Professional IIS 7 and ASP.Net Integrated Programming

Some people may get confused by the fact that this is book is about half about inner guts of the II7 and how and what changed (pure gold for people who had to deal with several versions) and half a case study on how to push the limits of IIS from .NET. The best way to approach reading this material is with a solid judgement on when to stop reading and go back to your project. Don't expect to read and absorb something this big in one breath. When you read a few chapters and things become clear in you mind, just go and use it and you can always come back for more when you need it. It provides a lot of hard core info at the beginning and parts that are actually a case study repeat some of the general info latter so it's really, really not meant to be read cover to cover like a novel but as a kind of just-in-time information source.

I first started playing with IIS 7 in Vista. I wanted a book that would explain this new IIS structure and explain all the choices I needed to make in order to make ASP and ASP.NET applications work in a secure environment. I'm extremely pleased with this text. It explains each and every step in configuring IIS 7 so that I understand why the different decisions are made. Now that I'm looking at IIS 7 on Windows 2008, I feel much better prepared for the migration. This book is a very complete reference to better understand IIS 7.

Khosravi has written a nice book about extending and integrating with IIS 7. As such this is a niche book, but a good one if you need it.

[also published on http://msmvps.com/blogs/luisabreu/archive/2008/07/23/book-review-professional-iis-7-and-asp-net-integrated-programming.aspx] Ive just finished reading the Professional IIS 7 and ASP.NET integrated programming book by Dr. Shramram. If youre trying to understand how to leverage the new IIS 7 managed features, then this book is just what you need. If you dont know what you must to to add a GUI interface to your own custom modules/handlers, then this book is for you too!If you want to learn how to administer IIS 7, then this book isnt for you. The book is really complete (in fact, its too complete, if such a thing exists more details on this in the next paragraphs) reference that contains lots of examples that show you how to integrate your ASP.NET code with IIS 7 and how to extend IIS 7. Having said this, Ive found one or two things that annoyed me while I read the book. For starterts, youll see lots of C# 2.0 code. Why not use C# 3.0? It simply doesnt make sense to me, but ok, I can live with thatThe second thing that I really didnt like is the ammount of repetition that youll get in the book. For instance, youll get at least one chapter on how to extend the integrated configuration system which are illustrated with dummy classes. And then, in a following chapter youll end up developing real config classes for supporting an url module. My question is simple: why not build the necessary config classes for the module instead of wasting paper with the dummy classes? And since Im talking about repetitions, theres really one thing I hated: why do we see pages of code which are repeated under the form of snippets so that the author can explain what each one of them do? Including the InitializeComponents is really really uncessary, if you ask me In conclusion, this book will give all you need if youre interested in understanding how to integrate your ASP.NET code with IIS 7 or if youre interested in seeing how to expand IIS 7. Im giving it a 7.5/10 due to the ammount of unnecessary repetition that the book contains. If it werent for that, I wouldnt have any problems in giving it an 8, but I cant simply ignore the fact that this book has over 600 pages and it could really just have about 400 without any content loss!

Make sure to click the "search inside this book" link at the top of this page and browse the table of contents for the book. The book is aimed at a specific kind of IIS 7 developer, not for ASP.NET developers in general who happen to be using IIS 7 now. That being said, the book was just great for getting into these internals, especially the new integrated ASP.NET processing pipeline.