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Ever since noticing the increase demand of usage of Internet Information Services (IIS), especially in a corporate environment where developers could not select their web server options, I’ve decided to start a series of tutorials on IIS usage. Although Microsoft’s IIS often combined with their own ASP.NET Framework as the tool for the web services, as a person who mostly began their experience with open-source tools, I’ve decided to focus mainly on PHP as the primary web development scripting language in this tutorial series, as resources are few on this IIS/PHP environment.

In these tutorials, I will be using IIS 6.0 as my primary setup.

Beginning from PHP 5.3, PHP can only be installed on IIS via a CGI Handler, and no longer through ISAPI. In this tutorial, we’ll step through the details of how to set up FastCGI and PHP on IIS.

Microsoft now has an official SQL Server Driver to use with PHP on IIS. This is a huge and step forward for PHP/SQL Server developers since beginning with PHP 5.3, the usually packaged MSSQL extension has been deprecated.

URL Rewriting is a powerful feature for web servers that provides the ability to modify a web page’s URL to display a more friendly links for users and relevance for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For Apache web server users, a mod_rewrite module is readily available, however, for IIS 6.0 users, it’s not. (For IIS 7.0, a URL Rewrite Module has been introduced.) In this tutorial, I’ll introduce a free URL Rewriter for IIS 6.0 (and later), how to install it, and the recommended method of usage.

For web developers, sometimes it is necessary to run a re-occurring task on the web server, such as sending out emails for notifications, or doing a periodic update without interaction from the client. On UNIX-like Operating Systems, the well-known Cron is a simple to use option, on Windows, it’s Task Scheduler. In this tutorial, I will step through the process of setting up a scheduled task to have a web script executed periodically.