Chapter 1: Overview of Microsoft Web Services

Overview

Each new version of Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) has represented a major advance in Web server technology. The changes have been dramatic, and they’ve improved reliability, availability, scalability, manageability, and security. However, no version of IIS has brought the kinds of changes you’ll find in IIS 6.0—so if you think you know IIS 6 because you knew a previous version, think again.

Microsoft's entire .NET strategy is tied to IIS 6., so much so that you can think of IIS as the heart of Web application services within the Microsoft Windows .NET Framework. IIS is no longer a simple bundle of services for putting up a Web site— it’s a complete solution for hosting Web servers and Web applications, and the Web application architecture is one of the most versatile you'll find anywhere.

IIS 6 has been redesigned from the bottom up. For starters, ASP.NET and the Windows .NET Framework are fully integrated into IIS 6, which significantly changes the way you use IIS. Further, unlike IIS 5, where the main Web server process was often a major choke point that severely affected performance, IIS 6 has a redesigned request processing architecture that allows the server to perform better, to reserve fewer resources, to handle more virtual servers, to detect failures and resolve them, and much more.

IIS 6 has many other new and enhanced features. Few are more important than the changes to the security architecture. IIS 6 has multiple levels of security, and it adds authentication mechanisms (including .NET Passport authentication and delegated authentication),improves Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) by enhancing performance and adding support for crypto service providers, and supports Uniform Resource Locator (URL) authorization whereby administrators can control access according to applications and URLs.

Because of the many changes, a lot of what you know about IIS is obsolete or irrelevant. But it's not all bad news. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel— well, it’s more like a freight train coming right at you—but it's there. The changes in IIS 6 are well worth the time and effort you'll spend learning the new architecture and the new techniques required to manage Web servers. Our dependence on ASP.NET and Windows .NET Framework will only grow over time, and the more you learn about the heart of the .NET architecture—IIS 6— the better prepared you’ll be for now and for the future.

Note

Throughout this book I’ll refer to administration of IIS, Web applications, and the Indexing Service as Microsoft Web administration or simply Web administration. Microsoft Indexing Service is used to create text indexes of the contents and properties of files so that the files can be searched using standard queries.

As you get started with Microsoft Web administration, you should concentrate on these key areas:

• What’s new or changed in IIS 6

• How IIS works with your hardware

• How IIS works with Microsoft Windows–based operating systems

• Which administration tools are available

• Which administration techniques you can use to manage and maintain IIS

  Note

  In this book, the term Windows Server 2003 refers to these members of the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 family: Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition; Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition; Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition; and Windows Server 2003, Web Edition. In addition, all procedures described in this book are based on the default version of Windows Server 2003; if you are using the Classic Start menu, some of the steps will be slightly different.