IIS 7 New Features, New User Interface
July 11th, 2008I found this article online on the new features of IIS 7 and thought I’d pass it along.
I find it is a great motivator in web development when new versions of trusted products like IIS come out because they offer a plentiful set of really useful stuff that you can’t believe wasn’t in there to begin with. Not only does IIS 7 make my job easier, it also inspires me to elevate the products that I am building.
One of the things I noticed immediately was the new user interface which seems alot more logical to work with. The old interface looked more like a simple file management system (which IIS is, but it is also so much more). The new interface looks more like a network management application. Cool.
The most often needed functionality of IIS when working with .Net is the restart command which in the old version was hidden in a right-click menu under another submenu. Strange how restarting is so important, but that’s another topic for another blog. I have seen many people repeatedly open and close the IIS interface thinking that this would be the same thing as restarting, which of course won’t do a thing. Then they remember the restart setting in the shut down window and end up rebooting the computer, which takes longer to bring the site back up. Effective, but at what cost to the website they are trying fix? I restart IIS on my development machine multiple times everyday especially when I am testing and have also had to do it in emergency situations with production websites. An emergency on a production box is no time to accidently click “Backup/Restore Configuration” when you meant to get a restart going. While you wait to stop that backup/restore process, your website stays down. And getting rid of the need to go through all of the menus and submenues to get to restart also helps. Now with IIS 7 it smacks you in the face in the Manager Server options on the home screen. Really simple improvement that I think makes a world of difference to the overall usability and friendliness of IIS.
In part 2 of the article, it begins by using the word “learnt” which I think is a great word. Another blog, another time. It also talks about configuration inheritance which is a great feature of IIS 7. I’ve worked in many networks that were so complex that starting another website or moving a development website to testing or production was fraught (oh yeah, that cool word blog will happen) with the pitfalls of not setting up the new configuration properly and debugging problems with the site for months. Now, if you get one up and going correctly you can modify the inherited setup as needed for each new site rather than having to open and close countless windows between the two trying to compare them and acurately replicate the setup. Making the setup of a website easier is a great improvement.
On the downside, IIS 7 runs on Windows Vista which can make things much more challenging. One step forward, one more thing to learn to stay current. I can’t wait to start figuring out IIS 7.
