In this article we will showed you how to configure Dynamic Website Activation.

One of the best feature in the latest IIS 8.5 is the “Dynamic Website Activation”. What so cool about this feature? When the IIS servicing large number of configured sites (100 or greater, by default) this feature let the IIS Service not activate any of the sites when the service started.

What is The Function?

When IIS servicing a large number of configure sites (default: 100 or greater), IIS will not activate any of the sites (all of them at once).

Why Using This Feature?

This Feature only available in the latest IIS 8.5 before this version IIS will automatically activates all configures websites at once. This will bring some trouble in the resources, and memory if it’s service the large number of sites.

How This Feature works?

If IIS 8.5 service in a large number of configured sites (default: 100 or greater), This service will not activate all of the sites at once, instead of activate them all at once IIS will activate each sites one by one (only when it receives the first request of the sites) and by using this technique could reduce the amount of system resources require by IIS.

How to Configure This Feature?

As I mention before, if there are less than 100 sites configured then IIS will activate all sites at starts up, but if there are 100 or more. Then it will activate each site as it is accessed the first time.

Step by Step

1. Open IIS Manager
2. Double Click Configuration Editor
   

   

3. Select System.applicationHost/webLimits
   
   

   

4. Set the value of dynamicRegistration Threshold to the new Treshold Value ( the default is : 100)
5. Restart IIS

Prerequisite

If you are using SSL on your IIS 8.5 (from 7.5 or greater) server for some time now; to get here you had to do a few things:

1. You scrubbed your site content to ensure all URLs are using their relative form, e.g. “src=’//images\image.png” or explicitly reference the use of HTTPS.
2. You have tested for certificate and SSL related problems like mixed content, appropriately tagging cookies as secure.
3. You have ensured that you follow the best practices guidance for SSL server configuration and verified you get an A on  SSLLabs.

there are a few things left for you to do, the most obvious being redirecting all traffic to the SSL version of your site! You should probably monitor your CPU usage during your peak so to ensure you have some headroom. This isn’t likely to be a problem as most web-servers are not CPU bound but it’s always good to check.

Once you know you are OK then it’s just a matter of deciding which approach to use, you have two choices:

1. Dynamically rewriting via code in your ASPX pages
2. Using the IIS URL Rewrite  module

If you are familiar with the IIS configuration you’re probably asking yourself what about the “Require secure channel (SSL)” option in the IIS MMC? Unfortunately this doesn’t do redirecting it only requires the use of SSL on a given site/folder/file.

So how do you decide which approach to use? The answer to that question is dependent on both your environment and personal preference, but this time we will show how to do using the method two

IIS URL Rewrite Module

since in this article we will showed you to use the second choice, using the IIS URL Rewrite module, you can check the steps below

This approach has a number of benefits, for one having this module allows you to leverage remapping for other purposes also for example maintaining old links that have SEO value. From a security standpoint it’s also a good approach as it keeps this decision one of policy that is enforced in a central place.

To use the URL rewrite approach you will need to do the following:

1. Install the URL Rewrite module (x86, x64).
2. Add a rule to rewrite all HTTP URLs to HTTPS.
   1. Open your “web.config” with your favorite editor.
   2. Find the “configuration\system.webserver\rewrite\rules” section.
   3. Add the following text block:
      <rule name=”Redirect to HTTPS” stopProcessing=”true”>
      <match url=”(.*)” />
      <conditions>
      <add input=”{HTTPS}” pattern=”^OFF$” />
      </conditions>
      <action type=”Redirect” url=”https://{HTTP_HOST}/{R:1}” redirectType=”Permanent” />
      </rule>
3. Restart IIS
   

Now you can go to your website over HTTP and you will see you are redirected to the HTTPS instance of the site.

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It sounds like it should be trivial: Create a WCF web library and host it in IIS. Surely lots of people need to do this, and it will be easy in a fairly modern version of Visual Studio like 2012? Previously I have created this article about how to host WCF Service in IIS 8, however I will explain more details in this article.

