A month ago I have stopped using Google Analytics for my site and instead gave a try to Piwik – an open source, PHP/MySQL based real time web analytics application. Since then it has been working well for my site and overall to me it looks like a better alternative to Google Analytics.
Here are the things that I like: Continue Reading »
This post has been updated from its original version to correct the installation instructions, which have changed since the time the post was written in Feb 2009.
With the addition of .NET Framework to Server Core in Windows Server 2008 R2 the Server Core installation option became even more appealing for those who want to use a very low footprint server for hosting their applications. Availability of .NET framework provides the following great benefits:
This post describes how to setup and configure IIS on Server Core in Windows Server 2008 R2. Specifically the following tasks are described:
Today IIS team has released the Dynamic IP Restrictions Extension for IIS 7.0 – Beta. The Dynamic IP Restrictions Extension provides IT Professionals and Hosters a configurable module that helps mitigate or block Denial of Service Attacks or cracking of passwords through Brute-force by temporarily blocking Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of HTTP clients who follow a pattern that could be conducive to one of such attacks. This module can be configured such that the analysis and blocking could be done at the Web Server or the Web Site level.
Microsoft Dynamic IP Restrictions for IIS 7.0 – Beta (x86)
Microsoft Dynamic IP Restrictions for IIS 7.0 – Beta (x64)
If IIS already has IPv4 Address and IP restrictions module enabled then Dynamic IP Restrictions installer will need to un-install the existing module in order to continue the setup process. Note that the existing IPv4 configuration will be preserved while old module is removed and new module is installed. Continue Reading »
ASP.NET Web Forms extensively use postback mechanism in order to maintain the state of the server-side controls on the web page. This makes it somewhat tricky to perform URL rewriting for ASP.NET pages. When a server side form control is added to the web page, ASP.NET will render the response with HTML <form> tag that contains an action attribute pointing back to the page where the form control is. This means that if URL rewriting was used for that page, the action attribute will point back to the rewritten URL, not to the URL that was requested from the browser. This will cause the browser to show rewritten URL any time a postback occurs.
The big benefit of IIS 7 integrated request processing pipeline is the fact that all the nice and useful ASP.NET features can be used for any type of content on your web site; not just for ASP.NET-specific content. For example, ASP.NET SQL-based membership can be used to protect static files and folders. Also, ASP.NET extensibility API’s, such as IHttpHandler and IHttpModule can be used to add custom modules and handlers that would be executed even for non-ASP.NET content.
IIS 6 did not have this level of integration. ASP.NET was plugged into IIS 6 as an ISAPI extension and by default was configured to handle ONLY requests mapped to that extension – for example any request that ended with “.aspx” would be be processed by ASP.NET extension. This obviously was a big limitation for customers who wanted to be able to use ASP.NET features for all other contend on web site. The most common way to workaround that was to use “Wildcard script mapping”. This post explains how an application that used wildcard script mapping in IIS 6 can be migrated over to IIS 7.
My name is Ruslan Yakushev. I am a program manager on IIS team, working on some of the very interesting projects that are being developed in the team right now. I have joined the team about a year ago, and was thinking about starting a blog for a while now. The primary work responsibilities kept me busy, so I have been postponing blog idea for a while. Every time I needed to make an announcement or an update on IIS community site, I asked some of my colleagues on the team to blog my content. Finally, I figured that I should probably start my own blog, so I could have all the freedom of publishing my own content any time I want.
Being a technical program manager on the team, I like to use (in other words – “dogfood”) the products that team develops. Hence I decided to self-host my own blog by using latest version of IIS. Also, I have been working with FastCGI and PHP for a while now, and became quite familiar with many popular PHP applications. As a result I chose to run my blog by using latest version of WordPress, which is a very nice and easy to use blog engine application. Finally, I am using my favorite feature of IIS 7.0 – URL rewriter – to enable “pretty permalinks” on my blog.
I plan to use this blog to publish information related to FastCGI, PHP, URL rewriter and IIS in general. I hope you’ll find this content useful.
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