Brian Goldfarb's Blog : IIS

New official Silverlight Blog

bgold — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:29:20 GMT

earlier this week, as part of MIX09, we launched an official Silverlight team blog. Subscribe now! We’ll push out new technical content, videos, and use it as a venue to respond to critical industry events that require our voice. You can use it as a direct conduit to us and the team with feedback (both good and bad!).

We’ll cover our entire UX platform including Expression Studio with a focus on Expression Blend (and the newly announced SkethFlow functionality which has had rave reviews), Silverlight, Visual Studio, and anything else we think is important.

Spread the news – http://team.silverlight.net/

I kicked us off with this post: http://team.silverlight.net/announcements/introducing-the-new-silverlight-blog/

More IIS7 goodness: Application Request Routing (ARR)

bgold — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:20:30 GMT

Application Request Routing (ARR) v1 released today! The ARR feature is a free IIS7 extension that extends the Web server UI and runtime to:

· Achieve high availability and scalability.

· Enable elastic scalability for shared hosters.

· Dynamically load balance web requests (to be used in conjunction with existing load balancers)

ARR enables the following scenarios

· Easily add server capacity as the demand for their web application increases

· Seamlessly deploy or upgrade web applications without downtime

· Shared hosters can offer elastic scalability and change the business model based on resource consumption

More details at http://www.iis.net/extensions/ApplicationRequestRouting

MIX09 – Register by Feb 27 and save $300

bgold — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:49:31 GMT

MIX09 is going to be amazing. I can’t give away the details, but as the keynote owner for Scott Guthrie (as I have been every year, it’s a glorious job to be the man behind the curtain :)) and I can tell you this year is on track to be the best ever.

We will be bringing to market some amazing technology, setting the stage for the future of our Web and RIA technologies, showing off the great work of many of our amazing partners, and so much more. I know times are tough, but if you can swing it or tell a friend do it.

To help with costs, 3rd night’s on us now :)

http://visitmix.com/News/Free-Third-Night-at-The-Venetian

Let me know if you have any questions! or feedback on what you want to see in the day 1 keynote :)

Microsoft Web Platform Installer Release Candidate – Now works with XP and Windows 2003!

bgold — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:37:57 GMT

I'm going to blatantly steal Bill Staples words since they were so good :)

"I’m excited to announce the availability of the Release Candidate version of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI).

Web PI is a free tool that makes it simple to download and install the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including IIS, ASP.NET, Visual Web Developer Express and SQL Server, along with a lot of cool IIS extensions like URL rewrite and ASP.NET MVC.

Web PI offers a simple experience for downloading and installing the entire stack through a single installer to help you obtain the software you need to build and run a complete Web solution on the Microsoft Web platform, whether you are using Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Windows Server 2008.

Run Web PI to get started and then run it again anytime to check for new extensions to the platform. Every time Web PI is run it checks online to ensure the most current versions and new additions to the Microsoft Web Platform are downloaded. Give Web PI a try today!"

IIS7 Extensions - URLRewrite and more

bgold — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:09:07 GMT

http://www.iis.net/extensions

The team just launched a new redesigned extensions page to make it even easier to find all the great out of band features you can get and install into IIS7. The newest downloads are URL Rewrite Module, Microsoft Web Deployment Tool, Application Request Routing

Other Highlights include:

and more!

check it out.

BizSpark is here -- easy access to Software, Support, and Visibility for startups

bgold — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:48:39 GMT

Today, we announced BizSpark, a global program designed to help accelerate the success of early stage software Startups. This is an awesome program that is really going to change the way startups evaluate technology usage. Choosing Microsoft, not only gets you best of breed technology solutions, but now marketing, demand generation, support, and more! The net cool thing here is a startup can build a killer software app in the cloud and money off it for 3 years for $100 -- pretty sweet.

By joining BizSpark, Startups get:

Software: fast and easy access to Microsoft’s current full-featured development tools, platform technologies, and unlimited production licenses of server products for immediate use in developing and bringing to market innovative and interoperable solutions with no upfront costs and minimal requirements. Startups will also get access to the community technology preview (CTP) of the Microsoft Azure Services Platform.
Support: professional technical support from Microsoft (MSDN) and community support from BizSpark Network Partners around the world who provide a wide range of support resources for software startups. Network Partners are incubators, investors, advisors, government agencies and hosters who are vested in software-fueled innovation and entrepreneurship.
Visibility: a dedicated online startup directory, BizSparkDB, on the Microsoft Startup Zone website (www.microsoftstartupzone.com) where we will highlight promising companies from around the world, including the “BizSpark Startup of the Day”. Through their relationship with Microsoft and BizSpark Network Partners, startups will achieve global visibility to an audience of potential investors, clients and partners.

