You can stop refreshing the page now. If you’ve been holding your breath for the last couple of hours in anticipation for the drawing of this website’s “31 Days of the Dragon” giveaway, seek medical attention immediately. The rest of you read on.

When I set out to design my contest, I opted for something easy and straightforward because we’re all a little lazy. With over three-thousand and seven hundred (3700) entries, I think I can safely say now it was easy enough.

At the same time I also designed the contest in mind of all the Windows Vista user out there who really wasn’t getting enough lovin’, so I’m also proud to say a thousand and eight hundred eighty-four (1,884) of you - just over half of the entries - took advantage of the bonus offer by turning on the Customer Experience Improvement Program in Vista. Hopefully you’ve kept it on.

Before I announce the winner I also want to mention users who have attempted to abuse the system like the one guy who registered using 6 different AOL emails are automatically disqualified. For your information, AOL emails in sequential numbers stand out.

Without a further ado, the winner is Andrew Stockdale (@gmail.com). For your information, I don’t think this is the same Andrew as the leader singer of Wolfmother. If under the rare circumstance it is, I will redraw.

If you didn’t win, you don’t have to resort to violence. There are still a handful of opportunities to win left on some other sites who’s still accepting entires. Good luck.

26 May - 02 Jun www.bleepingcomputer.com
27 May - 03 Jun www.hardwaregeeks.com
28 May - 04 Jun www.geeknewscentral.com
29 May - 05 Jun www.geekzone.co.nz
30 May - 06 Jun www.thetabletpc.net
31 May - 07 Jun www.gearlive.com
01 Jun - 08 Jun www.GottaBeMobile.com

One of the most anticipated features for IIS is now available. Yesterday the first preview of the URL re-write module for IIS 7 was launched. It is free for all IIS7 users and available for download x86 and x64.

So what does it do exactly?
The URL Rewrite Module provides a rule-based rewriting mechanism for changing request URL’s before they get processed by IIS. The module supports regular expression based URL rewriting logic or a simpler wildcard-based URL rewriting logic. Rewriting decisions can be based on the URL, HTTP headers and server variables. While the primary purpose of the module is to rewrite URLs, it also has functionality to perform redirects, send custom responses and abort requests based on the logic expressed in the rewrite rules.

Here is a quick feature overview:

• Rules-based URL rewriting engine. Rules are used to compare/match the request URL with and what to do if comparison was successful.
  • Regular expression pattern matching. Rewrite rules can use ECMA-262 compatible regular expression syntax for pattern matching.
  • Wildcard pattern matching. Rewrite rules can use Wildcard syntax for pattern matching
• Back-references to patterns and conditions. Back-references are used to capture parts of a matched URL so that it can be re-used later in a rule when constructing a substitution URL string. Back-references are available with regular expression and wildcards patterns.
• Global and distributed rewrite rules. Global rules are used to define server-wide URL rewriting logic. Global rules cannot be overridden or disabled by lower configuration levels. Distributed rules are used to define URL rewriting logic specific to a particular configuration scope, e.g. an web application.
• Access to server variables and http headers. Server variables and HTTP headers provide additional information about current HTTP request. This information can be used to make rewriting decisions or to compose the output URL.
• Various rule actions. Instead of rewriting a URL, a rule may perform other actions, such as issue an HTTP redirect, abort the request, or send a custom status code to HTTP client.
• Rewrite maps. Rewrite map is an arbitrary collection of name-value pairs that can be used within rewrite rules to generate the substitution URL during rewriting. Rewrite maps are particularly useful when you have a large set of rewrite rules, all of which use static strings (i.e. there is no pattern matching used). In those cases, instead of defining a large set of simple rewrite rules, you can put all the mappings between input URL and substitution URL as keys and values into the rewrite map, and then have one rewrite rule which references this rewrite map to look up substitution URL based on the input URL.
• UI for managing rewrite rules. Rewrite rules can be added, removed and edited by using “URL Rewrite Module” feature in IIS Manager.
• GUI tool for importing of mod_rewrite rules. URL rewrite module includes a GUI tool for converting rewrite rules from mod_rewrite format into IIS format.

Install the URL Rewrite Module today!

Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 CTP1 (x86)

Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 CTP1 (x64)

Sourced from : Bill & Thomas’s IIS blog’s