IIS 7 Appcmd UI Tool
Yesterday I had to give a presentation about Windows Server 2008. One of the roles that I must cover is IIS 7 because we made such great improvements on this web platform that it has to be included. Most of the time when I demo IIS 7 I show them the new UI and how you can easily manage your IIS 7 web platform with the new tool and that is also possible to manage remote servers. The second item I mostly touch is the fact that you can manage your web platform from the command line using a tool appcmd.
Now I don't use this tool often, actually only when I demo IIS 7 to my audience, which means that I have the choice either I write down all the command (with parameters) that I want to show or I can use the appcmd /? which can be annoying during the demo. No whilst preparing for my session I found this nifty tool called AppcmdUI.
This is really a great tool because with AppcmdUI you get an User Interface, not the most sexy one but still it's an UI, which will give you auto completion and also it will provide a list of available options for the command you just typed in.
Lets see how this works using some screenshots:
I just typed in the appcmd command and hit the space key. The tool will then give you the different options to use, let's continue and try to create a new website.
So we want to add a new site so let's do that and just select the add option and see what happens next
You see now you get information about how to use this command, so their are multiple examples available onto this pane which all come out of the help function of appcmd command.
This tool makes it really easy to use the appcmd command line functionality to configure and maintain a web platform. For me this tool goes into the standard set of tools an admin should have. Go ahead and download it now - AppcmdUI-Install.zip
Go ahead and check out the blog of the author of this tool: Kanwaljeet Singla's Blog