Plus, there is no up-front cost and no commitment (leave whenever you want). At the end (after 3 years), you pay $100. Yea that's it.

We've also lined up hosters like goGrid, Rackspace, or Opsource to help get you started.

If you want in, startup can get access to BizSpark either through a Network Partner (e.g. TiE, NVCA, select Venture Capitalists, and over 300+ entrepreneurial-focused organizations with a strong track record to helping young and promising technology companies success or through Microsoft BizSpark Program Leads (called “BizSpark Champs”). Startups can find both at Microsoft.com/bizspark.

Partners like TechStars, KPCB, Angel Capital Association or the European Business Angel Network are on board with us.

Eligibility for the program

BizSpark is available to startups that fit the following criteria, nominated by Network Partners or MSFTEES:

A private company building a software-based product or service
In business for less than 3 years
Less than USD $1M in revenue (2-4 local variants exist)
Participation lasts up to three years

Availability:

BizSpark is immediately available worldwide in most countries
82 countries have a BizSpark Program Lead (“BizSpark Champs”) to provide support

Offering Details:

Please visit www.microsoftstartupzone.com/bizspark for detailed program information.

Spread the word (I'm becoming a champ too so I can help)

Get the early skinny on Silverlight 2

bgold — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:34:00 GMT

ScottGu has been burning the midnight oil (literally!) to pull together an incredibly detailed tutorial that shows how powerful Silverlight 2 is going to be. Get an early scoop on the features in the soon to be released Beta1, get a feel for how Visual Studio and Expression Studio work together to enable developer/designer collaboration that is second to none, and see just a subset of the power that Silverlight 2 is going to bring to building amazing RIA applications.

Get the summary here and links to over 20 pages of details.

Hard to believe all of that power is packed into 4.3mb install that just takes 4-10 seconds on a typical machine without Silverlight.

Let us know what you think -- and remember this is just the beginning, there are a lot more features and details coming soon!

A new job for me, better products for you

bgold — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 19:40:58 GMT

And hopefully some more time to blog :) This week we re-organized our team so that we could better serve the needs of our internal and external partners and customers. I won't bore you with the details but it has a pretty major impact on what I do and the kinds of information I want; so I figured this was a great opportunity to share.

My new job is focused on Developer Division (which includes designers) Platform Strategy. My new team is 100% focused on making sure we build the best possible products for the market place. We get to understand the trends, the big picture, the little picture, customer needs, partner needs, and partner deeply with the engineering teams run by Scott Guthrie (NDP) and Eric Zocher (Designer) to help ensure that the products we build work great together and address the key needs of the market today, tomorrow, and way into the future.

Sounds like a huge daunting challenge, but gurantee it is going to be a lot of fun. To date, I've spent some of my time on this, but we've decided it is so critical that me and my team get to spend 100% of our time focused here. The results, well you'll be able to tell me as we lead up to MIX, PDC, and the next rev's of our products.

My team looks after the following technologies -- so take a look and lay it on, good, bad, ugly. What you want, what you don't want, what you don't even think you want, anything that you think will help us.

Tools

Expression Studio (Blend, Media, Web, Design) + futures
Visual Web Developer (the Web tooling inside Visual Studio)
"Cider" (the WPF tooling for VS) + futures

Platforms

ASP.NET
WPF
"WPF/E"
AJAX
Internet Explorer
Commerce Server

Plus the broader marketplace that encompasses these technologies (Web 2.0, UX, etc.)

I'll still be posting as much useful info as I can around the outbound work that we do, but my energy is going to be focused on building amazing products. Spread the word, we want your feedback.

Oh and joining me on the team are:

Brad Becker looking after Rich Client Platform and Tools

Sanjoy Sarkar looking after Web Platform

Pete LePage looking after IE, Web Tooling, Standards

Max Akbar looking after Commerce Server

and we are hiring a few positions

1) Expression Media and Media Workflow strategy

2) Rich Client Platform - Developer strategy

3) Rich Client Platform - Designer strategy

I'll associate JD's once we write them ;)

New improvements to iis.net: The IIS.net DownloadCENTER

bgold — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 20:53:02 GMT

We are always hard at work improving the experience around our online properties. IIS.net has been getting a lot of attention and we just launched an amazing feature to help you get what you need for IIS and contribute back -- all the details below, let us know what you think!

