IIS is a mature technology with a large amount of configuration available. Historically the configuration of IIS has been done through WMI, Appcmd, PowerShell, and graphically through IIS Manager. All of these technologies have continued to serve their purpose, allowing users to configure the web server to meet their needs. Recently the IIS team has been working on a project to open up IIS configuration even more by creating a REST API that exposes the configuration system. This API is not meant to replace any of the existing configuration access mechanisms, but stand beside them and offer an open method for interacting with IIS. The REST API communicates with HTTPS making it accessible from any device that knows how to send a web request. This allows IIS to be configured more freely and opens the door for configuration clients that were not possible before, such as mobile applications.
Today we want to not only let everyone know that we are working on a REST API for IIS, we also want to let you see it. The API that we have created has a built in tool called the API Explorer that allows those with access to the API to browse the entire API surface. This means once you have a link to the root URL of the API you can navigate to this tool and browse all of the API that is available. Here is a picture of the API Explorer in action displaying an application pool resource.
Source : blogs.iis.net
