New releases of IIS Express

Microsoft recently released a new version of IIS Express (IIS 7.5 Express) which can be downloaded from here:  http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=1038

This release does not include a 64-bit release.  However, Microsoft has also recently released a beta version of IIS 8 Express which also includes a 64-bit release:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=29055

Dealing with Self-Signed Certs in IIS 7/IIS 7.5

Here is a great article on dealing with the issues associated with Self-Signed Certificates in IIS 7/IIS 7.5:

http://www.robbagby.com/iis/self-signed-certificates-on-iis-7-the-easy-way-and-the-most-effective-way/

Of course, if you need the DNS entry to match the website so that you do not get the dreaded certificate mismatch error, you can either use SelfSSL from the IIS 6 Resource Kit (which requires IIS 6 compatibility) or SelfSSL7 which works natively on IIS 7 and above!


You can read more about using SelfSSL7 here:

http://blogs.iis.net/thomad/archive/2010/04/16/setting-up-ssl-made-easy.aspx

Getting to know ApplicationPoolIdentity

If you have not used Windows Server 2008 R2 much, you may not have noticed that there is a new account available for IIS called ApplicationPoolIdentity. 

If you have been working with IIS for any length of time, you are probably most familiar with the Network Service account.  Well, there were some limitations and issues that were encountered when multiple applications were utilizing the Network Service account, particularly 3rd party applications running in IIS such as Perl, PHP etc.  Therefore, the Microsoft team introduced the ApplicationPoolIdentity account to address these needs.

You can read more about the ApplicationPoolIdentity account here:

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/624/application-pool-identities/

http://blogs.iis.net/webdevelopertips/archive/2009/10/02/tip-98-did-you-know-the-default-application-pool-identity-in-iis-7-5-windows-7-changed-from-networkservice-to-apppoolidentity.aspx

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/202/application-pool-identity-as-anonymous-user/

http://forums.iis.net/t/1187121.aspx

Manually removing an IIS Web Site that no longer exists

I recently had some problems with my installation of SharePoint 2010 and therefore had to uninstall my instance of SharePoint 2010 from my development workstation.

However, one of the unfortunate side effects of the uninstall was that the IIS Management Console continued to display an invalid Web Site called "Site 2". 

Upon clicking on the Web Site, I received an error message stating that "The application / does not exist".

Fortunately, I was working with Windows 7 (and thus IIS 7.5) which provides me with the ability to directly edit the IIS Management Console contents.

1. From the top level in the IIS Management Console, click on the Configuration Editor icon in Features view
2. From the dropdownlist, select system.applicationHost and the sites
3. Click on the ellipsis to view the sites
4. Highlight and select "Site 2" and click on the Remove button in the Actions menu on the right hand navigation menu
5. Close that window
6. In the Configuration Editor Actions menu on the right hand navigation menu, click on the Apply button
7. Refresh the IIS Management Console
8. You should notice that "Site 2" has now been removed from the Management Console.