Several months ago, I posted my first ColdFusion extension. It allows me to switch the web root on IIS to any folder in ColdFusion Builder. Since my primary development machine is Windows XP, this has proven pretty handy.
In the intervening months, I have found that I have used this several times a day. In that time, I haven't needed to change the underlying code at all. So, I am going to go ahead and call it a full 1.0 version.
I had a magic moment this weekend when my wife and both of our babies were all asleep. I thought to myself "What should I do with this free time?". So, of course, I used it to make my first ColdFusion Builder extension, "Set IIS Root".
The extension allows me to right-click on any project or folder and set it as the web root in IIS directly from ColdFusion Builder. The functionality to do this was originally written by my friend, Jason Holden. Admittedly this is now only useful on flavors of Windows that have IIS, but don't allow multiple sites (Windows XP Pro, but not Windows 2003 or Vista), but I am in that group so it saves me time.
I was a little concerned about how difficult it would be to make an extension for ColdFusion Builder. It turned out to be really easy, taking me about an hour (or less) including the time to learn how to make an extension and to test it out. The ColdFusion Builder development team deserves major kudos here as do the authors of the documentation.
As part of a larger project, I need the ability to add a new web site. Part of this process required that I create a web site entry in IIS. This ended up requiring a bit of research, so I thought I would post my results.
The process mostly uses VBScript from Microsoft. I had to find scripts from two or three places on their site and combine them to get the whole thing to work as I wanted.
The big challenge was to make sure that the web site was created, started, and publicly accessible.
I recently had a need to be able to set the IIS web root from ColdFusion. This is for development on a local machine (where IIS can have only one web root). To do this, I took advantage of the load_iis.bat that my friend Jason Holden created.
