Mike Volodarsky has done a blog post about the IIS 7.0 Configuration Anatomy.
If you have worked with IIS6 and previous versions of IIS, you are most likely familiar with the IIS metabase paths. You know, the ones that look like LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT. These metabase paths serve as a mechanism to identify a part of the IIS website hierarchy, or a url therein, for the purposes of read/writing their configuration settings. For example, the server uses these paths at runtime to retrieve the settings for a particular site, virtual directory, or url in your website, and you use them to manage those settings for your site/virtual directory/url using tools like adsutil.vbs.
Read his post at Mike Volodarsky’s ServerSide.