What options are there to selectively enable or disable IIS 6 compression

Question

Unlike IIS7, in IIS6 the 'Compress application files' and 'Compress Static files' options are server wide so they apply to every website and virtual directory.

I recently enabled it server wide and I'm beginning to see more and more places where things are being compressed that I don't want -- notably dynamically created images.

Is there any kind of configuration for compression to enable or disable it for a 'web.config' based .NET application.

I have ASP.NET 1.1, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 apps running on the machine.

I've seen various 3rd party filters to compress content selectively -- is this really the best approach. These may be appropriate for me in the future but I'd rather not invest time in them now.

I'd be fine if i could just disable compression selectively for one application I have (that dynamically creates images). Is this not possible within IIS / webconfig ?

Answer 1

Take a look at this article on how to enable HTTP compression in IIS6 which talks about editing Metabase.xml to set compression at the directory level. I've not tried this so I can't vouch for the technique but it seems like it might help with your problem.