[gerdesj]

Nothing at all. It is an extremely capable webserver.

In common with all web servers, advice found via search varies in quality and unfortunately, being Windows based: IIS really suffers. The GUI is pretty intimidating (IIS Manager - both of them) and there are things that can only be done via registry, config files and dark magic.

IIS gets a lot of undeserved stick in my opinion.

[throwanem]

You're not really making a strong case here for that "undeserved".

[gerdesj]

Fair enough. I'm an Apache, Caddy, nginx, HA Proxy "fan" and I generally only worry about IIS when it hoves into view - Exchange for example, or whatever weird and wonderful nonsense a customer comes up with.

I am almost perversely going to get into IIS but I probably won't. Following logs on Windows is a right old ballache. The bloody things don't seem to get written to disc for quite a while for those many systems that ignore the Windows Events system and dump to .log. I've tried various log viewers. Where the hell is lnav or even less for Windows?

My snags with Windows is opacity. I fire up a daemon on a Linux box and then in another tab/window or whatever, I follow logs - I can use less (is more) or something fancier like lnav. That workflow does not translate very well to Windows.

The taskmanager on Windows is much improved these days - you can now with a GUI work from a network port to a binary (PID) and even associate it with a particular service.

However, text logs are still second class citizens.

[throwanem]

Fair disclosure: I administered and developed for IIS fairly heavily in the first decade of my career - not so much by choice, but when you're the star engineer of a three-man contracting firm, you take the jobs that come and learn how to do them on the fly, or else you end up looking for work because your boss went out of business. He didn't, not while I was there, so I guess I must've been good enough at it.

I'm perfectly willing to confide IIS is a fair bit faster, more reliable, and better to work with these days than it was in those - but that's a hell of a long way from imagining it's anything like good.

(Also, a pedant's unrelated note, because I've seen a lot of this in particular lately and I'm going to say something about it somewhere: "hove" is an archaic past tense of "heave", as in the related nautical phrase "heave to," as might be found in a commerce raider's injunction to "heave to and prepare to receive boarders". So something properly is said to heave over the horizon; only after it has done so may it rightly be said to have hove.)