Whatever the reason, I hope this page will offer a useful step-by-step guide to set up a WCF Service Library project to be run from its development folder on Windows 8.0 or Windows 2012, IIS 8.0 – and I have been using VS 2012 and .Net Framework 4.5 as the target.  Also, before I begin, and something of a spoiler alert; you may prefer to publish your website to a specific location, and host it in IIS from there, rather than try and host it from your development folder.  This option is covered after the walk-through below.

Please Make Sure that You Have Integrated your ASP.NET with IIS

The easiest way to check this is to create a minimalistic web application (e.g. ASP.NET MVC with “No Authentication”) and try to host it in IIS (see configuration steps below). If something is missing, make sure that:

• “Internet Information Services” and “Word Wide Web Services” are enabled in the “Turn Windows Features on or off” dialog.
• If IIS is up and running, but the ASP.NET integration is missing (you can check the ISAPI filters in IIS Manager), you should run “%WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe –i” and hope for the best (maybe restart the machine afterwards).

Take a look at WCF Service

I assume that you have created WCF service called “WCF Service Application”. Hosting this application in IIS means that you create a virtual directory in IIS, where you link the root folder of your project to a URL. You also need to specify an app pool to be used, which should match to the .NET framework you target (e.g. “.NET v4.5”).

If you have configured your.svc files within the specified URL, you should see a page with some positive messages and links to the WSDL contracts. If you see this, then stop reading, you are done.

However, you can receive an error page, “HTTP Error 404.17 – Not Found”, “The requested content appears to be script and will not be served by the static file handler.”. This most probably means that your IIS is not configured to host WCF services (this seems to be the default).

With .NET 3.5, you had to run the “ServiceModelReg.exe” tool, but this doesn’t seem to be necessary anymore for .NET 4.0+ (“aspnet_regiis” does this already). If you look into the details of the IIS settings, you can see some references to WCF.

The only thing you have to do is to enable “HTTP Activation” in the “Turn Windows Features on or off” dialog under the “WCF Services” node. With this, you basically enable the creation of WCF service instances to serve requests coming through HTTP.

Then, please test it again and you wont see any error message anymore.

I hope this article will help you a lot.

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Recently a colleague of mine wrote an article on setting up a CDN (Content Delivery Network). This made me experiment a bit with some IIS 8 settings. It is possible to set up IIS to rewrite all outgoing requests in such a way that your static content (e.g. images, style-sheets, etc) will be downloaded from a separate location. The main benefit of this method is (in my opinion) that it doesn’t requiren any adjustments on your target site. All it requires is some tweaking of your web.config and ofcourse a working CDN.

Outbound rewrite rules are a pretty powerful thing, when used properly. When used incorrectly, they can slow your site down to a screeching halt. Lucky for us, the outbound rewrite rules can be used to filter out specific requests. In this case we will use them to rewrite all outgoing HTML code. We want to search out all static content (in this example .jpg and .png files) and rewrite it on the fly to be downloaded from a CDN. So, first we want to set the proper precondition. Loads of data leaves a webserver, so let’s make sure we only look at the relevant parts of it. We start by setting up a precondition:

<preConditions>

      <preCondition name="CheckHTML"> 

           <add input="{RESPONSE_CONTENT_TYPE}" pattern="^text/html" /> 

      </preCondition> 

</preConditions> 

Now we’re looking at all HTML only it’s time to get even more specific. Outbound rules allow you to filter a tag you want to look for. In this case we assume all images are located in tags. So we can use the following filtering before actually matching it to a pattern:

<rule name="CDN"stopProcessing="false">  
      <match filterByTags="Img" pattern="(https?:\/\/www.(.*)\.(jpg|png))" />  
      <action type="Rewrite" value="http://cdn.{R:2}.{R:3}" />  
 </rule> 

Noticed the ugly regex I used there? Let’s take a look at it:

(https?:\/\/www.(.*)\.(jpg|png))

All this baby does is matching all url’s containing .jpg or .png on the end. So basically it makes sure we catch all outgoing image url’s before they reach the browser. This same regex gives us 3 backreferences. We only need two of them: {R:2} and {R:3}. These contain (in my case) the stripped url (no more http://www.) and the extension. We use these later on to rebuild the url for our CDN. You might want to adjust this regular expression to suit your specific needs.

