Professional IIS 7.0

Chapter 7. Web Application Administration

When you look at most web sites today, you are seeing some type of dynamic content. This dynamic content could be an online auction, webmail, forums, blogs, online games, or any type of nonstatic content that is on a web site. The content is delivered by a web application. Normally, a web application is a three-tiered system, where the browser is the first tier, a dynamic web content technology is the second tier, and a database is the third tier. For our purposes, the dynamic content technology will be referred to as the "web application." The web application can be based on a variety of technologies, including ASP, ASP.NET, ISAPI, CGI, and FastCGI. IIS 7.0 natively supports these technologies as well as the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). These technologies all plug into IIS 7.0 via modules that can be added or removed based on the purpose of the server. In this chapter, we shall discuss these technologies and their administration as they relate to IIS 7.0.

Application Administration

The configuration store used by IIS 7.0 is based on the .NET Framework, allowing the server or site to have a tighter integration between IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET. As mentioned in Chapter 5, "Administration Tools," the configuration is kept in the applicationHost.config, machine.config, and various web.config files. Owing to the tighter integration between IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET, the other content types now have access to the features of ASP.NET. An example ...