20.April.2005 Update:  IIS PM Shai Kariv informed me that the managed configuration API will allow for interaction against remote machines on the network.  Previously I had stated that only WMI made this possible programmatically.  Of course this is disabled by default.  To enable it run aspnet_regiis -config+ on the remote machine to enable remote access to configuration.

Today the fact that IIS 7 centers around configuration files was driven home.  We had opportunity to learn about and experiment with the new IIS Admin tool and the WMI scripting interfaces.  By the end of the day I was asking questions about the different features each of the administrative tools provides.  I still have much to learn, but I do have a bit to begin thinking over.  Here are the highlights.

IIS Admin Tool has been completely redesigned and architected.  At this point the classic tree view we are used to does not even exist.  I and others are asking that it be brought back for rapid navigation of servers, sites and applications.  There is a strong move in the tool toward specific administration roles.  For those that focus on a specific area in the configuration hierarchy you will find that the tool nicely limits your interaction with the server to appropriate areas.  To further enhance this limited administration there is a new delegated security model.  This is probably my favorite new feature of the tool.  My second favorite feature is the ability to administer sites remotely over the Internet.  Of course it can use SSL to keep the data secure and also requires credentials to administer a remote machine.  I think the combination of delegated security and remote administration will make this tool popular for hosters and very helpful for application developers as well.  Developers are simply going to love IIS 7 because they finally will have the ability to configure the setting they need without having to request them from an administrator.  Admins, don't worry, developers will not have more access than they should not.

A few more take aways on the IIS Admin Tool:

• It is fully extensible.  Microsoft uses the public extensibility scheme themselves for the tools they have built in.
• New or updated modules are synced up with the admin tool when it connects to the server.
• Creating new modules for your custom configuration sections is relatively painless.  I imagine it will get even better be the time we see the first beta.

WMI and Scripting have been enhanced.  The WMI programming model has been cleaned up to make it easier to use and consistent between the different objects that are exposed for IIS.  Having never worked with WMI I discovered a whole world of automation that I have been missing out on.  I look forward to working more with WMI now and into the future with IIS 7.0.  WMI turns out to be the only programmable interface that works against remote servers on a network.  The .NET managed APIs for configuration are great against a local machine, but only WMI will let you hit a remote machine from code.  I asked around and learned that WMI uses traditional COM and DCOM to remote the calls to the remote machines.  Apparently both WMI and the GUI Admin Tool ultimately use the .NET configuration API to get their work done.

Some additional new features offered up through WMI include:

• Enumeration of Application Domains and Worker Processes
• Access to custom configuration sections (using new tools to automatically update the required MOF)

At the end of the day I had opportunity to continue on my soap box with the request to de-couple IIS from the operating system.  This time I made the request to Scott Guthrie.  I told him that I am going to keep requesting it right on up to Steve Balmer.  I suppose I could take it Bill Gates, but I probably should reserve any requests to Bill for things of slightly more importance.  Not that I will ever have an audience with Steve or Bill (notice the first name basis I ave with people I don't know), but it is fun to talk about.  Please join in this request if you also would like to see IIS removed from the Operating System beginning with IIS 7.0.  Perhaps if we make enough noise about we can get the right people to respond.  Anyone want to start a new site for the De-coupling campaign?  Perhaps something like decoupleiis.com (it's available at the moment).

Speaking of new domains, I registered IISSeven.com last night.  I plan to dump information about IIS 7.0 there.  To begin with I will aggregate my IIS 7.0 blog category and start linking to IIS team member blogs as well.  I guess I had better do some work tomorrow getting those team blog URL's.

For those of you who are following the back ported Membership API I have some news.  Tonight I had opportunity to visit with Scott Guthrie and I asked him when we might see the download return.  He indicated that it was likely not to return.  Currently DotNetNuke and Community Server are both licensed to use it.  Others can request it and will likely be granted license, but the issues around supporting it are apparently causing Microsoft to hold back on releasing it openly.  For those wanting to check it out you probably should plan on following the steps I outlined when it first appeared.  I will leave the latest changes in implementation to you for now.  Those who really want it will need to find a way to request it from the ASP.NET team.

Scott Guthrie, here is a thought.  Perhaps you could give it to a 3rd party like myself or someone else who could maintain it in an open source model.  That would free Microsoft from supporting it and still allow the community to begin writing against it to prepare for .NET 2.0 and gain its advantages today.  I would be happy to rebuild it under a new namespace to remove Microsoft from responsibility for support and updates.

