The Windows Web Application Gallery makes it easy to explore, discover and install popular community ASP.Net and PHP applications on Windows. Users can browse and view applications for different types of Web sites, ranging from photo galleries to blogs to ecommerce sites.

The Web Application Gallery integrates with the Web Platform Installer 2.0, so that when a user clicks “Install” for an application, the Web Platform Installer 2.0 launches with context set on the user’s selection. This powerful combination of application discovery and simplified installation makes it easier than ever for community-based applications to run on Windows.

This has some neat implications.  For one, developers can have their stuff put out for the whole world to see – and install in a few clicks.  Another, if you run a web server (like me) that has several blogs on it, this could streamline installing, say, WordPress.  Or Gallery for your users.

I don’t get terribly excited about some stuff Microsoft does, but this is pretty cool.  That is, if it takes off.

Here’s my setup: IIS7, PHP 5 (using FastCGI).  When I would click the “Upload” button from the webpage, things would chug along and eventually fail.  The only thing the browser would say is that the connection had been reset – which tells me nothing.  Did my ISP have a hiccup?  Did the server shutdown?  Pretty useful, eh?

After trying everything I could find on Google, I tried the simple thing: I changed the ActivityTimeout under FastCGI Settings.  This is defaulted to 120.  Basically, this says that if the php-cgi.exe process doesn’t talk to IIS for two minutes, timeout.  Well, while the PHP process is processing my upload (the verb IIS uses is “POST”), it seems that it doesn’t talk to IIS, so IIS times it out.  Well, you try uploading a 40MB file from some DSL site in the world and see if you can do it in two minutes.  I know I can’t.  I changed the timeout to 600 seconds, and now I’m happily uploading files.

I suppose this could be dangerous if PHP hangs and the process gets stuck.  It might make users wait 10 minutes if something screws up.  I suppose I’ll tackle that issue if it comes up.

Anyway, here it is.

It gives two options for “speeding” things up: IIS’s Output Caching and WP Super Cache.  Each have their downsides, but maybe one will work for you (and me).