The DownloadCENTER at IIS.net is an inclusive community destination for discovering new components, modules and 3rd-party solutions related to the Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server.

With the worldwide release of Windows Vista tomorrow, this new section of IIS.net is particularly relevant to ASP.NET developers interested in the future of the Microsoft Web stack.

For example:

The latest release of IIS, IIS7, is included with Windows Vista and has a completely modular architecture which features over forty pluggable components that can be easily added, removed or even swapped with custom implementations.
The integrated pipeline gives ASP.NET developers a familiar event model and unified programming framework for enhancing the server.
The powerful extensibility support is available to both .NET (managed) and C/C++ (native).
The new management & configuration system and tools make it easier to setup your sites so you can spend less time troubleshooting and more time implementing.

There are already numerous downloads for all versions of IIS available today. Many are provided by Microsoft but, even more exciting are those contributed by the IIS community. In the future, the DownloadCENTER will host a large number of extensions specific to IIS7 submitted by Microsoft, ISVs and the broader IIS community.

To learn more about the DownloadCENTER, go check out Bill Staples’ blog post about it or, better yet, go visit today.

Using the Microsoft AJAX Library with PHP

bgold — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:21:52 GMT

Steve Marx has been working behind the scenes on building out a community project to create native PHP support for the Microsoft AJAX Library. Today he released the first version. He provides a ton of details in this post which I steal liberally from below.

First download ASP.NET AJAX or grab just the client side Microsoft AJAX Library

Second, check out the codeplex project

Third, code away -- you can contribute bugs, code and more at the CodePlex site -- I think this is pretty darn cool and when you think about this in terms of our FastCGI work on IIS things are getting very cool for developers in any language/platform.

Check out this HelloWorld sample code:

<?php
 
require_once '../../dist/MSAjaxService.php';
 
class HelloService extends MSAjaxService
{
    function SayHello($name)
    {
        return "Hello, " . $name . "!";
    }
}
 
$h = new HelloService();
$h->ProcessRequest();
 
?>

index.html:

<html>
<head>
<title>Hello, World!</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="../../MicrosoftAjaxLibrary/MicrosoftAjax.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="HelloService.php/js"></script>
</head>
<body>
Name: <input id="name" type="text" />
<input type="button" value="Say Hello" onclick="button_click(); return false;" />
<br />
Response from server: <span id="response"></span>
</body>
<script type="text/javascript">
    function button_click() {
        HelloService.SayHello($get('name').value, function (result) {
            $get('response').innerHTML = result;
        });
    }
</script>
</html>

Definitely let us know what you think!

IIS7 Beta Hosting at DiscountASP

bgold — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 02:58:34 GMT

I got an email yesterday from Takeshi over at DiscountASP and they just launched free IIS7 Beta hosting for all customers who are interested. You can get all the details at http://www.discountasp.net/sp_iis7hosting.aspx

This is a great way to experiment with the great new features of IIS7, especially the integrated extensibility pipeline and ASP.NET integration. With the release of IIS7 with Vista, now is a great opportunityto begin familiarizing yourself with what IIS7 has to offer.

Enjoy.

Microsoft and Zend Announce Collaboration to Enhance PHP on IIS/Windows

bgold — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 09:34:48 GMT

I'm being lazy and stealing verbatim from Keith's post (Update: also check out ScottGu's great post here)

As part of today's keynote presentation at ZendCon, Bill Staples, Microsoft's Product Unit Manager for Internet Information Services (IIS), announced a new collaboration with Zend to improve performance and stability of PHP on Windows.
This isn't just vaporware, either. During Andi Gutmans' keynote (Andi is one of the creators of PHP and co-founder of Zend), Bill announced the availability of a technical preview release of FastCGI for IIS and demoed it for the audience as well.
FastCGI is a new component for Microsoft's Web server platform that is available for download & evaluation today. It works IIS 6.0 in Windows 2003 Server and IIS 5.1 in Windows XP. Even cooler, it also works with the brand new IIS 7.0 making its debut with Windows Vista and, later, as part of Windows Server code-named "Longhorn."
This announcement continues to solidfy IIS as the premiere Web application server whether you are developing sites with ASP.NET or any other server framework. Moreover, regardless of the programming language or framework they choose, developers building sites of any size can leverage the full capabilities of the Microsoft platform with enterprise-class security, speed and stability.