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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 Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.
This isn't "new" information, though it was new to me this week. I came across this excellent set of youtube videos, 50 substantial yet brief overviews of key IIS topics from IIS/.NET/Windows guru Scott Forsyth.

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.

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

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Comments
FYI, My Kaspersky is reporting that this site has malware on it.
HEUR:Trojan.Script.Iframer
# Posted By Snake | 1/16/16 6:39 PM
Great find! Will watch these.
Another on the theme of bite-sized IIS chunks is a book "Windows IIS in a Month of Lunches". Good foundation, touches on just about all the important parts.
# Posted By Mark Gregory | 1/16/16 7:01 PM
Thanks, guys.

@Mark, those "month of lunches" books are indeed nice. I really appreciate the one on Powershell.

@Russ/Snake, good catch. None of my browsers flagged that problem. It's unfortunate to hear.

Here's good news. One need not go to that intermediate site. They could just google the title and find the direct link to the Youtube video. (It took long enough to create the list with the links to the other site, so I hope you'll forgive my not doing that to get all the youtube videos. Plus, his (Scott's) intros to the articles there seemed worthwhile.

Also, is your understanding of that warning that it implies you (the client computer browsing the site) will be harmed? or is it more just warning that that host is at risk because of it? In other words, is it something you know we (as visitors to that site) need to beware?

Most search results for that phrase ("Trojan.Script.Iframer") just go to sites and posts that seem focused on "how to remove it if you've been infected", but it's not clear that just visiting this site hurts as, as visitors. As for getting the site to solve the problem, I have no direct connection to them so have no ore influence than anyone else to get it resolved.

But I can and will add a comment to my post, warning of what you have observed, and will update it if we learn more.
Ok, I have added a warning to the post above, and I have sent messages to the dotnetslackers folks, both by twitter and the feedback form on their site.

FWIW, I noticed that much of the same intro text is offered for each video on posts by Scott at blogs.iis.net, all linked to as one category here (http://blogs.iis.net...), but I don't know that I should change my links to point to those instead, because in each post there he does point back to the dotnetslackers url as "where to find the video" (he doesn't point to youtube directly, for some reason).

I suppose one option (if the problem at dotnetslackers is not fixed) could be to change my links to go to the iis.net site (for the extended description of each), and then also offer here the youtube link for each. There's still the risk, of course, that someone would go to the iis.net site for the description and slip and follow his link back to the dotnetslackers site. There's really only so much I can do to help here. And even doing that would take considerable time, and it's late as I see this. So perhaps I'll get to it in coming days.

Anyway, again, in the meantime, if anyone is concerned about visiting the dotnetslackers link, just copy the text of the title of any video and search for it, to go directly to Youtube. (Sadly, the description for each video at Youtube is only a small subset of what's on the dotnetslackers and iis.net site for each video, or I could point ONLY to that for each.)
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