Ride the IIS Adoption Wave!

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 16:46:04 GMT

This InformationWeek article highlights the most recent Netcraft survey which shows IIS continues to gain marketshare on the web.

Netcraft's August 2007 survey of about 128 million Web sites shows a decline in market share for Apache to 48.4%, while Microsoft has risen to a 36.2% share of active Web sites.

This is a great time to ride the adoption wave and build new products for IIS. As these websites move to IIS, they'll be looking for add-ons that help them enhance and manage their servers and applications.

With the upcoming release of IIS7 on Windows Server 2008, extending IIS has never been easier. You can create components in C# or VB that extend IIS in several ways:

New modules and handlers that run in the IIS pipeline - Authentication, URL Rewriting, Caching, Compression, etc.
Enhancements to the management UI - Reporting plug-ins, Application deployment tools, etc
Configuration schema - enable your application to use the IIS distributed configuration system for its own settings
Diagnostics - build tools or hooks into the great diagnostics tools in IIS7

Helping you build these types of extensions for your applications, is what my new role is all about. It doesn't matter if you're building commercial or non-commercial products or that you are targeting ASP.NET, PHP or other platforms/frameworks. Give me a shout if you've got ideas and interest in building some of these scenarios. My alias is drobbins at microsoft.

IIS7 Technical Evangelist

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:29:17 GMT

Today, I start a new job within Microsoft as the IIS7 Technical Evangelist.

In my previous role as a Community Developer Evangelist, I was responsible for influencing the adoption of all Microsoft development and platform technologies in a specific geography (the Heartland District). In this new role, I'll be responsible for IIS, enabling developers around the world to realize the potential of this technology.

Why IIS? I've been working with IIS since it's first days as part of the NT Option Pack. More recently, I've spent a good amount of time talking with ASP.NET, PHP and CFML developers about how to leverage the features of IIS7. I had the opportunity to speak at CFUNITED, Zend PHP Conference and PHPConf (Russia). The audiences were very excited about the changes in IIS7. I think this is a great time to evangelize this technology and show people that Windows is a great platform for building and hosting web applications and services.

I'm looking forward to the new challenge, working with a great team of people (James, Brian, David, Justin, Matt, Ryan and Vittorio) and spreading the word about an exciting technology. My family will be relocating to Redmond, WA over the next month, so I expect to be very busy getting started in a new job and moving 2500 miles across the country.

If you work with IIS7, developing software that leverages its features, count me as a new connection and resource for you at Microsoft.

If you'd like to connect, here are some upcoming events that I'll be at:

devLink - Nashville, TN - October 12-13

Heartland Developers Conference - Omaha, NE - October 18-19

TechEd Europe - Barcelona, Spain - November 5-9

I also hope to come back for CodeMash in January.

Drewby: IIS

Ride the IIS Adoption Wave!

IIS7 Technical Evangelist