A couple other news items from Scott.  Sharepoint 2006 or whatever the next version is called will support forms authentication for Internet sites.  He has updated his VirtualPathProvider sample code for Beta 2 of VS 2005.  See the download for the March 20, 2005 talk from VS Connections in Orlando.

This week I was given the opportunity to learn first hand about IIS 7.0 from the product team. I plan to share a few details here to let everyone know what I have seen and what sounds exciting to me. I currently admin 3 web farms totalling about 15 servers running both IIS 5.0 and IIS 6.0. Between those servers there are about 20 sites and 50 applications. By no means do I consider this a huge installation, but it will definitely benefit from many of the new IIS 7.0 features. As the number of sites and applications continue to grow I am very much looking forward to IIS 7.0.

Today we were introduced to 2 aspects of IIS 7.0 know as Configuration and Core Server.

Configuration has changed significantly for the better. With IIS 6.0 the metabase was moved into an XML file. IIS 7.0 enhances this by using a new applicationHost.config file that incorporates a full hierarchy of settings just like .NET uses in its config files. ASP.NET is further enhanced by IIS 7.0 as the configuration of the web server, sites, and applications are fully merged with ASP.NET application configuration and follow a similar hierarchy of application. This will allows application developers to deploy the necessary settings for their application along with the application itself. That feature alone should save a lot of configuration management headaches as applications move from development and testing into production. The best part about the merging of configuration is that it is coupled with a merger of the processing pipeline. Gone will be the need to configure both IIS and ASP.NET for duplicate settings like Windows authentication. The ASP.NET 2.0 configuration API will also fully support the entire IIS 7.0 configuration files and settings.

Some other things I picked up today that I am looking forward to in terms of configuration.

• Configuration sections support a new attribute called configSource. This attribute allows you to put specific configuration sections into external files. This works much like the external appSettings files work today.
• There is a new attribute that allows external config file changes to trigger an application reset.
• Configuration elements and attributes can be locked from inheritance at a very granular level.
• Encrypting configuration is very simple to prevent it from being human readable.
• ASP.NET developers will now have as much access to the pipeline as ISAPI developers have always had. This means that all IIS extensions can now be written in managed code!
• One item I found a nice little ISAPI filter for allows you to set a specific cookie with a string that could be inserted into the IIS logs. This was useful for logging the userID with the request for example. (Windows auth automatically did it) In IIS 7.0 this now happens no matter which authentication mechanism you choose because the value comes from the User in the httpContext. The big thing is that now we have the ability to do things like this easily from managed code.
• For compatibility with existing IIS tools and scripts the metabase can be installed in addition to the new IIS 7.0 configuration. Those items in IIS 7.0 that also existed in IIS 5/6 are kept in sync between the metabase and the config files. This should allow full backwards compatibility with existing scripts and tools. Of course new features in IIS 7.0 are now synced with the metabase as they would not be understood by the metabase consumers anyhow.

Core Server has gone fully modular. What this means is that instead of IIS installations supporting everything out of the box they can instead support nothing. Each feature you want to add can be added as needed. New features can be added to the entire server or just to an individual site or application following configuration hierarchy. This creates a totally modular approach to IIS hosting. The big take away here is that ASP.NET httpModules and httpHanders are both things that you will want to get an understanding of if you plan to do any IIS extensibility. Of course Microsoft will be providing all the current IIS functionality through the 44+ modules and handlers that will come out of the box.

More benefits from the IIS core server:

• Patch management can now be done at the module level instead of the server level.
• Improved performance by scaling back the services and processing of requests to only what is needed.
• Improved security by reducing the attack surface.
• Ability to easilly extend through managed code. (Native code still an option for you ISAPI lovers)
• Full processing pipeline available to ASP.NET for all requested file types.

SMTP and FTP both are getting little or no attention in IIS 7.0 and at present are not being re-written. I have notcied that STMP settings can be configured in APS.NET 2.0 so at least you can set things up for sending Email from applications inside your ASP.NET apps without messing any SMTP server defaults in the IIS admin tool.

Complaints

My biggest wish that currently is not answered by IIS 7.0 is that it be decoupled from the operating system. Apache doesn't force you to run on a server SKU and each new version does not have to wait for the next server release. As an ASP.NET developer I want to be able to run the same hosting environment on my development machine that I will have on the production server. XP Home and Pro should both support IIS 7.0 as should Windows 2003 Server. Please, Microsoft, do not force us to upgrade to Longhorn for a product that has nothing to do with the operating system. Also, please only include operating system specific features in http Modules so that they can be added for customers who chose to run on Longhorn. I love IIS, but it's tight coupling to Server OS's is not necessary or appreciated!

