James Senior's Blog

Today I blew my machine away and ready for the Web Camps events starting next week in Toronto – getting everything from Visual Studio 2010 to IIS and more installed.

Part of the demos will be covering Web Deploy – the technology that makes it easy to deploy websites on IIS from Visual Studio 2010 and IIS.  I normally get it installed via Web PI but for whatever reason (I may have installed something in the wrong order) I wasn’t getting the UI features showing up in IIS – where it should give me options to import and/or export a deployment package:

This was curious because Web PI was telling me that Web Deployment Tool was installed too, so I decided to try install it “raw” using the MSI – which is available under the main Web PI download link:

When I ran that MSI I had the option to change the installation and this revealed where the problem was.

The components for the UI Module in IIS Manager were not installed as you can see above.  Once I installed them, sure enough, the options appeared in IIS.

I have no idea why the options for importing/exporting packages didn’t show up in IIS – nor do I care :) – but hopefully if you come across the same problem, this will help you out.

Today we launched the Windows Server 2008 R2 Learning Centers on Channel9 – congrats to the team!  There’s great content on there including labs, videos, presentations etc covering a wide range of topics from performance and efficiency to extensibility.

Learn deployment, scale and extensibility

As a web developer, there are some lessons that of particular interest to me that teach me how to deploy and scale my web application and make sure it’s running lightning quick.  All this is covered in the “Extensible Web Platform” lesson.

Give your native code apps an API just like web apps

Also, I often want to create APIs for my web applications that allow other developers to interact with it and help create a rich ecosystem of apps that add value on top of my platform (think Twitter).  We’ve already showed you how you can do this using REST APIs (check out the Web App Toolkit for REST Services).  The Extreme Web Services course shows you how you can now do the same for your native code applications built in C++ etc.

Need Scale? There’s an extension for that!

If you need ultimate scale for your web applications be sure to check out the free extension called Application Routing Request which allows administrators to optimize resource utilization for application servers to reduce management costs for Web server farms and shared hosting environments.  Check out the blog post from the product team and see how Inernap are using it today to cut costs whilst improving scale and reporting.