MVP’s provide information about how they have been active in their respective community.   Here is some stats I calculated since 10/1/2008.  Since joining the IIS community three years ago as an MVP (I was previously an ASP.NET MVP).  Microsoft has focused on making the IIS community as dynamic as ASP.NET.  IMO, they’ve succeeded and it continues to grow.  Kudo’s to the IIS team for providing a secure, dynamic platform in IIS 7.x.  The additional modules, thriving community portal site (www.iis.net)    I can see this continuing to grow.  It’s fun to share my knowledge, learn new things and be part of a exciting community! 

Per an annoucement by Ruslan from the IIS team   Keep up the great work.

“Today IIS team has released the URL Rewrite Module 2.0 for IIS 7 – Beta. This is an incremental release that includes all the features from version 1.1, and adds support for outbound response rewriting. More specifically, it can be used to:

• Replace the URLs generated by a web application in the response HTML with a more user friendly and search engine friendly equivalent


• Modify the links in the HTML markup generated by a web application behind a reverse proxy.


• Fix up the content of any HTTP response by using regular expression pattern matching

Install the URL Rewrite Module 2.0 Beta

Install with Web Platform Installer

or, download:

URL Rewrite Module 2.0 for IIS 7 – Beta (x86)

URL Rewrite Module 2.0 for IIS 7 – Beta (x64)

Note:

• URL Rewrite v1.0 and v2.0 cannot be installed side-by-side.


• URL Rewrite v1.1 and v2.0 cannot be installed side-by-side.


• If URL Rewrite v1.0 or v1.0 is already installed, uninstall it before proceeding with installing URL Rewrite Module v2.0 Beta.

New Features

URL Rewrite Module 2.0 includes the following key features:

• Rules-based response rewriting engine. Outbound rules are used to express the logic of what to compare parts of the response with and what to do if comparison was successful. Web server and site administrators can use outbound rules to define complex response rewriting logic.


• Rewriting within the content of specific HTML tags. Instead of scanning the entire response for a particular match, the rule can be configured to look only inside of certain HTML tags, such as <a>, <img>, etc. That way the pattern is greatly simplified and the process of applying the rule to the content is much faster comparing to applying the pattern to the entire response.


• Pre-conditions for outbound rules. Applying rewrite rules on every response is an expensive operation and is not necessary in majority of the cases. Pre-conditions are used to check the response metadata to determine if outbound rules evaluation should be applied.


• Setting of server variables and HTTP headers. Various IIS server variables and HTTP request headers can be set by using rewrite rules.


• Tracking capture groups across rule conditions. The conditions back-referencing logic in URL Rewrite 1.1 worked only against the last matched conditions. In v2 it is possible to configure back-referencing logic to work against all matched conditions.


• Logging of rewritten URLs. The module can be configured to log the rewritten URL in IIS W3C logs as opposed to logging an originally requested URL.

More information

• Usage walkthroughs


• Configuration reference


• URL Rewrite Forum

Cheers

Steve Schofield

I started hanging out in the newsgroups again, along with the forums at http://forums.iis.net  I ran across a particular interesting post by Alun Jones (Security MVP and maker of WFTPD or WFTPD Pro).   There are a fair amount of posts on http://forums.iis.net about FTP, some are confused by Active, Passive, and SSL settings. His posting in the newsgroups described this very clearly. (IMO).   What people are confused about is how Active, Passive connections are handled.

Here is his post

http://omgili.com/newsgroups/microsoft/public/inetserver/iis/ftp/E703AA31-D0A7-4AE8-B6C4-06A76736FBEBmicrosoftcom.html

Here is an article series Alun is posting on his blog.

http://msmvps.com/blogs/alunj/archive/2009/07/08/1698917.aspx

Hopes this helps.  Thanks Alun for posting such great information!

Steve Schofield
Microsoft MVP – IIS

Here are my experiences about using the SEO toolkit by the IIS team.   I had a few sections I wanted to improve for search engines, using the SEO toolkit, it identified over 700 found errors.  I’ve reduced to 187 individual items, of which is tied to a few articles that need some reformating.   The articles will get touched up, which mostly are HTML markup.   This was VERY helpful in identifying items on my website (www.iislogs.com)   

Here is the list of things that were found.

• 
  
  Images did not have an ALT statement


• 
  
  Invalid HTML markup


• 
  
  Titles too long


• 
  
  Descriptions were missing


• 
  
  The page contains multiple canonical formats.

To correct the items, I downloaded my entire site locally, created a website solution within Visual Studio 2008.  I did a find and replace in the entire solution.  It was mostly making things consistent, putting items in lower case (a href and </a> for example).   It helped to correct the HTML markup issues.  The one way I keep formatting simple is using ASP.NET Master Pages.   This can help keep the site maintenance to a minimum.  I came from the days of multiple include files (both Classic ASP and ASCX files), so using a single file made adjusting the formatting simplier.  The biggest thing on my site was images were missing the ALT tag.  Once I fixed the easier errors, I focused on the larger ones.  The tool found 408 ALT images missing, after adjusting my master page, the count was below 190. The SEO toolkit was helpful in identifying various problems.  For issues, feel free to post in the forums at http://forums.iis.net/1162.aspx

Hope you find this helpful!

Steve Schofield
Microsoft MVP – IIS

Here is another thread on forums.iis.net that discusses UNC content, IIS 7 and Samba. 

http://forums.iis.net/p/1158781/1909100.aspx

Great stuff!

Added to my collection of UNC based posts and articles.

http://weblogs.asp.net/steveschofield/archive/tags/UNC/default.aspx

Steve