This afternoon I received an email from Microsoft to tell me that I’d been awarded the 2013 Microsoft MVP Award for ASP.Net/IIS!  This is my sixth MVP Award and I’ve mentioned before I am extremely humble to be associated with a great group of less than 5000 technical people around the globe.  I’ll be aiming to continue my efforts to help the community and deliver as much content as I can to aid and spread knowledge. 

On Thursday night I was having an email conversation with Takeshi Eto from DiscountASP.Net about the hosting of my blog.  I’ve been hosting my blog with DiscountASP.Net for nearly five years and have been very, very happy with their service – always up to date often offering services faster than other hosters and very quick turn around of support tickets if ever I’ve had any issues – they also host the NEBytes site.

Well on Thursday I was asking about migrating my site onto IIS 8.0 hosting and enquiring when it would be available.  Well during the same conversation Takeshi posted a blog post announcing the arrival of Windows Server 2012 hosting to their US data centre with the team also working to bring it to their European datacentre -http://blog.discountasp.net/windows-2012-hosting-arrives-in-us-data-center/.  So the first thing I did was select the upgrade on my account and my site has now been migrated across to a new Windows Server 2012 platform and is running on IIS 8.0

I also took the opportunity to upgrade the underlying platform of my blog, BlogEngine.Net, to 2.6.0.5 after not having upgrade from 2.0.  At the same time I’ve tinkered with the theme so I can present more content in my posts and I’ve also fixed a number of issues that I haven’t had time to investigate before now, for example my tweets are now displayed correctly in the bubbles above.  I’ve got a couple rough edges to smooth down like the search page but everything else seems ok.

Thanks to all the attendees who came to my talk on IIS8 last week at NxtGenUG Manchester Daresbury.  Apologies for the delay in posting the slides, you can now get them on my Slides & Resources page and the direct link for the IIS 8 Presentation slides is - http://www.andrewwestgarth.co.uk/Presentations/IIS%208%20–%20Platform%20for%20the%20Future.pdf

Two new Release Candidates for the following IIS Extensions have been released today:

• Application Initialization for IIS 7.5 (the replacement for the previously released Application Warmup beta extension)
• Dynamic IP Restrictions for IIS7/7.5

Application Initialization for IIS 7.5

Application Initialization is a feature which is coming in IIS 8.0 and is now also available for IIS 7.5 (please note this feature is not available for IIS 7.0).   This module helps to eliminate the lack of feedback experienced by users when an application is first accessed and is not “warmed up”.  Through the use of this module Administrators can enable a website to return a splash page while waiting for the application to be ready for example.  The module also enables seamless recycling of pre-loaded application pools with no noticeable impact to users, something I am sure many application developers will be able to take advantage of.

Dynamic IP Restrictions for IIS7/7.5

The Dynamic IP Restrictions module provides Administrators and Hosters with the facility to mitigate or block Denial of Service Attacks or brute force attacks on passwords by temporarily blocking IP Address from where potential attacks are emanating, this is done by monitoring patterns of traffic and matching those to patterns which would indicate attack.  This can be configured on a server and site level.

Sean Eagan, Program Manager on the IIS Team has a more detailed blog post with links to documentation and download links for both the Release Candidates of Application Initialization and Dynamic IP Restrictions - http://blogs.iis.net/shauneagan/archive/2012/04/02/release-candidates-for-dynamic-ip-restrictions-and-application-initialization-now-available.aspx

I will be looking to cover both of these extensions in both my talks at user groups and also in more detail here on my blog.

With the recent release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and the Windows Server 8 Beta I’ve been looking at the new features in IIS8 such as:

• Web Socket Support
• Application Initialization
• Configuration Optimization
• SNI Support
• and many more…

If you would like to know more and are in the Manchester area why not come along to NxtGenUG Manchester on Wednesday 18th April 2012 where I’ll be giving my first in a number of sessions on IIS8.  For more information or to signup please visit the NxtGenUG Website

This week’s RunAs Radio has Clint Huffman, a Microsoft Premier Field Engieer talking to Richard Campbell about understanding the health state of IIS7/7.5.  There is some excellent content in this episode and I’d strongly recommend listning to it. Clint covers aspects such as mappings, caching, failed request tracing and the IIS Log Analyzer. Rather than tell you everything that is in the podcast, listen now! - http://www.runasradio.com/default.aspx?showNum=248

RunAs Radio is an excellent weekly podcast with Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes for IT Professionals/Developers making use of Microsoft products. In my honest opinion I think developers need to also have an understanding of the systems they develop and deploy on top of to maximise the full use of the platform, so I feel this is an excellent resource for all, so check out the podcasts and subscribe now!

