My previous post ‘The Missing Link - a Platform Developer’ was in part inspired by deployment efforts that I have been busy with over the last few weeks.  I found that this link on Scott Guthrie's Blog (a blog which if you are not reading frequently – you are simply not doing ASP.NET development) resonated my need for a Platform Developer.

The image below reminded me of how much developers need to understand deployment issues and the deployment platform.  It seems that Microsoft, in an effort to make deployment easier, is blurring the line between what is the responsibility of the developer, versus what facilities has to worry about.

You will see in the screenshot, icons for membership – something which is currently part of the development space, but being so integrated into IIS admin functionality it is becoming part of facilities.  Look at all the other properties, which were previously part of the development teams’ responsibility – connection strings, session state etc.  Final clues are that in IIS7 the administrators can ‘delegate administrative control to developers or content owners, thus reducing cost of ownership and administrative burden for the administrator’ (it seems that developers do not have enough of a burden) and there is a .NET API for IIS 7 too.

So if there are any aspiring Platform Developers out there, deployment of applications on IIS7 is definitely something to pay attention to.  Project Managers and Architects, if you don’t want to surrender your architecture to the ‘burdened’ administrators – identifying a Platform Developer in your organization to focus on IIS7 is probably a good idea.

Simon Munro