ZDNet Asia - IIS 7.0

I wrote this ZDNet article quite sometime ago, and it was published last month yet I only got notified last week :)  I originally wrote it as 7 facts about IIS 7.0, somehow after tech edit - it get shorter and 1 of the facts is missing :( 

So I'm going to paste it here:

Troubleshooting Enhancement
The ‘black box’ diagnostic that is what the IIS team addressed the current IIS from the troubleshooting perspective. I’m sure you shared the same experience with me that is when the IIS is crashing on hanging, there are limited information available to tell you what’s going on inside the IIS process. Of course, you can always start digging in yourself via IIS DebugDiag toolkit, yet how many of you really understand what those log and dump files are indicating, then ultimately you can engage the Microsoft Product Support and Services (PSS) team, provided you are ready to pay $$$. There’s minor improvement with IIS 6.0 when the team put in the effort for event tracing, that was good but it is not that straight forward and you need Windows Server 2003 SP1 together with quite a bit of procedures to follow. Now, let’s see what we got for IIS 7.0. To name a few, more detailed error message that make more sense to system administrator, the team revamped the custom error modules, so instead of getting blur and confusing error message, you will know seeing more meaningful information about the error in the requested page itself, take note by default only localhost sees that, but you can configure for remote clients to display the error message as well; then you will also get possible clue on solving the particular error along with the error message. Moving on, ever wonder what is current in the process queue? What are the resources consume by the request? For IIS 6.0, you have to do it at command line via event tracing, no GUI support at all, with IIS 7.0, you can do it either in IIS Manager or Appcmd.exe, beside the ability to look at runtime request, you can also trigger failed request tracing! And best of all, it is very straight forward and easy to interpret what’s going on inside IIS. You will no longer stuck in the situation when the application developers finger pointing at you and saying “it is the server issue, the code run fine in the development box”. With these enhancements, you will have the luxury to start pointing finger. Oops, I mean taking the free time that you freed out from troubleshooting nightmare and used to learn more about extending IIS 7.0.