In addition to all of the other great products that Microsoft has released today, I’m happy to announce the release of the Internet Information Services (IIS) 8.0 Express Release Candidate. You can install the IIS 8.0 Express Release Candidate through the Microsoft Download Center by using the following URL:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=254247

IIS 8.0 Express Release Candidate supports the following new features:

X64 Support

IIS 8.0 Express supports both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

Shared Features with IIS 8.0

IIS 8.0 Express shares a great number of features with the full version of IIS; for example, IIS 8.0 Express uses many of the same binaries, configuration files, and error codes as the full version of IIS, so migrating projects between your development environment and your production environment should be easier than ever.

Changing the User Home Directory

IIS 8.0 Express supports changing the user's home directory, which is mapped to the %IIS_USER_HOME% variable in configuration. By default this path is located at %UserProfile%\Documents\IISExpress, but users can change this by setting a CustomUserHome registry property in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\IISExpress, or by specifying the "/userhome" parameter when launching iisexpress.exe.

WebSocket Support

IIS 8.0 Express supports writing WebSocket applications. For more information, see the WebSocket protocol specification or the System.Net.WebSockets Namespace topic on Microsoft's MSDN website.

AppCmd Support for editing multiple configuration files

The AppCmd utility now supports a "/AppHostConfig" parameter, which makes it possible to use AppCmd to edit multiple ApplicationHost.config files and not just the primary configuration file.

For more information, see the IIS 8.0 Express ReadMe file.

My thanks to Eok Kim, Jeong Hwan Kim, Yamini Jagadeesan, Wade Hilmo, and Won Yoo!