Well, that about does it for the features I was exposed to today. I hope to complete this series on IIS 7.0 over the next few days.

I just got notice that the Boise Idaho chapter of ISSA will be holding the 3rd Annual Information Security Conference May 4th and 5th.  There is no cost and the quality of the speakers is top notch.  Where else can you hear this lineup and get a free lunch to boot!  I have attended this conference in the past and I believe it is well worth the time.

Howard Schmidt,
Vice President and CISO, eBay

Enterprise Security Incident Management - Can we run any faster?
The volume, severity and frequency of IT security incidents has increased dramatically in the past few years resulting in increasing risk to enterprises. Traditional incident response programs are failing to keep up. Effective proactive and reactive programs must be established to manage these threats. This session will outline steps taken by one organization to develop a comprehensive incident management program and bring order where there was chaos.

Peter Coffee,
Technology Editor, eWeek

State of Technology
Peter Coffee, Technology Editor of the national enterprise newsweekly, eWEEK, has twenty years' experience in evaluating leading-edge information technologies and practices. In addition to writing product reviews, technical analyses and his weekly Port Scans column on IT issues and practices, Peter has appeared on CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and PBS TV newscasts addressing system and network security, the Microsoft antitrust case, and other eBusiness issues. He chaired the four-day Web Security Summit conference in Boston during the summer of 2000, and has been a keynote speaker or moderator at technical conferences throughout the U.S. and in England.

Sherry Ryan,
CISO, HP

Getting Governance Right - Aligning IT Security with the Business
Hewlett-Packard has developed organizational linkages and established a number of practices designed to engage HP's business units with IT Security governance and implementation. This session outlines the key elements of these practices and covers the challenges associated a broad approach to integrate security into business processes.

Dave Cullinane,
CISO, Washington Mutual

Secure Application Development - Where do you start?
Security assurance in software development environments requires building security in from the start. This session will describe the approach taken by one company to embed security throughout the lifecycle including lessons learned and cover tools and techniques for enabling and empowering developers.

John Wylder,
Strategic Security Advisor, Microsoft

TBA
TBA

Ira Winkler,
CISSP, CISM is President of the Internet Security Advisors Group

TBA
TBA

I absolutely love the movie Napoleon Dynamite.  Apparently some folks in the Idaho State Legislature also love it.  I wonder if any of them do glamour shots with Deb?  Take a look at House concurrent resolution No. 29.  The resolutions are certainly a stretch.  I mean come on, do we really want uncle Rico's football to represent Idaho athletics (Line 18)?  At the same time this resolution is probably the most enjoyable government produced document ever.  Like anyone can know that!

Affinity boondoggle key chains to the Idaho House!  Pedro offers you his protection!

The Boise .NET Developers User Group in cooperation with INETA is thrilled to announce that Rocky Lhotka will be visiting Boise, Idaho.  On July 21st he will be the featured speaker at our regular user group meeting.  Then on July 22nd we will have a full day with Rocky as we dive deep in the CSLA.NET framework.  I personally am on about page 250 of the Expert C# Business Objects book and I can't wait to put it to good use.  If you can please plan on joining us for both days of this this special event.

Get a free second shot at any Microsoft Certification exam:

Register for this offer by May 31, 2005, before taking any Microsoft Certification exam.

If you don’t pass on your first try, you can take it again for free. 

Click HERE to visit the website.

Offer expires May 31, 2005. See registration site for full details.

When I was a kid we had bracelets and such with colored beads to help us learn and share the truth about Jesus.  Today's “Chrisitian“ kids unfortionately are bombared with an explosion of trash.  Shame on their parents for suppoting this industry.  I refer to this stuff as Jesus Junk!  You may know some well intentioned folks who litter their lives with this stuff.  Come on people, be serious.  No wonder so many think that Chirstians are idiots.  We prove them right when we put the message of the cross on Jelly Bean bags!  Personally I prefer to buy my Bible's other Christian materials from retailers who do not carry this stuff.

If you are interested in the truth without the trite sugar rush you can find my favorite presentation at www.DesiringGod.org.

On March 2nd the very excellent group of Rainbow Portal developers released Rainbow 2005.  This is the fastest and most functional build ever.  I was very impressed with the speed when I loaded it up for the first time today.  Everything clicked into view instantly.

Excellent job my friends!

