There's a lot of ground to cover when one endeavors to talk about
something as big as a new server operating system. Obviously there's no
way I could possibly cover everything, or even everything that
relates to ASP and ASP.NET on the new platform, in this one little
article, so... for now, I'm planning on just giving you a whirlwind overview
of some of the highlights that I thought were cool and show you
some cool looking screen shots.
Once the product ships, we'll naturally cover
some of the individual features in more depth, but this little peek should
at least give you an idea about what you can look forward to seeing in
Microsoft's latest server offering when it ships.
The Facelift
Not really knowing where to start, I guess the new UI is as good a place as any.
It's pretty looking. It's not as XP'd up as the Home and Pro versions (probably
to save wasting system resources on drawing shadows and cool looking window bars),
but it's still got the XP flavor you're probably used seeing to at this point.
Shutdown Logging
I ran into this the first time I went to shut the server off. It wouldn't let me
shut it down without telling it why! It then logs this information in the event log.
Pretty neat huh? This should help end those "Hey Bob, I saw the server was down for
a minute. Did you reboot it? If so... what's up? If not, should we look into it?"
type of conversations and emails.
Configure Your Server Wizard
At first I didn't like this, but it's worked well for everything I've used it for.
Now you can only really install/configure one thing at a time, but the good news is they seem
to install faster and the wizard is only a few steps long for most things.
IIS 6
The biggie for ASP and ASP.NET purposes... IIS 6 has a ton of new features and
options that can make your site run better and with less maintenance. I'll go into
depth in a future article, but believe Microsoft when they say they've "completely revised
the IIS architecture."
Remote Browser Based Admin
Windows has had remote, browser-based admin capabilities for a while, but like
a lot of other stuff, Microsoft has given us a new and improved version.
