Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition

Chapter 33. Administration and Management

You have almost reached the end of this book; you have been introduced to ASP.NET 2.0 with its wonderful new features designed to help you become a better and more efficient programmer. However, with all advancement comes complexity, as is the case in the areas of ASP.NET configuration and management. The good news is that the ASP.NET 2.0 development team realized this and provided tools and APIs that enable developers to configure and manage ASP.NET 2.0–based applications with reliability and comfort.

This chapter covers these tools in great detail in an effort to educate you about some of the options available to you. In this chapter, two powerful configuration tools are explored: the new ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool, a Web-based application and the new MMC ASP.NET Snap-In, a plug-in configuration tab for IIS.

The ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool

When ASP.NET was first released, it introduced the concept of an XML-based configuration file for its Web applications. This web.config file is located in the same directory as the application itself. It's used to store a number of configuration settings, some of which can override configuration settings defined in machine.config file or in the root server's web.config file. Previous versions of ASP.NET, however, didn't provide an administration tool to make it easy to configure the settings. Because of this, a large number of developers around the world ended up creating their own configuration ...