Kanwaljeet Singla » IISConfig

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 [...]

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

How configuration system merges sections

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:22:00 +0000

One of the things which was not clear to me when IIS7 configuration system was written was how configuration system merges all the configuration data available and then decide what values are effective for the current request. One of confusions came from the fact that I assumed that IIS modules try to read the values for the current URL and then keep moving up till it finds the attribute explicitly defined in a configuration file. This is part true for the configuration system but never for the modules. All modules do is ask the configuration system for a merged view of a particular configuration section for a configuration path which usually corresponds to the URL of the requested page. If you are familiar with AhAdmin, this corresponds to the following call.

How to read/write administration.config

Kanwaljeet Singla — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 17:37:00 +0000

IIS7 configuration system understands machine.config, web.config and applicationHost.config but does not handle administration.config natively. This means reading and writing administration.config is little difficult. If you use AhAdmin directly and call GetAdminSection for a section defined in administration.config, it will throw a configuration error for all configuration paths saying that it couldn’t find the section in the configuration file. Easiest way you can work with administration.config is by using Microsoft.Web.Administration (MWA). ServerManager::GetAdministrationConfiguration gives you a Configuration object which represents administration.config. Below is a sample program which uses MWA to print UI module providers registered in administration.config.

class Program
{

Working with RSCA using configuration APIs

Kanwaljeet Singla — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 13:29:00 +0000

One of the new features in IIS7 in windows server 2008 enable people to extend existing IIS configuration sections. If you have a schema file in schema folder which defines section already defined in IIS_Schema.xml, IIS configuration system will merge the schema defined in these two files. This enables you to add owner, email, phone properties to sites and have then keep this data under sites section in applicationHost.config. In addition to this, there is a new concept of dynamic properties. These are the properties which doesn’t have static values in configuration files but whose values can be supplied dynamically by some COM components. Dynamic properties can support get/set operations as other configuration properties. Other than get and set, configuration system allows you to define methods in schema which can be called using configuration APIs. These methods can accept input and return output as well.

Using ahadmin to read/write IIS configuration – Part 2

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 01:10:00 +0000

Continuing my ahadmin drill down, lets see how to use available interfaces to work with section groups, section definitions, locations and metadata. IAppHostConfigFile interface Working with section groups, section definitions and locations require you to get an instance IAppHostConfigFile which is obtained using IAppHostConfigManager.GetConfigFile(). Following code gets IAppHostConfigFile instances for machine.config, root web.config, applicationHost.config and prints file path of each.

var ahwrite = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.ApplicationHost.WritableAdminManager");

Using ahadmin to read/write IIS configuration – Part 1

Kanwaljeet Singla — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 02:47:00 +0000

The Application Host Administration API (ahadmin.idl) interface library can be accessed using native code and any COM-interop means like script or managed code. This blog post details how to use this interface in scripts (all samples are in javascript) to read/write IIS7 configuration information.

Getting/Setting property values

You start by getting an instance of IAppHostAdminManager if you want to only read the config. If you want to write to config as well, you will need an instance of IAppHostWritableAdminManager which derives from IAppHostAdminManager. IAppHostWritableAdminManager has additionally CommitChanges method to commit changes to disk and CommitPath get/set property which dictates where the configuration settings are written. Lets create an instance of these.

Tool to generate strongly typed classes for configuration sections

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 03:46:00 +0000

I wrote a simple tool to generate strongly typed classes for IIS configuration sections which can then be used with MWA to enable intellisense. This tool should be able to generate very logical intuitive type names in most cases. Generated code is similar to code samples in my earlier blog.

Usage:
genscode.exe <schemaFile> <optional section name>

This tool dumps the code on the console. Redirect to save in a file.
genscode.exe %windir%\system32\inetsrv\config\schema\IIS_Schema.xml system.webServer/httpCompression > HttpCompression.cs

MWA and intellisense for configuration sections

Kanwaljeet Singla — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 03:13:00 +0000

Microsoft.Web.Administration (MWA) returns generic ConfigurationSection, ConfigurationElementCollection, ConfigurationElement classes for dealing with different configuration sections. Using these classes directly requires you to remember attribute/collection/element names which needs to be passed to GetAttribute(), GetCollection(), GetChildElement(). MWA allows you to define your Section/Collection/Element types which can then be passed to GetSection, GetCollection, GetChildElement to get an instance of strongly typed class which makes dealing with sections very easy.