Professional Microsoft IIS 8

Direct Configuration

IIS can be managed in many different ways. You are probably very familiar with using IIS Manager to configure and administer IIS, and you may have edited the configuration files directly or developed some applications that manage IIS. With so many features in IIS 8.0, it's well worth your time to understand the entire configuration structure and many of the features that are available so that you can tackle even the most complex situation with relative ease.

IIS 8.0 has taken great strides to ensure that the entire schema can be extended and configured and that all programming APIs have full access to the extended configuration.

This section lays a foundation that is necessary for both the administrator and the IIS programmer to be able to understand the configuration files, why they are configured as they are, the benefits that they have over previous versions, and how to manage them well.

Configuration File Hierarchy

Since the introduction of the Integrated Pipeline, ASP.NET is not a second-class citizen. This means that ASP.NET continues to play a significant role within the IIS 8.0 platform. It also means that IIS and ASP.NET need to work together in a cohesive way.

The decision that led up to the current IIS configuration structure could be considered a battle of configuration dominance between IIS and ASP.NET. The IIS development team had to decide which configuration structure should become the standard. The configuration structure that has been ASP.NET's ...