ASP.NET and PHP Support

IIS7 provides a single Web server platform for developing, deploying, hosting and managing the most popular languages used on the Web, from ASP.NET to PHP.

Advanced Process Architecture

IIS7's advanced process architecture provides high performance, secure and reliable hosting for all kinds Web applications.

Multi-threaded application frameworks like Classic ASP and ASP.NET run efficiently inside processes called Application Pools, enabling blazing fast performance and complete process isolation between Applications. With IIS7, new Web sites and applications are automatically created within their own Application Pool, ensuring they are securely isolated by default. Application Pools are monitored for health and availability, and can be gracefully recycled in the event of memory leaks, deadlocks, and other health-related parameters.

In order to maintain a high performance, reliable, single-threaded environment for application frameworks like PHP, IIS7 includes the all-new FastCGI module, which allows Application Pools to spawn durable, single-threaded child processes for PHP requests. FastCGI processes not only maintain the single threaded environment many PHP extensions expect, but persist between requests, thereby increasing performance and providing excellent reliability.

The result: ASP.NET and PHP applications run inside IIS7 with greater performance and reliability than ever before.

Enhanced ASP.NET Integration and Extensibility

ASP.NET gets more powerful than ever before on IIS7, with an integrated processing pipeline, integrated configuration files, and integration administration tools.

IIS7 integrates the ASP.NET runtime within the core Web server, providing a unified request processing pipeline that is exposed to both native and managed modules. This allows developers to build modules and handlers using the same extensibility APIs that exist today for ASP.NET (HttpModule and IHttpHandler), but use them for all types of applications. Imagine being able to use the powerful ASP.NET forms authentication module and membership system for that existing classic ASP application!

IIS7 provides a unified configuration system, allowing IIS configuration to be stored in the same web.config file developers use today for ASP.NET. Now web.config can contain both IIS and ASP.NET settings and can be deployed with application code and content simply by copying the file from server to server. The configuration system is fully extensible, allowing developers building custom modules to store configuration seamlessly within the same configuration system. IIS7's new IIS Manager Tool provides a single tool for managing IIS, ASP.NET and PHP applications all in the same place. IIS Manager is also complete extensible, enabling developers to provide a completely seamless experience for custom extensions.

Easily Install the World’s Most Popular Web Applications

IIS7 provides support for the Web Platform Installer (Web PI), designed to help you quickly get up and running with the most widely used Web Applications (ASP.NET and PHP) freely available for your Windows Server. Web AI provides support for Graffiti, DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, OSCommerce, and more. With a few simple clicks Web AI will check your machine for the necessary pre-requisites, download these applications from their source location in the community, walk you through basic configuration items, and install them for your use.