Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS 7.0)

IIS 7.0 provides administrators with an unprecedented degree of control over their Web server. IIS 7.0 is designed to enable the IT Professional to customize exactly which features are installed and running on the Web server. IIS is now factored into more than 40 feature modules that can be independently installed on the server, dramatically reducing the potential attack surface and lowering the footprint requirements of the server.

The flexible, extensible architecture of IIS 7.0 presents developers with new opportunities for customizing the Web server. The core Web server features of IIS 7.0 have been built using a new set of public Web server APIs that all developers can use to extend, replace, or add functionality to the Web server. These APIs are available as native Win32 APIs as well as managed .NET Framework APIs. Developers can also take advantage of IIS 7.0 extensibility, with event logging, configuration, and administration tool feature sets, providing a smooth experience for customers using third-party extensions.

The rich administration capabilities make deploying and managing Web applications on IIS 7.0 straightforward and efficient. IIS 7.0 provides developers and administrators with a unified configuration system for storing all IIS and ASP.NET settings in a single XML format, and includes a set of managed code and scripting APIs for accessing configuration information for the entire Web platform. This new configuration system supports distributed configuration files, which can be stored along with Web site or application content.

These improvements have radical implications for how applications are configured and deployed. Now that Web site and application settings are no longer explicitly tied to a centralized configuration store on the local machine, configuration can simply be copied from the developer's workstation to a test server, and then to the production Web server. Once a Web site is in production, administrators can share configuration information across multiple front-end Web servers, avoiding costly and error-prone replication and manual synchronization issues.

IIS 7.0 offers a broad set of administration features that simplify the day-to-day tasks of managing Web sites and applications. IIS 7.0 includes a new graphical user interface (GUI) administration tool, a new command-line utility, a new managed API, and a new Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) provider for automating administration tasks. All of these new administration features provide unified support for managing IIS and ASP.NET settings together.

The new GUI administration tool in IIS 7.0 offers a new, more efficient tool for managing the Web server. It provides support for both IIS and ASP.NET configuration settings, membership users, and role data, as well as runtime diagnostic information. The new UI also enables those who host or administer Web sites to delegate administrative control to developers or content owners, thus reducing cost of ownership and the administrative burden for the IT Professional. It supports connecting to remote servers over HTTP (through firewalls), and works in both dedicated and shared hosting environments.

IIS 7.0 enables developers and IT Professionals to more easily troubleshoot errant Web sites and applications, eliminating hours of potential downtime. IIS 7.0 exposes runtime diagnostic information to administrators (for example, what requests are currently executing, how long they have been running, which URLs they are invoking, what client called them, and what their status is). IIS 7.0 can also be configured to automatically log detailed trace events for requests when failures are detected. These diagnostic capabilities in IIS 7.0 are extensible as well, so new diagnostic events can be inserted into custom modules.