IIS7 Resource Kit Rocks!

I’ve never been much of an “infrastructure guy” which is why Microsoft’s Resource Kit books always induced sleep on me.

However, the IIS7 Resource Kit by Mike Volodarsky, et. al., has been a pleasant surprise. A bit repetitive, perhaps due collaboration of several authors, yet concise and thorough. The diagrams are great and the text is easy to follow.

I’ve held out on IIS7 for too long because I just couldn’t grok the integrated pipeline, and how http.sys, W3SVC, WAS, and W3WP all interacted with each other. I’m sure this abbreviation bingo is scary enough to an untrained eye.

In retrospect, I’m kicking myself, “Why haven’t I jumped on the IIS7 bandwagon sooner?!” It’s got so much stuff out of the box which I’ve been hacking by hand in IIS5 and 6!

If you don’t want to read the entire book, at least read Chapter 2 “Understanding IIS 7.0 Architecture” and Chapter 11 ”Hosting Application Development Frameworks.” I consider these chapters to be essential to web developers.