IIS 7.0

Be Extensible and Manageable. The vision for IIS 7.0 was to take the speed, reliability, and security of the IIS 6.0 codebase and turn it into a highly extensible and manageable Web server platform powerful enough to run Web applications of the future.

At the core of the IIS 7.0 release is a completely modular Web server, comprised of more than 40 features that can be assembled into small-footprint Web servers optimized for the desired role in your application topology. These features are built on top of a new extensibility layer that allows developers to extend or replace virtually any aspect of the server, in native code or with the Microsoft® .NET Framework. IIS 7.0 offers extensibility throughout its runtime, management, and operational features to help you build end-to-end solutions for your specific needs. On top of the core platform, IIS 7.0 tackles many of the problems associated with the manageability and operation of the server. It features a brand new configuration system that enables fully delegated management of sites and finally makes xcopy deployment of Web applications a reality. The new management APIs and diagnostic features make deployment, administration, and troubleshooting of the server significantly easier and more convenient than ever before.

The centralized configuration store of the previous IIS releases, known affectionately as the metabase, is gone. IIS 7.0 features a new delegated configuration system based on a hierarchy of distributed XML configuration files. This hierarchy is comprised of a global applicationHost.config file, which contains server-level configuration defaults, and distributed web.config files within the application's directory structure.

In the past, IIS application settings had to be explicitly configured in the machine-level metabase repository before the application could function correctly. With distributed web.config files, applications encapsulate the required server configuration within their directory structure. This dramatically simplifies deployment, allowing self-contained applications to be simply copied to the target server's application directory and thus be up and running immediately with the desired settings.

IIS 7.0 continues to support existing setup code that uses the Admin Base Object (ABO) APIs to write to the legacy metabase or scripts that use the higher-level Active Directory® Service Interfaces (ADSI) and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) objects to configure IIS. It does this by providing a compatibility layer that emulates the ABO APIs, on top of which all other legacy configuration APIs are based, allowing such scripts to read and change configuration just like they did in the previous releases of IIS.

Remote Management Tool. IIS 7.0 provides a tool that enables delegated management, letting application owners manage their applications remotely without having administrative access to the server computer. Server administrators, of course, have complete control over what management features are delegated to application owners.

Microsoft.Web.Administration, the new .NET Administration API, makes it easy for managed code applications to programmatically provision IIS sites and applications, access important state and diagnostic information, and otherwise configure the server.

In IIS 7.0, ASP.NET comes in two versions: Classic mode and Integrated mode. Classic mode works exactly the same way as it did in previous versions of IIS. Integrated mode, the new platform default, uses a brand new engine to provide unparalleled integration with the IIS Web server.

IIS on Windows Vista is limited to 10 concurrent requests at a time.

The modular nature of the server allows administrators to remove unneeded server features, saving memory and CPU usage during request processing.

The new IIS Output Cache provides support for re-using responses to expensive dynamic pages on the server, alleviating the need to perform the expensive rendering and database transactions in order to return the response to the client.

From IIS 7.0: Explore The Web Server For Windows Vista And Beyond by Mike Volodarsky