Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Defining Applications

An application is a logical grouping of resource files and components. It is a logical boundary that separates data and subsections of a site. This allows IIS to share data within the application threads and to have security and worker process isolation between applications. By default, the root of each website is already an application, and subfolders and virtual directories can also be made into applications.

Classic ASP and ASP.NET are application-aware and use application boundaries to share data and settings. InProcess session state in ASP.NET, for example, executes within the scope of the application boundaries so that all ASP.NET pages within the application have access to the same session state.

Many pre-existing websites expect their site to be installed in an application root. Developers creating a new project in Visual Studio often expect their project to be placed in an application when it is deployed to the production server.

ASP.NET 2.0 has several resources that depend on the application boundaries. There are eight folders, plus a couple of files.

The folders are as follows:

• Bin
• App_Browsers
• App_Code
• App_Data
• App_LocalResources
• App_GlobalResources
• App_Themes
• App_WebReferences

The files include the following:

• web.config
• global.asax

In addition, there are some common default filenames for various ASP.NET features:

• masterpage.master
• web.sitemap

Bin, web.config, and global.asax are the three files and folders that ASP.NET 1.1 is aware of. ...