Benefits & pitfalls of moving to IIS 7, Windows Server 2008 for WCF Services

Question

We're currently using IIS 6 and Windows Server 2003 for our web and application servers. Our web servers make WCF Service calls to our application servers.

We'd like to move to IIS 7 and Windows Server 2008 so that we can use the recommended netTcpBinding (at the moment we're using a basicHttpBinding).

(along with this we'd also move from SQL Server 2005 to 2008)

Does anyone have any points to make about the benefits and pitfalls of the above?

Answer 1

As you mentioned, IIS 6 only has support for the various HTTP-based bindings. IIS7 has support for all the bindings, including TCP/IP, named pipes (for superfast in-proc calls on the same machine), and MSMQ queue.

For a detailed comparison between hosting WCF in IIS6 and IIS7, see this MSDN article: Extend Your WCF Services Beyond HTTP With WAS

Answer 2

IIS 7 uses a completely different (and much improved!) configuration model; the Metabase has gone and has been replaced by a hierarchical and pluggable model based around .config files. If you can't port your IIS 6 configuration to IIS 7's model for legacy reasons, be sure to install the IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility Layer feature. I work on a web app at work, which runs fine on IIS 6 and 7 with no other modifications than this.

By the sounds of things, your app is not that deeply embedded into IIS, so other than the above you shouldn't run into many other problems at all. The compatibility between the two is very good.