Finally Windows 7 is done with and will be available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers on Thursday 6th July.

 

Waiting to grab my copy and then move my development environment to Windows 7. Also waiting to see what the final version will look like and will there by any final suprise in store for us.

 

So if you are  a MSDN or TechNet subscriber then you know what has to be done on 6th. Please no pressing F5 continously and hammering the download servers.

Now that Windows Server 2008 has been released there has been a lot of excitement in the market about what is in store for us. Also one of the biggest selling point of Windows Server 2008 is the newly designed IIS 7 (Internet Information Server). IIS 7 has been redesigned from the ground up to provide a modularized feature of configuration for both the administrator and the developer.

 

Let me narrate below how I studied about migrating an existing ASP.NET 2.0 website from Windows Server 2003/IIS 6 to Windows Server 2008/IIS 7.

 

First I got a copy of Windows Server 2008 and then began the installation. I chose the Enterprise Edition and the installation was completed in a few minutes. The first thing that Setup asked me was to change my password and use a strong password. This is mandatory during the setup of Windows Server 2008.

 

Since the primary use of this server was to configure IIS 7 and use it as a web server, I configured it as an application server by adding the role of Application Server. Setup did the necessary tasks by including .NET 3.5. and also I had to configure the timezone and configure TCP/IP.

 

Internet Information Server 7 has a new interface and it is now simpler to manage websites with the tools found in the home page. I copied the runtime files of my web application from Windows Server 2003 and copied it over to Windows Server 2008 and then created a new Virtual Directory in IIS 7. IIS 7's configuration wizard is smart enough to detect that the folder has a Default.aspx file and made it the default start up file.

 

Thinking that this was all needed to run Web applications in IIS 7 mode, I ran the website for the first time and was surprised to see the following message

 

"An ASP.NET setting has been detected that does not apply in Integrated managed pipeline mode."

 

Googling for this error message brought up several pages and the best bet was to read the information from whom else but the developers of IIS 7 since they are the best source of information for any new breaking feature.

 

 

The news to observe is the following paragraph.

 

IIS7 takes ASP.NET to the next level, by integrating the ASP.NET runtime extensibility model with the core server. This allows developers to fully extend the IIS server with the richness of ASP.NET 2.0 and the .NET Framework, instead of using the lower level IIS C++ APIs. Existing ASP.NET applications also immediately benefit from tighter integration, by being able to use existing ASP.NET features like Forms Authentication, Roles, and Output Caching for all types of content.

 

While IIS7 provides the improved ASP.NET integration by default, the choice is yours: IIS7 supports both the new and the old ASP.NET integration modes that can be

used side by side on the same server.

 

Since I needed to understand how IIS 7 handles ASP.NET 2.0 websites and my website uses Form Authentication, I did the following steps.

Added the following code to my web.config file of the ASP.NET 2.0 website

<system.webServer>
    <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" />
</system.webServer>

 

After this the website started working and also I noted a faster performance when navigating from page to page and this is much faster than what was seen in Windows Server 2003/IIS 6.

 

Now that the website has been configured, there is still more to be observed and that will be written in the blogs in the future. Stay tuned.
 

This IIS Manager overview explains why IIS7 has an entirely new user interface, and then goes on to describe the look and feel, feature delegation, interaction with configuration, and remoting. This document was written for Longhorn Server. Windows Vista may not have some of the functionality/features discussed in this document.

The Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager is entirely new in IIS7. 

Why did it have to change?  So glad you asked – here are a few of our top reasons: Read more here.

If you are one of those users who use OWA (Outlook Web Access) frequently you would have noticed that it crashes frequently when using Internet Explorer 7.

 

The exact reason for this is not known but it seems to be related to the S/MIME feature of OWA. There is a thread in Microsoft Technet that discusses this problem and there is also a workaround for getting over this crash.

 

Read this thread here.