Welcome to Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 Administrator's Pocket Consultant. As the author of over 65 books, I've been writing professionally about Web publishing and Web servers since 1994. Over the years, I've written about many different Web server technologies and products, but my favorite has always been Internet Information Services (IIS). IIS provides the core services for hosting Web servers, Web applications, and Microsoft Windows SharePoint services. From top to bottom, IIS 7.0 is substantially different from earlier versions of IIS. For starters, the underlying configuration architecture for IIS has been completely reconstructed—IIS configuration architecture is now based entirely on Extensible Markup Language (XML) and XML schema.
Having written many top-selling Web publishing and XML books, I was able to bring a unique perspective to this book—the kind of perspective you can gain only after working with technologies for many years. You see, long before IIS 7.0 architecture was built on XML and related technologies, I was working with, researching, and writing about these technologies. The advantage for you, the reader, is that my solid understanding of these technologies allowed me to dig into the IIS configuration architecture and to provide a comprehensive roadmap to this architecture and the hundreds of related configuration settings in this book.
In addition, as you've probably noticed, there's more than enough information about IIS 7.0 on the Web and in other printed books. There are tutorials, reference sites, discussion groups, and more to help make it easier to use IIS 7.0. However, the advantage to reading this book instead is that all the information you need to learn IIS 7.0 is organized in one place and presented in a straightforward and orderly fashion. This book has everything you need to customize IIS installations, master IIS configuration, and maintain IIS servers.
In this book, I teach you how features work, why they work the way they work, and how to customize them to meet your needs. You'll also learn why you may want to use certain features and when to use other features to resolve any issues you are having. In addition, this book provides tips, best practices, and examples of how to optimize IIS 7.0 to meet your needs. This book won't just teach you how to configure IIS—it'll teach you how to squeeze every last bit of power out of the application and how to make the most of the features and options included in IIS 7.0.
Also, unlike many other books on the subject, this book doesn't focus on a specific user level. This isn't a lightweight, beginners-only book. Regardless of whether you are a novice administrator or a seasoned professional, many of the concepts in this book will be valuable to you. And you'll be able to apply them to your IIS server installations.