Jim Blizzard is moving to Florida.  He will go on record as the best Microsoft employee to regularly visit Boise.  His support of the Boise .NET developers user group was outstanding.  More importantly he has become a friend and I will miss him.  As I read Rory's post this morning I was reminded again how great he is.  Microsoft, if you are listening, the role of Developer Evangelist is a fantastic thing and Jim Blizzard has done you very well.  Take care of him and let him help you improve the program accross the planet.

Rory mentioned sailing in Florida.  How about a nerd cruise?  I have never been to Florida, but now I look forward to paying a visit one day.

Wishing you the best Jim!

I have been writing about some things related to Programming Inside Out while here at VS Live!  Last night I had a couple of good conversations with some vendors in this product space. 

First I talked a bit with DevExpress about their XPO product.  Currently it is the only OR Mapping product I know of that follows the Inside/Out rule.  Instead of starting with the DB and helping you map it to your objects (it does that too) it will create and update a database for you based on your objects and their relationships.  I plan to give it a closer look soon. 

The second vendor I talked with was Versant.  They not only have an OODB, but also an OR Mapping tool for .NET.  They have been in the business for several years, so I am confident we will be hearing a lot more from them.

I am glad we are seeing more companies playing in this space.  Issues of object versioning and various integration challenges will continue to be worked on to improve OODB options.  Will we see then end of the relational database anytime soon, probably not.  And, that is perfectly fine.  The most exiting thing for me is the increasing support I am seeing for Domain Driven Design concepts and tools.

I have had some readers tell me that my link to Microsoft's back-ported membership API is not working.  I am aware of that.  Apparently it has been pulled so that it can be brought into sync with Beta 2.  There have been a few database changes for the SQL providers and some minor API changes.  I hope we see it back online soon, but I have no idea when it will show up again.  In the meantime you can still get it the hard way.

Permission Manager has been updated for Beta 2 of VS 2005.  The more exciting part is the addition of Authorization Manager.  This is similar to the AzMan from Microsoft in purpose.  The best part about Fredrik's version however is that it is true .NET and does not require any install (think standard .NET XCopy) or COM+ registration like AzMan.  For more info head on over to the run down on Fredrik's blog.

You will not want to miss the February 17th NETDUG meeting if you are anywhere near Boise.  We have the privilege of having ineta speaker and MSDN Regional Director of the year Scott Hanselman.  He will be speaking on the Zen of Web Services.

I had the privilege of meeting Jimmy Nilsson today in the speaker lounge.  He did a talk on Domain Driven Design today at VS Live.  It was good introduction to the concept.  I had hoped it would go deeper, but in 1 hour it is hard to cover much.  After my exploration into Business Objects earlier this week with Rocky I was curious about Jimmy's recommendations for persistence with the private fields problem I mentioned before.  In short the answer was that nHibernate uses reflection to address the problem.  He acknowledged the performance costs.  

I guess it just brings out the reality that as solution architects we have to balance performance and maintainability and choose wisely.  I know that most of the things I work on can afford the impact of reflection and it will not be problem.  Today I am back with thinking that the best approach for Domain Design will include a service layer that handles the interaction with the persistence layer.  So, when I use the CSLA framework I will move the Data Portal code to separate classes and find a way to integrate my favorite best practices for persistence and object creation.

I has the pleasure of presenting today.  I promised everyone in the session that I would post the sample code and slides so have at them: VSLive.zip (3.22 MB)

I feel honored to be part of this lineup.

I made an exciting discovery today in the vendor hall at VS Live.  SoftWIRE is here and I stopped by to talk to them about their tool.  I ran across it a couple years back when I was looking for tools to help teach my kids programming concepts.  They have a library of controls for programming Lego Mindstorm robots among many other things.  Now that the toolkit is free you can all afford to pick up a Mindstorms kit right!  I asked about some books to help me get started teaching the kids and what do you know they now have some teacher and student guides included with the SoftWIRE software.  I am looking forward to giving this one another look and getting my kids and others interested in programming.  I think I will stop back by their booth and pick up a few extra CD's for the user group.

Thanks SoftWIRE!

After lunch yesterday I continued the session on OO with Rocky.  I really appreciated the practical aspects of his presentation.  It is obvious he has been striving for OO purity and landing in the real world.  That is a difficult thing to do, but so often necessary.

