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Today IIS team has published a servicing release of Web Farm Framework 2. This release contains fixes for the bugs reported in version 2.0 that was published in January this year. The following bugs have been fixed in this release:

• If a server was excluded from load balancing because of an error or if it was temporary unavailable then it required administrator to manually add it back. With this release the Web Farm Service will attempt to auto-repair unavailable servers and add them back to load balancing once they become healthy again.
• Non-standard HTTP ports could not be used when communicating with servers in web farm.
• Error caused by race condition between when applicationHost.config is updated and when service reads the configuration.
• Service attempted to add firewall exception and failed if firewall service was not running.
• MSDeploy 1.1 was always installed on servers in the farm, even if MSDeploy 2.0 was available.
• Recycling of the app pool on the controller resulted in HTTP 502 errors.
• Secondary servers kept synchronizing the same changes over and over again.
• When primary server came back after downtime, the provisioning did not start automatically.
• Sync Error “An item with the same key has already been added.”
• User profile was not loaded when service was installed which caused installation failures.

Install the Web Farm Framework 2.1

To install Web Farm Framework 2.1 use the download links at the project’s home page at www.iis.net/expand/WebFarmFramework.

If you have Web Farm Framework 2.0 already installed, then it will be updated to v2.1. Note that a reboot maybe required during update and after the reboot the WebFarmService must be restarted on the controller server by using the command below:

net start webfarmservice

More information

• Web Farm Framework 2 Documentation
• Web Farm Framework Forum

1 Comment »

ruslany on July 29th 2011 in Other

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(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

The latest release of PHP Manager 1.2 for IIS now includes Windows PowerShell commands that can be used to install, configure and manage PHP on IIS 7 from command line. In addition those commands can be used to automate the configuration and management tasks.

Here are examples of what can be done with PHP Manager command line tools: Continue Reading »

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ruslany on June 28th 2011 in PHP

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(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)

A month ago I have stopped using Google Analytics for my site and instead gave a try to Piwik – an open source, PHP/MySQL based real time web analytics application. Since then it has been working well for my site and overall to me it looks like a better alternative to Google Analytics.

Here are the things that I like: Continue Reading »

2 Comments »

ruslany on May 16th 2011 in Other

3,762 views

(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

The WinCache Object Cache plugin provides a persistent memory-based backend for the WordPress object cache. An object cache is a place for WordPress and WordPress extensions to store the results of complex operations. On subsequent loads, this data can be fetched from the cache, which will be must faster than dynamically generating it on every page load.

The WinCache Object Cache for WordPress is available at the following location:

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wincache-object-cache-backend/

Note: if you use the old version that you have downloaded from blog post about how to Make WordPress faster on IIS with WinCache 1.1, then it is highly recommended to upgrade to the version from wordpress.org.

The plugin is based on the code written by Mark Jaquith for his APC Object Cache WordPress plugin. Thanks to Andrew Nacin for pointing me to that plugin and suggesting to publish similar one for WinCache.

5 Comments »

ruslany on May 8th 2011 in WinCache, WordPress

4,144 views

(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

The WinCache extension 1.1 for PHP has been released last year. Since then several customers reported a bug in the extension that prevents WordPress and other PHP applications from performing automatic upgrades of their plugins. This was reported on WordPress forum as well as on WinCache forum.

The new build of WinCache with the fix for this problem is available now at the following location:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/wincache/files/development/

The latest dev build at that location is a release candidate build. Several customers have already verified that this build fixes the problem and is running stable in their environments. Please try it out and let me know if it works or does not work for you. The things to try and to look for are:

1. Try to auto-upgrade any of the WordPress plugins;
2. After installing this build check the Windows Application event log from time to time looking for errors caused by module “php_wincache.dll”.

If you see any errors while using this build please let me know by leaving a comment here or in WinCache forum or by opening a bug in PECL bug database.

40 Comments »

ruslany on April 14th 2011 in PHP, WinCache, WordPress

9,568 views

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

A new release of PHP Manager for IIS (version 1.1.2) is available for download. This release includes translations into 5 languages:

• German – the translation is provided by Christian Graefe
• Dutch – the translation is provided by Harrie Verveer
• Turkish – the translation is provided by Yusuf Oztürk
• Japanese – the translation is provided by Kenichi Wakasa
• Russian – the translation is provided by Ruslan Yakushev

Thanks to above mentioned people for providing these high quality translations! The PHP Manager Project is still looking for volunteers who can help with Spanish, French and Chinese translations.

