I hate configuring a new dev machine. You know you’re going to have to kill a few hours downloading and installing components and getting things working nice with each other.

I always wished there was a tool where I could click one button and get IIS, SQL, Visual Studio and the .Net Frameworks installed and running.

Of course, now I don’t have to build dev machines and write code every day for a living… along comes a tool that does just that!

The Web Platform Installer is pretty much the answer to my prayers! It allows you to take a default build or customize exactly what gets installed (including out-of-band features like bit rate throttling, URL Rewrite and Web Playlists and some unexpected extras like the SQL Server Drivers for PHP – yes, PHP runs really well on IIS7).

It’s currently in beta so now would be a really great time to check it out and use the forums to provide lots of feedback to make it great.

Thanks to Scott for the pointer to this.

Thanks to the folks at Netcraft I've just found out that Microsoft.com is putting it's webpages where our mouth is and running on Beta3 of Windows Server 2008 and IIS7 (and appears to have been doing so for most of June).

Now that "the server formerly known as Longhorn" has a Go Live licence you could join the 2500+ sites who are already trying this out for real.

Obviously before making the switch from Linux/Apache or an earlier version of IIS you'll be keen to find out what the new platform offers... well, a good place to start is the IIS.NET article on what's new in Longhorn Server Beta 3 ... as an extra goodie that page has links to a number of providers offering free hosting so you can try it out and see how your current applications work and how performance compares...

On one of my discussions on performance I mentioned in passing the topic of Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) but as a couple of people have emailed me to point out that while they're great at taking the heavy lifting (especially for static pages) they can be rather expensive....

Well, that doesn't always have to be the case...

A few years ago I came across a free experimental Peer-to-peer CDN called Coral running on top of the Planet Lab infrastructure. By the beginning of 2006 their 260 servers scattered worldwide were supporting 25 million requests per day from more than 1 million unique clients and it's still going strong.

What makes Coral so interesting is that while a publisher can choose to use it (simply by appending .nyud.net:8080 to the hostname of the URL they want handled by the network) but if a site is going slow a user can choose to view that site through Coral simply by altering the URL they reference.

So, you could access this site at http://blog.offbeatmammal.com.nyud.net:8080/blogs/obm/default.aspx and automatically get the content delivered via Coral or I could choose to hardcode (say) all my images to be served from that URL in order to reduce the load on my server.

That flexibility makes it very easy to turn on and off as you need to. You can even use an Apache mod_rewrite or similar for IIS to turn it on and off for you (for instance at times of high load off-load all images and static pages to the CDN by activating the URL rewriter) though make sure you check the examples for the re-write rules to make sure you don't get stuck in an endless loop of redirection!

You can use Coral for any sort of content - html pages, images or mp3 files (for instance as Mangatune are doing) - you can get a benefit from fairly frequently changing pages (as long there is value in caching content for at least a few hours) but very dynamic pages are going to need to come back to the server to remain 'fresh'.

Coral is free to use but if you can it would be great to help out on one of their sister projects - Illuminati - by embedding a small code fragment in any pages on your site to help them map the internet. You can help with the illuminati project even if you're not using Coral for content - every site hosting their fragment helps improve the quantity and quality of their data.

Eventually they plan to open up a a true p2p platform so anyone can offer bandwidth and cache space but for now it's supported as a research project.

Although there are a few aftermarket log analysis tools or remote (embedded Javascript) analysis solutions for Internet Information Server sometimes you want something simple, lightweight and integrated to give you a quick overview of what's going on.

Well look no more! Carlos has released the first version (more goodness promised) of his IIS7 Reports plug-in for IIS7. Note: It also needs the IIS Log Parser to be running so you should install that first.

Despite being a first release the graphs and information displayed are a great resource you can manage right from the console, and unlike remote javascript reporting you know that it's actually what the server is seeing (so it can be a good sanity check for some stats packages)