Fro example he said that Tiers are bad.  He was speaking of physical ties in the architecture.  The obvious problem with Tiers include the deployment issues and performance issues.  The trade offs include scalability, fault tolerance and security.  At Idaho Commerce and Labor those of us doing more Object centric development have realized how painful it is that we are running on a web farm.  If the user sessions were sticky or we we running on a single front end box then we could use caching and working with object graphs would be smother.  So, I definitely understand and agree with Rocky that Tiers are bad.  I have also come to believe that many solutions would be best run on a simplified physical architecture.  So often more energy and money is put into redundancy than it would cost to have a hot spare standing by with instructions for staff on how to switch it over.  Of course there is no perfect one size fits all solution.

Another thing that struck me was Rocky's belief that using serialization is bad practice for persistence.  To clarify he was not talking about an in memory working set, but for long term storage.  Serialization is necessary for passing objects around, but has significant challenges when it is used as a more permanent storage mechanism.  The biggest problem is versioning.  Say you store an object and then have a need to modify the class by adding or removing properties.  Then you try to deserialize your stored object for version 1 of the class using the schema of version 2 of that same class.  OOps!  There are ways to deal with the versioning issues, but Rocky's opinion is that its not worth it.

I was impressed with the CSLA Data Portal concepts as they are similar to many of the ideas I have been considering in the past.  Primarily I like the concept of a single port of entry for storing and retrieving objects. 

My conclusion is that I want to use the CSLA framework.  It has been well tested in the real world.  Well improved since the book was printed.  Actively used in the community.  Strives for purity, and lands in reality. 

Only 1 major complaint I have and I need more experience to decide where to land.  Love to have feedback from others on this.  In the CSLA framework the Data Access methods are contained within the Business Object Classes themselves.  The pattern I prefer places the Data Access in its own classes.  I like to have a Manager class or service class has responsibility for persistence.  I asked Rocky about it and he is happy with his solution of course.   The reason is private members.  The only way to persist and retrieve private members is if you have access to them which means you are either inside the class or you are using reflection.  Reflection is expensive and much more difficult.  As I think about the purpose of private fields I realize that they certainly can and do exist without a public property accessor.  Also, the encapsulation of of property into a private field allows for some behavior in the Get/Set blocks.  Often you would not want that behavior to happen if you are merely recreating an object from a data store.  If the Object itself represented data and not behavior then it be much less of an issue.  Of course understanding Rocky's presentation that objects should model behavior and not data helps me to clearly understand his framework decisions.

Take a look at the ASP.NET 2.0 Membership system.  It uses the static Membership class for persistence and creation of MembershipUser.  This doesn't fit Rocky's model because the business object of Membership user is not responsible for its own persistence.  I like it much better though because the behavior of persistence is modeled separately than the behaviors around the authentication object. 

Anyone care to share their thoughts on this?  Is it a case or purity meets reality?  Perhaps some Objects best fit the CSLA model and others a different model?

Recently I gave a presentation to my co-workers at Idaho Commerce and Labor on programming inside out.  The core concept was on designing objects around use case.  I stressed the need to forget the database, not because data is un-important, but that is must not drive design.   Similarly the UI must not drive the application design.  Rocky is fully backing up that concept in his pre-conference talk.

I am not 1.5 hours into Rocky's presentation on Building Distributed Object-Oriented Apps.  Here are the bullet points I have noted so far:

• Objects are defined or modeled by behavior, not data
• Objects consolidate behavior, not data
• Don't do relational data modeling of objects
• Code re-use is a myth (at the business level, not at the framework level)
• Help out the UI developers with support for things like undo, data binding and broken rule tracking
• Data should only be owned by a single application (SOA concept)

There was also a discussion on the difference between approach a framework with base classes versus interfaces.  I will leave that research for you to do on your own.  There are important considerations for each.  Understand the options and chose appropriately.

To be continued....

This morning I got all checked in.  Hotel was nice and close.  First time at VS Live.  First impression is that this show is much smaller than shows like Tech Ed and PDC (my favorite).  It looks to be similar in size to a Connections conference, but probably a bit larger.  I will have a better feel later.

Found out Bliz will not make it.  Bummer.  He is moving to Florida and will be sorely missed!

This time around I am not only an attendee, but also a speaker.  I am excited about the opportunity to be presenting at the show.  In the future I hope to do that more, but probably on some very specific topics I have not seen others cover.  I will not give anything away yet.  So if you want to catch my talk on security, its on Tuesday at 2 PM in the ASP.NET track.

Off to get filled on building distributed apps with Rocky Lhotka.  He just said datasets/datatables have a home.  Backyard in the doghouse.  Go get 'em Rocky!