Enabling intellisense for AhAdmin code in scripts
MWA (Microsoft.Web.Administration) is pretty popular among developers who wish to read/write IIS configuration because of ease of writing managed code (which enables its use in powershell as well) and also because it provides a more intuitive wrapper over the IIS configuration system which is easier to work with. MWA has concept of application pool collection, sites, bindings etc while IIS configuration system only understands sections, elements, properties, location paths etc and not application pools, virtual directories which makes life of developers writing AhAdmin code very difficult. If you disagree, try adding a binding using MWA and then using AhAdmin. Presence of tools like genscode makes using MWA even more easier. Even though its painful to use AhAdmin interfaces, you don't get intellisense in scripts when working with COM components and you are required to refer configuration schema all the time, people do write AhAdmin code for variety of reasons. One reason is because people want to access IIS configuration in VBScript/JavaScript. Another reason is because people want to write code which works on server core as well (appcmd and WMI are alternatives as well). I have been thinking of ways to make life of AhAdmin developers easier for sometime.
Read full blog post here.
Thanks.
Kanwal