IIS7 Can Suck It

I will admit that IIS7 is very dreamy in comparison to IIS5 and IIS6 because it flows nicely and it has a very nice inheritance system. Best feature of all of course is its application pools. However there are a few things that I am going to point out that some people are going to be annoyed by, but I don't care because for you to have opposition to what I am going to describe is plain stupid and biased.

I like Microsoft products, but we all know, especially power users, that sometimes Microsoft will do things that are just terribly stupid. Joining that ever growing list is:

IIS7

IIS5 and IIS6 were the easiest to setup, I never had any serious problems setting them up or using them. Very easy to use, only encountered the dot net issue where the dot net installation had to be reinstalled. No biggy works like a dream after repairing the dot net side.

First trial:

Installation on Windows Vista. Vista is a flaming piece of crap. That being said IIS7 is a windows feature. Naturally I should be able to install it on a Vista machine if the damn option is available. Logical right? Wrong... it just doesn't work. I got machine.config errors no matter what. I spent 6 hours trying everything to appease the IIS7 beast. No luck so I went back to IIS5.

Second Trial:

I set it up for other people on windows 7 machines, with no problem for the most part. I even use it on windows server 2008. No problems, so I figured it just doesn't work on Vista. Wrong...

Third trial:

I took a fresh install of windows 7 professional on a brand new laptop. I tried using IIS7 and the first thing I get is an error right off the bat. I am told by IIS that I have things in my web.config that are unrecognizable. This didn't sound right because it worked in IIS5 and IIS6, but not in IIS7? So I started looking around and realized it was missing components so I went to add and remove features for IIS and no matter what I did the other features would not install. I kept getting errors. So I uninstalled IIS7 and reinstalled it, this time it installed well, but much to my dismay it still didn't work when I tried to run my web application... this is mind boggling. So I then started doing some deep googling and finally finally finally I found out why I was getting errors (500.21 error specifically) and it was because there was a missing DLL! The isapi.dll was missing from the modules section! HOW? WHY? I don't know but it took 6 hours to figure out and I am very very unhappy about it. This is by far the stupidest thing I have ever seen. What I explained was the short version mind you.

So to those of you that are kissing the IIS7 ass, I'm sorry to break it to you, but it isn't flawless. In fact is very far from it, down right disgusting actually to take 6 hours to figure out why this stupid software isn't working!

Mind you, if someone has Vista, that is what they have therefore don't tell them to just change their OS, that is not fair to that person. Software costs money unless you are going to pirate it which I don't recommend at all. My stance on pirated software is, "If you can afford it, buy it." Other people will say that it works on the Server OS versions (2003, 2008, 2008 R2), this is not true at all if you check google. There are plenty of people regardless of the goddamn OS that are having many issues with IIS7. This is goddamn ridiculous and unfair to the people who need to work. This isn't a fucking hobby for me (partially it is) I do this as my job.

Some people say, just use the integrated development server in Visual Studio... How about no? Casini (the web development server) is crap and unreliable. You use that as a last resort or when you don't have IIS available to use. Casini has a bunch of issues all on its own, it is inaccurate and has problems keeping the most current versions of files you just compiled current. I avoid Casini when I can. Plus you want your software to run in a production like environment at all times to avoid "surprises" when you get to your production environment.

The point here is, IIS7 has some fucking stupid issues, it isn't plug and play at all like IIS5 and IIS6 were. People need to wise up and stop being fan boys when it comes to shit like this and Microsoft needs to take the heat that people give them for this. There is shitty documentation on these ridiculous issues from Microsoft.

When IIS7 is fixed it is going to be great, just like IIS5 and IIS6.

My advice for people who are having issues setting IIS7 up, google the shit out of your problem. Every time you make an adjustment the error message may change, be aware of this. Make sure you have proper permissions set on your files. If all else fails, setup another computer to run XP with IIS5 or IIS6.