The rich administration capabilities make deploying and managing Web applications on IIS 7.0 straightforward and efficient. IIS 7.0 provides developers and administrators with a unified configuration system for storing all IIS and ASP.NET settings in a single XML format, and includes a set of managed code and scripting APIs for accessing configuration information for the entire Web platform. This new configuration system supports distributed configuration files, which can be stored along with Web site or application content.
These improvements have radical implications for how applications are configured and deployed. Now that Web site and application settings are no longer explicitly tied to a centralized configuration store on the local machine, configuration can simply be copied from the developer's workstation to a test server, and then to the production Web server. Once a Web site is in production, administrators can share configuration information across multiple front-end Web servers, avoiding costly and error-prone replication and manual synchronization issues.
