Ah, it seems barely a few weeks since IIS 5 was the new kid on the block. I remember the happy days of IIS 4 combined with the ludicrous budgets of dotcom...

Of course it's all a little more complicated now and that means it's all well beyond my meagre technical capabilities. But I figured I needed to understand IIS7 given that it is 'cool and new' which means that people will want to talk to me about it.

So, off to the IIS.Net website, a browse through a few blogs revealing an interesting piece comparing IIS and Windows Media Services, and a 30-page paper on IIS7 for .NET developers.

Then I saw this piece by Bill which is his take on IIS vs. Apache and a bunch of reasoning on the various new features of IIS and how they stand up. (Bill professes to love the Apache vs IIS, Mac vs PC, etc. etc. type debates which I have to say I hate: but I am interested with the actual comparisons of such things). Anyway it's a great article.

Then I saw the FastCGI mention, and thought 'cool' - Rails on Vista. Which lead me to Mike's blog post on 10 steps to get Ruby On Rails running on IIS. So by now, I'm clearly a long way off the pace.

Anyway, to make up for my lack of knowledge, I figured I'd get RoR running on my Vista machine, so I followed the instructions. Sort of, as there are a few differences on IIS7 compared to actual screenshots shown.

Unfortunately I couldn't get this to work, but I'll give it another go on a slightly 'cleaner' machine and let you know what happens.