Project History

By Lex Li

The first commit of Jexus Manager was made on March 19, 2014 in a private Git repo. This project was designed to be the management console of Jexus web server, which at that time lacks of an easy-to-use GUI tool.

One of the initial goals was to attract IIS users, so its look and feel is almost the same as IIS Manager. This approach also led to the facts that Microsoft.Web.Administration API needs to be re-implemented. Mapping of all Jexus settings (both server and site levels) was done, and soon the work kicked off. Because Jexus only has a few settings, the needed features were finished with the first release candidate released on April 20, 2014. The 1.0 release came on May 30, 2014, which enables Jexus web server remote and local management.

Starting from May 10 2014, the project entered its second phase, trying to fully support Microsoft IIS/IIS Express servers. Microsoft did not provide a management console for IIS Express, so Jexus Manager can be a critical tool to fill the gaps. However, the work on a fully functional Microsoft.Web.Administration implementation took very long. Although the first 2.0 Alpha build was made available on November 16, 2014, it lacks of many important features. The work on Microsoft.Web.Management started on December 20, 2014, which soon enabled a redesign of all user interface elements to match IIS Manager more closely. Refactoring in July 2015 moved it forward to a fast track. In November this tool was demonstrated to some Microsoft guys. Scott Hanselman suggested it might be open sourced. On January 16, 2015, Jexus Manager’s Microsoft.Web.Administration implementation went public on GitHub. The entire Jexus Manager source code was made available on June 25, 2015.

The 2.1 release candidates started to be available on July 11, 2017. On July 22, the 2.1 final release was shipped.

Due to a bug report (related to version number) in January 2018, Jexus Manager version number was bumped, and 12.0.0.0 release was shipped on January 4, 2018.