM

      Thanks for the nice comment Tobin. I've seen some of your stuff and you seemed pretty smart to me.

      ReplyDelete
    3. David Wang10:34 PM

      Oh hey, this is the first time I have read about my writing as the topic of news. I am flattered. :-)

      You very succinctly described my approach and goals - enlightening and context-rich focus on the relevant nuts and bolts of what makes something (such as IIS) tick and how to take advantage of it in the grand scheme of things.

      It is what I *wish* all documentation and troubleshooting guides provide, but alas, none consistently do this - hence I blog to start it organically.

      I have actually moved my blog to http://w3-4u.blogspot.com/ and will be continuing as usual from there.

      Cheers,
      //David

      ReplyDelete

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