harbar.net component based software & platform hygiene

Application Pool Manager v2 (finally)

Print | posted on Tuesday, October 28, 2008 7:42 PM

Yesterday during the opening PDC keynote I did the final release build of APM v2 and posted it for download. Unfortunately due to a combination of sucky wireless and power "issues" I have only now got around to posting an announcement here.


Since the initial release of APM it's grown many arms and legs and it has been amazingly popular. By version 1.2 the code had become pretty disgusting and hard to maintain (even for something which does very little). Therefore this release is a complete from the ground re-write. It's actually been ready for quite a while but I was trying to sneak in some features which I finally decided to punt for another release.

In addition to the re-write I changed my mind on platform support, and this version includes hybrid functionality. If you are running IIS6 then APM continues to use the combination of various nasty legacy APIs for most of it's functionality. However, if you are on IIS7 it will make use of the extremely cool and much more suitable Microsoft.Web.Administration APIs. I even managed to do it nicely by utilising some wrapped wrappers :)

Aside from making me happier by the code being half decent, a number of other benefits are a vastly reduced working set, some UI tweaks and improved performance of both warm ups and STSADM execution. Also included this time is more robust IIS status detection and support for Windows Vista and a UAC manifest if you are crazy enough to be developing on Vista with UAC enabled.