Windows Web Solutions UPDATE, August 13, 2002

Tim Huckaby explains how Covalent Technologies used the ASP.NET APIs to integrate its Apache 2.0-based Enterprise Ready Server product with ASP.NET. Keep up with IIS, respond to our Instant Pool, and check out the featured thread from the Windows Web Solutions forums.

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(below COMMENTARY)

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August 13, 2002—In this issue:

1. COMMENTARY

2. KEEPING UP WITH IIS

3. ANNOUNCEMENTS

4. HOT RELEASE

5. RESOURCES

6. NEW AND IMPROVED

7. CONTACT US

1. COMMENTARY

Last week, software firm Covalent Technologies announced that its Enterprise Ready Server (ERS) product is now compatible with the Microsoft ASP.NET development environment. The server is based on the Apache 2.0 open-source platform. "Developers now can create ASP.NET applications and run them on Apache systems," according to Jim Zemlin, Covalent's vice president of marketing. "We want to interoperate with as many good technologies as possible, and ASP.NET is good technology."

What's particularly interesting about the announcement is that the product wasn't a joint effort by Microsoft and Covalent (although Microsoft's ASP.NET team did give Covalent developers technical support on the implementation). Covalent used the publicly available, published APIs that Microsoft provides with ASP.NET to achieve ASP.NET integration. Microsoft made ASP.NET a highly flexible Web platform with built-in support for hosting on any Web server. ASP.NET was already running on a Web server platform other than IIS before the Covalent announcement—that non-IIS Web server is the one that ships with Web Matrix, Microsoft's free tool for building ASP.NET applications.

In technical terms, the Covalent product doesn't achieve interoperability with ASP.NET. Covalent's software module connects the Apache HTTP server to the ASP.NET worker process (aspnet_wp.exe), which is separate from the Web server. The Covalent module doesn't modify ASP.NET but rather lets the Apache server talk to the worker process.

Covalent's solution is actually quite crafty and has fueled much speculation about what else developers could do. Certainly, they could quite easily do for IBM's WebSphere Web server what Covalent has done for the Apache server.

I've written in the past about my belief that Windows eventually will run on varying hardware and software platforms. But make no mistake: Covalent's announcement doesn't represent ASP.NET running on another platform—it's ASP.NET running on an Apache-based Web server on Windows. Maybe I'm overstating the obvious, but Microsoft won't provide technical support for ASP.NET applications running on Apache, as John Montgomery, group product manager, .NET Developer Marketing, publicly stated after Covalent made its announcement. Technical support will have to be through Covalent. I hope the company is ready for it!

Microsoft isn't doing any work to make ASP.NET run on platforms other than Windows. Microsoft made ASP.NET the best platform for building Web applications on Windows, and Redmond is focused on continued innovation on the Windows platform. But Microsoft has clearly stated that nothing is preventing other companies from extending Microsoft .NET (specifically the Common Language Runtime—CLR) to other platforms and has publicly encouraged other software companies to do so.

"Using Covalent Enterprise Ready Server, enterprises will now be able to use the world's most widely deployed Web server—Apache—with Microsoft .NET technologies. Covalent's Apache support for Microsoft ASP.NET is a significant offering for enterprise customers wishing to take advantage of the Microsoft Web services development platform and deploy the Apache Web server," Zemlin said.

Although developers can use APIs to run ASP.NET on non-Microsoft Web servers, don't misconstrue that openness to mean that Microsoft is giving up on IIS in any way. It simply shows that Microsoft wants to make innovative technologies such as ASP.NET extensible enough to give customers a choice. "ASP.NET is a highly flexible platform with built-in support for hosting on any Web server. We're pleased to see Covalent making ASP.NET available to its expanded user base," said Shawn Nandi, product manager on the ASP.NET team.

I believe that IIS and Windows provide the best integrated Web server solution. But, as I've stated in the past, many companies have hardware and software investments that they can't throw away simply because Microsoft has produced something better. Covalent's software engages a "best of breed" approach that will let many companies leverage their Apache investments and still take advantage of ASP.NET's superior application power. And that seems like a good idea to me, whether customers use it to leverage existing Apache investments or as a transition to .NET.

You can learn more about Covalent's Apache 2.0 support for ASP.NET Web services on Covalent's Web site ( http://www.covalent.net ) or from the Covalent technical white paper "Apache 2.0 Support for Microsoft ASP.NET Web Services," which you can obtain at http://www.covalent.net/products/rotate.php?page=93 .

Tim Huckaby, News Editor, [email protected]

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2. KEEPING UP WITH IIS

In July, Riptech released Volume II of its Internet Security Threat Report, which shows that Internet attacks grew at an annualized rate of 64 percent during the period from January 2002 to June 2002. The report is based on data mining and analysis of more than 11 billion firewall logs and Intrusion Detection System (IDS) alerts from more than 400 companies in more than 30 countries around the world.
http://www.secadministrator.com/articles/index.cfm?articleid=25897

The voting has closed in the Windows & .NET Magazine Windows Web Solutions channel's nonscientific Instant Poll for the question, "Do you plan to take Microsoft up on its offer of a free trial copy of Windows .NET Server (Win.NET Server) Release Candidate 1 (RC1)?" Here are the results (+/-1 percent) from the 93 responses.

The next Instant Poll question is, "How many attacks have you recorded on your organization's Web servers over the past week?" Go to the Windows & .NET Magazine Windows Web Solutions home page and submit your vote for a) We don't count attacks, b) 10 or fewer, c) 25 or fewer, d) 50 or fewer, or e) More than 50.
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3. ANNOUNCEMENTS
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4. HOT RELEASE

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5. RESOURCES

September 3 through 6, 2002
Seattle
http://microsoft.com/misc/external/serverdevcon/

Learn everything about writing scalable, trustworthy enterprise applications for the Windows server family. Sessions include Building Scalable and High Performance Web Applications with IIS 6.0, Tips and Tricks on Writing Scalable Applications, and Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning Applications Using Event Tracing in Windows .NET Server.

For other upcoming events, check out the Windows & .NET Magazine Events Calendar.
http://www.winnetmag.net/events

Richard is trying to get a Windows 2000 Professional client that's logged on to a Win2K domain to use only Kerberos to authenticate to two Win2K IIS servers that run the Network Load Balancing (NLB) service. When he runs Internet Explorer (IE) 6.0 on the client and directs it to http://nlbcluster, the client uses Windows Challenge/Response, not Kerberos, to connect to the IIS servers and view the Web pages. If he disables NLB on the IIS servers and points IE on the client to one of the servers, the client uses Kerberos to authenticate and view the Web pages, so the problem appears to be with Kerberos and NLB. To lend a helping hand, visit the following URL:
http://www.windowswebsolutions.com/forums/thread.cfm?cfapp=74&thread_id=110621&mc=1

6. NEW AND IMPROVED
(contributed by Carolyn Mader, [email protected])

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Have you used a product that changed your IT experience by saving you time or easing your daily burden? Do you know of a terrific product that others should know about? Tell us! We want to write about the product in a future What's Hot column. Send your product suggestions to [email protected].

7. CONTACT US
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