For me: this one is all I need. Now it’s time for rewriting our url. I can use the backreferences that are given to re-assemble the image location to something that should be working on the CDN. How the data gets there is up to you. I’m only pointing out how you can redirect traffic there ;) After your done, the following can be used in your web.config:

<rewrite> 

      <outboundRules>

          <rule name="CDN" preCondition="CheckHTML" stopProcessing="false"> 

                <match filterByTags="Img" pattern="(https?:\/\/www.(.*)\.(jpg|png))" /> 

                <action type="Rewrite" value="http://cdn.{R:2}.{R:3}" /> 

           </rule> 

           <preConditions> 

                <preCondition name="CheckHTML"> 

                     <add input="{RESPONSE_CONTENT_TYPE}" pattern="^text/html" /> 

                </preCondition> 

          </preConditions> 

      </outboundRules>

</rewrite>

Web Deploy is one of the mechanisms to publish websites to IIS from Visual Studio. You can utilize this mechanism to publish from Visual Studio, TFS or manually if you have existing website packaged as a zip file.  If you haven’t checked this gem of resources (Vishal Joshi's Blog) on web deploying and publishing then please do yourself a favor.  In this post I am going to talk about a checklist to make sure before you wish to publish site to IIS hosting.  Here is the list:

Installed the latest Web Deploy on windows server (Check this IIS website).

- Web Management Service is started and running

- Web Deployment Agent Service started and running

- Created a website inside IIS and created application pool for it.

- Given the user IIS Manager Permissions at the site level inside IIS

- Configured website for Web Deploy publishing

- Saved Web publish settings on a local desktop

- Import Web publish settings from the local desktop from Visual Studio publish dialog

- Publish url is over Https 

- Checked connectivity to the site from the Visual Studio publish dialog 

Now before you jump on to the TFS side of things to publish, please make sure that you have done following things:

- Team Foundation Server Build service account is added to IIS Manager Permission section for the website inside IIS

- Able to publish successfully from visual studio using web deploy?

- Check the MSBuild parameters for web deploy (I have provided what works for me below).

If you have some more checklist you have formed over the years then let me know I will add to this list.

What-If-Error
When you click publish from visual studio you will have to select a publish method and at that point select Web Deploy.  You have the option to import the profile you have created from that publish dialog.  This will pre-populate all the details.  You will have to provide the user name and password for the user who has the permission in IIS Manager Permissions as described in earlier.  At this point if you see any errors then this is a nice website where all the errors are listed.  I think you will see these errors only if you do some mistake while manually typing out the details in the publish dialog.  I haven’t found any issues if you import site details through import mechanism.
Here are TFS MSBuild parameters I use to publish a website from TFS to IIS7.
/p:DeployOnBuild=True
/p:DeployTarget=MsDeployPublish
/p:CreatePackageOnPublish=True
/p:MSDeployPublishMethod=WMSVC
/p:MSDeployServiceUrl=https://ServerName:8172/MSDeploy.axd /p:DeployIisAppPath="NameofWebsiteOnIISServer"
/p:AllowUntrustedCertificate=True
/p:UserName="domain\serviceaccount"
/p:Password="AwesomeSecurePassword"

If you are still unsuccessful in publishing the website from TFS Build then it could be that your TFS Build server is 2010 and you are using Visual Studio 2012 and it might be missing some binaries.  If you install Visual Studio 2012 on the build server then this issue could be resolved.