Scott Forsyth's Blog

Every trade has their favorite tool, whether it be a hammer, calculator, or stethoscope.  For me, one of my top tools is Process Monitor.  I use it like a handy man uses duct tape.  With it I can easily troubleshoot access denied errors, files not found, strange path redirection, and many other unexpected behavior situations.

IIS is a powerful web platform, and since version 7.0 everything, absolutely everything, is backed by a schema.  This defines the settings, defaults and value ranges that IIS uses.

Last week I covered IIS 7(.5)’s distributed and delegated configuration system.  This week I’ll take it a step further and look specifically at editing applicationHost.config in a text editor (e.g. notepad) to make more advanced configuration changes.

IIS 7.0 introduced a completely new delegated and distributed configuration system.  This offers a number of benefits, which are welcome changes for us web administrators, but there are some gotchas.

Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) web platform is extremely robust, and one of the neat features is overlapping application pools.

Virtual Directories and applications are useful special folder types in IIS.  Yet it’s easy to be confused between them.

As you may be guessing already, I’m a big fan of URL Rewrite for IIS.  Today I cover Outbound rules, providing demos on changing the content in-flight and adding Server Variables (HTTP headers) for the browser.

IIS URL Rewrite is a powerful tool that I’ve grown quite fond of.  One variable that URL Rewrite doesn’t have, which I wish it did, is the Server Name (Machine Name, Computer Name, whatever you want to call it).  The server name isn’t a normal HTTP server variable. So, I wrote a simple provider to take care of that.