Kanwaljeet Singla » IIS

Podcast on Running PHP on Windows

Kanwaljeet Singla — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:36:19 +0000

Peter Laudati & Dmitry Lyalin host the edu-training Connected Show developer podcast on cloud computing and interoperability. I met Peter in Chicago during Tek-X and we along with Don and Wade recorded a podcast on evolution of PHP on the Windows Platform. We talked about the improvements made to Windows in order to support PHP, [...]

Using IIS configuration tools to manage HWC configuration

Kanwaljeet Singla — Sat, 29 May 2010 21:09:15 +0000

I have seen many people built some innovative solutions on top of hostable web core (HWC) functionality which was added in IIS7. One of the questions which HWC users frequently ask is how to make IIS configuration tools (like appcmd, UI etc.) work against configuration file which their HWC instance is using. So far they [...]

Goodness of dynamic maxInstances in FastCGI

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 03 May 2010 21:12:04 +0000

One of the major pain points in FastCGI 1.0 was that users were required to set maxInstances to a number which works best for their application. Many users didn’t tune this value and were running FastCGI with default value of maxInstances which didn’t give them optimal performance. We recommended users to set maxInstances to (10 [...]

How to add traces to IIS log from PHP

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 03:08:24 +0000

One of the new features added to FastCGI module in IIS 7.5 is ability to use IIS tracing infrastructure from FastCGI applications. This feature request was made by a customer who wanted to consolidate logging of the request processing in one log. All IIS events were present in IIS trace logs but traces generated by [...]

Application specific mapping in FastCGI ISAPI 1.5

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:25:49 +0000

IIS team recently released FastCGI ISAPI 1.5 for IIS 5.1 and IIS 6.0. One of the major new features added in this release is per application process pools. Per application process pools allow users to specify a unique FastCGI mapping for a particular web application in fcgiext.ini. Using this functionality administrators can now choose to [...]

Urlscan to RequestFiltering migration using MSDeploy

Kanwaljeet Singla — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:57:00 +0000

In addition to FastCGI migration provider, MSDeploy 1.0 RTW shipped with a URLScan to request filtering migration provider to ease migration of UrlScan.ini settings to system.webServer/security/requestFiltering section. Even though URLScan 3.1 is supported on Win2K8 and you are not required to move to request filtering module, there are few advantages in using request filtering module. One advantage is that all your configuration can stay together in applicationHost.config and web.config and you are not required to maintain a separate configuration file.

Migrating FastCGI configuration from IIS 5.1/6.0 to IIS 7.0/7.5

Kanwaljeet Singla — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:18:00 +0000

Problem

As you know FastCGI functionality on IIS 5.1 and IIS 6.0 is provided by FastCGI ISAPI extension which is available as an independent download. On IIS 7.0 and beyond, FastCGI functionality is provided by IIS FastCGI module which comes with the operating system.

Getting both FastCGI module and AppPool CPULimit to work

Kanwaljeet Singla — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:29:00 +0000

FastCGI module available in IIS 7.0 did not work when CPULimit for the application pool was enabled. This was because when CPULimit feature was enabled WAS uses job objects to track CPU usage of worker processes. WAS keeps a job object for each application pool and all worker processes which belong to that application pool are made part of that job object. FastCGI module uses job objects to make sure that there are no orphan child processes left when worker process goes away. Note that FastCGI requires a per process job object while WAS requires a per application pool job object. For this reason, it was not possible to make WAS take care of killing FastCGI child processes when worker process dies.

FastCGI ISAPI 1.5 Beta for WinXP and Win2K3

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:39:00 +0000

IIS team today released FastCGI ISAPI 1.5 Beta for WinXP and Win2K3 which has some very nice additions to existing FastCGI ISAPI functionality. Following additions have been made to FastCGI ISAPI 1.0.

Using advanced logging to log custom module data

Kanwaljeet Singla — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:34:00 +0000

Advanced logging module which media team released few days ago uses IIS tracing subsystem and allow module developers to log custom data in W3C compatible format using familiar IHttpTraceContext interface. If you are a module developer and want to generate W3C style logs for requests with custom data, doing it with advanced logging module is very easy. All you need to do is call IHttpTraceContext::RaiseTraceEvent passing data you want to publish. Your module installer can then configure advanced logging module to make it dump this data in a log file and you have complete logging solution without ever have to deal with log files yourself. Let’s see what it takes to make use of this functionality.

Implementing IAppHostPathMapper in C

Kanwaljeet Singla — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 04:38:00 +0000

Few days ago I was required to implement IAppHostPathMapper interface in native C to map configuration path MACHINE/WEBROOT/APPHOST to DefaultAppPool.config and struggled with finding good documentation. With help of some incomplete, hard to find documentation and some head banging here is what worked for me.

New features in configuration system and appcmd in IIS 7.5

Kanwaljeet Singla — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:48:00 +0000

Following new features have been added to IIS configuration system and appcmd command line tool in IIS 7.5.

Configuration System

1. Configuration system tracing and logging

IIS 7.5 updates to custom errors and compression

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:44:00 +0000

Looking at number of people reaching my first blog post while searching for information on IIS 7.5, I figured I should do few more posts on changes which are coming in IIS 7.5. In this blog post I am covering new features which have been added to compression and custom errors modules in IIS 7.5.

Changes to custom errors

Improvements to FastCGI in IIS 7.5

Kanwaljeet Singla — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 10:10:00 +0000

Following improvements have been made to FastCGI module in Win7 (and Win2K8 R2).

1. Monitor changes to a file

We have added ability to monitor changes to a file for each FastCGI process pool. Module will recycle FastCGI processes for the process pool if a change to the file is detected.

Generating trace information in native modules

Kanwaljeet Singla — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:45:50 +0000

IIS7 has really nice tracing capabilities which are available to all module developers. If you want to make it easy for you and your customers to debug problems in your modules, you should definitely be using them. You can use IHttpTraceContext::RaiseTraceEvent or IHttpTraceContext::QuickTrace in your IIS7 native modules to generate trace information. Once you have [...]