WebProNews

Microsoft has made IIS 7 much more like its popular, and some have said superior, open source competitor.

Longhorn Server has an even more distant release date than Windows Vista, arriving sometime in 2007. Part of Longhorn Server will be a revamped version of Internet Information Server, version 7.0. Developers received an advance copy of IIS at PDC 2005.

The latest revision of IIS dispenses with the monolithic architecture in use since its arrival with Windows NT. Microsoft engineers have made IIS modular, an approach that will better position it for web services development.

"The fact is that the monolithic nature IIS, which has been a total pain for people building applications has been eliminated in this release. IIS is now built with a set of modules, with standardized interfaces, public interfaces...that's how you can do extensibility to IIS," Microsoft Windows Server senior vp Bob Muglia fold developers.

Part of the redesign has IIS using Web.config files to contain configuration information. ASP.net developers will already recognize this file, according to Microsoft's Bill Staples. That approach allows new modules to be deployed to IIS 7, and available to site visitors without rebooting the server.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.