Microsoft News Tracker

Nate Mook at BetaNews has the details:

Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia took the PDC 2005 stage Thursday morning to discuss the future of Windows Server. In addition to announcing Compute Cluster Edition Beta 1 and the first Longhorn Server CTP, Muglia introduced IIS 7.0 - complete with a modular architecture.

“We’ve learned from Apache,” acknowledged Bill Staples, product unit manager for IIS. Version 7.0 takes the IIS feature set and breaks it down into individual components, or modules, that can be loaded on an as-needed basis. The result is a Web server with much less overhead.
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IIS has taken another page from Apache’s playbook as well: simple configuration.

IIS 7.0 does away with complicated the “Metabase” and replaces it with XML configuration files - an announcement that prompted cheers from the PDC audience.
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ASP.NET has additionally been given a boost in the update. No longer requiring a plug-in as it did with previous IIS releases, ASP.NET is natively supported in version 7.0.

Checking the reaction of bloggers showed uniform enthusiasm for the enhancements. Robert McLaws has more including the possibility that IIS 7.0 might ship on Windows Vista, even the “Home” SKUs.