Professional IIS 7 and ASP.NET Integrated Programming

Chapter 2. Using the Integrated Configuration System

This chapter discusses the new IIS 7 and ASP.NET integrated configuration system. You'll learn about the hierarchical structure of the configuration files that make up this integrated system, the hierarchical relationships among the files themselves, and the notion of the declarative versus imperative schema extension. The chapter then dives into the structure of the new IIS 7 machine-level configuration file named applicationHost.config, where you'll also learn how to override the configuration settings specified in different sections of this file in a particular site, application, or virtual directory.

Integrated Configuration System

IIS 7 comes with a new configuration system that has the following important characteristics:

• It has the same format, grammar, and syntax as the .NET Framework configuration system. This is great news for ASP.NET developers. They should immediately feel at home with this configuration system.

• It's heavily dependent on the file system for backup, restore, and security. This makes deployment easier because you can simply copy the configuration files from the development machine to the production machine. The file system security is based on file ACLs, which are very straightforward and easy to manage.

• It's hierarchical. A flat configuration file, such as the one used in IIS 6.0, introduces problems such as:

  • Readability: If you take a look at the MetaBase.xml file in IIS 6.0 you'll see that it consists of ...