I don’t often post links to posts from others, however I really wanted to highlight two great resources which two other IIS MVPs have started recently.

IIS Community Newsletter

Steve Schofield has recently published the first IIS Community Newsletter.  The newsletter comprises all of the latest information and happenings in the IIS Community.  If you would like to find out more or register to receive the newsletter go to http://www.iisnewsletter.com and if you have anything you’d like to contribute you can also contribute to the Wiki.  Big thanks to Steve for the mention is the inaugural newsletter for both my Twitter account and for NEBytes

Web Pro Series

Scott Forsyth has recently started a 52 week series of walkthrough videos on a number of topics relevant to IT Pros and Web Developers covering a vast range of topics including

• Troubleshooting essentials;
• Application Request Routing and Load Balancing;
• URL Rewrite;
• SQL Syntax for IT Pros;
• Scripting;
• Command Line Basics;
• IIS Share Configuration;
• Keyboard Shortcuts;

In the first four weeks Scott has covered Ping and Tracert; Understanding DNS Zone Records; Nslookup; Capturing Command Line Output.  It’s a great start and will help to fill gaps in knowledge and also add tools and techniques to your arsenal for resolving issues and implementing technologies in the best way possible based on a wealth of experience. 

As is the case with most of my blog posting of late, it’s well.. late and in a big queue, but seeing this is relatively time sensitive and the fact that I’m over the moon again.  I thought I’d jot a quick post.

Last Thursday (1st July 2010), I was very pleased to receive an email from Microsoft to inform me that I had been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for 2010 – Internet Information Services (IIS).  This is the third consecutive year I have received this and as I’ve mentioned before I am extremely humble to be associated with a great group of technical people around the globe.  I’ll be aiming to continue my efforts to help the community and deliver as much content as I can to aid and spread knowledge. 

Finally I am uploading my slides and links to demos from the session I delivered at NxtGenUG Manchester on the 21st April, for those who attended thanks for coming along I hope you enjoyed the session, and I’d like to offer a massive apology for taking so long to post the slides and links to the demos.  My session covered the Web Deployment Tool including the integration in VS2010 and I also covered the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit.  Download the slides from my Slides & Resources page.

MS Deploy Resources

• Web Deployment Team Blog - http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/
• Vishal R Joshi at PDC – http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT56
• Vishal’s Blog - http://www.vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/
• Scott Hanselmann at Mix10 – http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/FT14
• MSDN Guide to XDT -- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465326.aspx
• MS Podcast on Web Deploy - http://www.microsoft.com/events/podcasts/default.aspx?pageId=x5283
• Vishal has also posted his snippets from his PDC session  - XML Document Transform XDT Snippets For VS2010

SEO Toolkit Resources

• IIS.Net – Main IIS Resource Site
• Carlos Aguilar’s Blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/carlosag
• IIS SEO Toolkit – Crawler Module Extensibility

This morning Scott Guthrie announced a new program to help Small Web Development Companies (10 employees or less) and individual Web Developers who develop Web Sites and Services.  The program runs for three years is free to join, all that is payable is a $100 fee on exit.  Benefits of the program include:

• Windows Web Server 2008 R2 – licenses;
• SQL Server 2008 licenses;
• 1 Expression Studio 3 license;
• 2 Expression Web licenses;
• 3 Visual Studio 2008 Professional licenses
• and more…

For full details of the announcement see Scott Guthrie’s blog post and to register visit the WebsiteSpark portal.

Announcements from the IIS Team

Today has been a day for announcements with the IIS Team also announcing a list of new releases – Bill Staples has full details of the releases – which are:

• Final Release of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2 –this is a great application which helps to install all of the components that you need to get started on the Microsoft Web Platform and with some great community apps, for example the great BlogEngine.Net on which I run this blog;
• Final Release of the Web Deployment Tool 1.0 – something I’ve delivered sessions on in the past and will be reviewing the final changes now I’m back from my holiday;
• Final Release of Database Manager 1.0 – a great extension for the IIS Manager which enables easy management of your databases;
• Search Engine Optimization Toolkit – Beta 2 – Another great IIS extension which I have started to look at and will post more on soon;
• Application Request Routing 2 – Release Candidate;

For more information refer to iis.net and to Bill’s blog post, I’m off to read up on today’s great announcements.