IIS 6 to IIS 7

IIS 7 : Manage web farms from one place.

IIS 7 : You can have SITE OWNERS and thus delegate management to them.
Also, you can DEPLOY APPLICATIONS PRECONFIGURED.
...configuration settings are housed in the site's directory (instead of centrally for entire server)...web.config .


IIS 7 has central config file : %WINDIR%\System32\InetSrv\Config\applicationHost.config
instead of IIS 6's metabase.xml.
There is no "configuration service" required for IIS 7 (IISADMIN not required).

IIS 7: No "in-memory representation of a configuration". That means once a config file is changed, it is picked up immediately.

C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config\schema\IIS_schema.xml also has default values for any property not specified in individual config files.


IIS 7 has BUILT-IN SUPPORT FOR PHP !

The tool provided by MS for migrating was called "MS Deploy".

IIS 6 Script Maps ===> IIS 7 Handler Mappings (both are for customizing how certain files and file extensions are handled by server)

IIS 7 has AppCmd.exe, a command line tool for managing IIS.

IIS 7 still has following concepts: site/application/virtual directory

In IIS 6.0, the concepts of virtual directories and applications were confusing. Although they were discussed as separate concepts, (and they were conceptually different from a functionality standpoint), an application was not a physically separate object from a virtual directory. In IIS 6.0, an application was really just a virtual directory with one or a combination of the following properties in the metabase: AppFriendlyName, AppRoot, AppIsolated, and AppPoolID.

Note: The site root is an exception, as it was implicitly treated as an application even if those properties were not set.

Applications were less important to IIS than to the technologies that extended Web server functionality, such as Active Server Pages (ASP), Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI), and ASP.NET. These technologies provided additional features and processing for applications hosted in IIS 6.0, and enabled developers to create more complex applications. The important question for IIS 6.0 was isolating such applications in a way that would prevent applications in one application pool from affecting applications in another application pool on the server.

IIS 7 and above formalizes the concepts of sites, applications, and virtual directories. Virtual directories and applications are now separate objects, and they exist in a hierarchical relationship in the IIS configuration schema. Briefly, a site contains one or more applications, an application contains one or more virtual directories, and a virtual directory maps to a physical directory on a computer. (and furthermore, each site contains at least one default application which also contains at least one virtual directory)