IIS.NET 7.0 Brainstorm
I was recently speaking with a friend about IIS 7.0 and was trying to explain to him why it was such an important step forward with Web Server Technology from Microsoft. IIS 7.0 is being release with Vista (or Longhorn...whatever it is called). There are two big changes that caught my eye.
First are the config files to control IIS. If anyone has tried to move a website from dev to production, it isn't a pleasant experience if you have different caching rules for different folders, handlers, etc. There will be an xml config file way to configure your virtual directory. This is a godsend for anyone that has used "inetmgr". It is not going away, but there is a better way.
The other big one is writing IIS level .NET modules. Currently I can write an HttpModule that runs inside the AppDomain of my website application. This is fine, but there are a couple jumps the HttpRequest makes as it worms it way through Http.sys -> inetinfo.exe -> w3wp.exe and then finally to the AppDomain.
It is going to be possible to sit a .NET module equal to IIS. My friends and I were talking about what this really meant. I would think it would make online gaming much easier. Right now, all online games typically use some random port that you have to poke holes in your firewall to get on.
I think you would be able to, with relatively few lines of code, be able to write a gaming server, or at least a server dispatcher that could use IIS to host a gaming server. This would enable games to be played over port 80 and skip out on all the firewall problems.
It's from February 2005...but here is Scott Guthrie's talk about it from channel 9.