Great set of substantial, practical, but brief videos on IIS

Note: This blog post is from 2016. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

I offer the list of topic titles (and links to them) below, and have even created a YouTube playlist with them, but note that the links below go to pages that the author had created where he offered a helpful introduction to each video (more than appears in the Youtube description for each).

I had also wanted to offer here this brief overview of them, to set the context and encourage you to view them, so as not to dismiss them if other tech video series haven't impressed you. Whether you're new to IIS 7 or 8, or an old hat user, there really is something for everyone, including wonderful little tips he shares in passing during most videos (which average about 10-20 minutes each).

Originally "Topics for web pros", but nearly all on IIS

Scott started it technically as a "web pro" series, intending to share practical tips and insights into things that he thinks anyone managing a server with IIS should know about (and I agree). And the initial couple of talks as well as a few throughout are not really IIS-specific, but are indeed potentially interesting for readers of my blog.

And note that this is not your typical "getting started with IIS" series. Not at all. Even when he does start into IIS, he's diving right into host headers, bindings, SSL config, url rewrites, app pools, app pool identities, security, web gardens (when not to use them), file replication with DFS, IIS configuration replication with "shared configuration", and more.

He also has several later talks on the AAR (Application Request Routing) feature of IIS 7, for setting up a server farm, load balancing, reverse proxying, and more. He also covers IIS 8 toward the end.

That makes the point that again, these are not "new" videos (being from 2011 and 2012), but they are still very useful.

In each talk, Scott gives practical experience-based information, unlike some resources that simply spit out what they found in docs. I can't recommend enough that anyone with responsibility for managing/running CF (or anything) on IIS should view most if not each of these.

And beyond IIS topics, he also has single-topic sessions on things such as the free Process Monitor and Log Parser tools, and even "simple" but often missed topics like command-line tips/tricks and line numbering in Notepad (when that's all you have on your server, at least make the most of it).

Sadly, I didn't see these listed as a youtube playlist, so I wanted to pull the list together here, with that bit of introduction. Also, each of the links below goes to a landing page for each video, as offered by the site dotnetslackers.com, when they were first introduced. And those pages embeds the youtube videos, and if you may have trouble viewing it there, they also offer a direct link to the video under that embedded version (especially helpful if you may be on a mobile device).

Important update (2016): Before you visit these links, note that reader Russ Michaels (Snake) has reported that he found that his Kaspersky security scanner reported that this site I link to (dotnetslackers, where the videos were originally posted) seemed to have some vulnerability called Trojan.Script.Iframer. It's not clear if it's that his tool is reporting "that site" (meaning some page somewhere on that site) or one of these specific pages. I've asked him for more about that, as well as to know if it's necessarily a problem we need to be concerned about as site visitors, or if it's more a concern for that site owner. (I've not been able to find more about that on my own.)

Important update (2020): I find now that the links below (to the dotnetslackers.com site) now fail to work, as the dotnetslackers site has been given up by its owners). You can find links to each of the articles via the archive.org site, specifically at this archive of the top-level page of the site.

Better still, while the page links are helpful (for the intro content offered for each video), you can instead see just the videos via a YouTube playlist I created in 2016 pointing to all the videos. There is some introductory text for each at its YouTube page, but not as much detail as he wrote on the pages that were linked below. I might at some point update all the links below to go to a direct archive.org link to that page, but I probably will not. Again, see instead archive of the top-level archive page.

With that, here are the topics.

• Ping and Tracert walkthroughs - Week 1 (again, these links no longer work, but consider instead my YouTube playlist of the videos themselves, here)
• Understanding DNS Zone Records-Web Pro Series - Week 2
• Nslookup, the Ultimate DNS Troubleshooting Tool - Week 3
• Three Tricks for Capturing Command Line Output - Week 4
• The Four IIS Binding Decision Points - Week 5
• The SSL Bindings Issue - Week 6
• Adding Host Headers for SSL sites in IIS 7 and 6 - Week 7
• An Intro to URL Rewrite + Adding www to Domain Name - Week 8
• Understanding URL Rewrite - Part 2 - Week 9
• Understanding Regular Expressions - Week 10
• Understanding Regular Expressions (focus on URL Rewrite) - Week 11
• AppDomain - What it is and Why it's Important - Week 12
• SiteServerDetails - Web Farm Node Information - Week 13
• URL Rewrite Outbound Rules - Week 14
• IIS Virtual Directory vs. Application - Week 15
• IIS's Overlapping App Pools - Week 16
• IIS 7.x's Configuration System - Week 17
• Hacking IIS's AppHost - Week 18
• Mastering IIS - Understanding the Schema - Week 19
• ProcessMon - Power Tool for the Windows Admin - Week 20
• IIS 7.0/7.5's Hidden Tool. Run-time page request performance data - Week 21
• IIS's ApplicationPoolIdentity Made Easy - Week 22
• Securing IIS. Thwarting the Hacker - Week 23
• Why You Shouldn't Use Web Gardens in IIS - Week 24
• Using IP Restrictions with URL Rewrite - Week 25
• How to Setup an Active Directory Domain - Week 26
• DFS-R for Web Server Replication - Week 27
• IIS Shared Configuration - Week 28
• IIS 7.x Shared Configuration - Advanced Tips and Tricks - Week 29
• Shared Config - Staggered Install - Week 30
• Introduction to Application Request Routing - Week 31
• Bindings and Rules for Application Request Routing (ARR) - Week 32
• ARR Helper - Week 33
• ARR Health Checks - Week 34
• Three ARR Back End Binding Options - Week 35
• ARR Binding Trick - Week 36
• ARR Tricks to Share with Web Server - Week 37
• High Availability for ARR - Week 38
• Introduction to Log Parser - Week 39
• Resolving Legit Blocked Ports Through Windows - Week 40
• Line numbering in Notepad - Week 41
• Change Password vs. Reset Password - Week 42
• IIS 7.x Classic and Integrated Pipeline Modes - Week 43
• IIS FTP Basics - Week 44
• IIS FTP and IIS Manager Users - Week 45
• IIS FTP User Isolation - Week 46
• FTP Firewall settings, Active vs. Passive, and FTPS Explicit vs. Implicit - Week 47
• IIS FTP Troubleshooting - Week 48
• Q&A. What's new in II S8, Perf, Indexing Service - Week 49
• Q&A. DNS Load Balancing, Google and Geo-location, CDNs - Week 50

Enjoy, and let me know what you think of them.

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