Note that this release still includes English and it is recommended to upgrade even if you do not need these translations.

Use Web Platform Installer to get the latest release of PHP Manager for IIS (make sure to upgrade to the latest build of Web Platform Installer to get this release of PHP Manager).

10 Comments »

ruslany on March 10th 2011 in PHP

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(No Ratings Yet)

Xdebug is a very popular PHP extension that helps with debugging and profiling of PHP scripts by providing a lot of valuable debug information. Microsoft WebMatrix is a development tool for building web applications. When WebMatrix is used to build or modify a PHP-based web application the debugging tasks can be greatly simplified if Xdebug extension is used. This post explains how to install and use Xdebug extension with WebMatrix. Continue Reading »

3 Comments »

ruslany on February 18th 2011 in PHP

7,742 views

(7 votes, average: 3.86 out of 5)

Today IIS team has released to web the Web Farm Framework 2.0. This is the final, production ready version that has several new features and improvements listed below:

• Workflow Builder is used to define and schedule custom tasks that can be run on all servers in the farm. The tasks can be scheduled to run periodically or can be started manually by an administrator. An example of such task could be a msdeploy command to partially sync web site content.
• Windows Credential Store support allows to store the administrator credentials used for server provisioning in a secure Windows Credential Store. This enables an added layer of security when dealing with credentials in Web Farm Framework.
• Third party load balancers support via Web Farm Framework extensibility. It is possible to configure Web Farm Framework to integrate with hardware load balancers instead of relying on IIS Application Request Routing module.
• Improved support for advanced MSDeploy operations. Options of MSDeploy can be used with Web Farm Framework for advanced deployment scenarios.
• Improved support for syncing large amount of files. Several issues related to syncing large amount of files across web farm nodes have been fixed.

In addition to that many bugs reported by beta users were fixed in this release.

Install the Web Farm Framework 2.0 – RTW

To install Web Farm Framework 2.0 use the download links at the project’s home page at www.iis.net/expand/WebFarmFramework.

If you have a beta build of Web Farm Framework 2.0 already installed, then it needs to be uninstalled prior to installing RTW build.

More information

• Web Farm Framework 2.0 Documentation
• Web Farm Framework Forum

3 Comments »

ruslany on January 20th 2011 in Other

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PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7 has been released today. This is an incremental release that contains all the functionality available in PHP Manager 1.0 for IIS 7 plus additional features listed below:

• Improved detection logic for existing PHP installations. Now PHP Manager detects the location to php.ini file in accordance to the PHP specifications.
• Configuring date.timezone. PHP Manager can automatically set the date.timezone directive which is required to be set starting from PHP 5.3.
• Ability to add new PHP extensions. When pointed to a PHP extension file, the PHP Manager will copy it to the right location and will enable the extension in php.ini file.

In addition, several bugs were fixed in this release. The complete list of changes can be found in the change list.

PHP Manager can now be installed with Web Platform Installer. Use the link below to install it:

9 Comments »

ruslany on December 9th 2010 in PHP

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PEAR (short for PHP Extension and Application Repository) is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components. In includes many useful tools and components that can be easily downloaded and installed by using PEAR package manager. This post describes how to install and configure PEAR package manager and then how to use it to install a PEAR package. An example PEAR package used in this post is phploc, which is a tool for measuring the size of PHP projects.

Start by installing PHP on Windows by using one of the following methods:

• Install PHP for by using Web PI 3.0. With that you can install PHP for either IIS or WebMatrix or both;
• Download and unpack the PHP 5.3 VC9 non-thread-safe zip package and then register it with IIS by using PHP Manager.

Now open an elevated command line prompt and go to the directory where PHP was installed. For example if PHP 5.3 was installed with Web PI 3.0 then the directory path will be: Continue Reading »

4 Comments »

ruslany on November 22nd 2010 in PHP

7,548 views

(2 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)