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Programming ASP.NET, 3rd Edition
book

Programming ASP.NET, 3rd Edition

by Jesse Liberty, Dan Hurwitz
October 2005
Intermediate to advanced
956 pages
27h 19m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Programming ASP.NET, 3rd Edition

Understanding Web Applications

The term application has been used throughout this book. You probably know intuitively what a web application is. Here is a working definition for a web application: “A web application consists of all of the web pages, files, code, objects, executables, images, and other resources located in an IIS virtual directory or a subdirectory of that virtual directory.” In other words, a web application is either a web site or a web service.

The web application will start the first time any of its pages are requested from the web server. It will run until any of a number of events cause it to shut down. These events include the following:

  • Editing global.asax or a configuration file

  • Restarting IIS

  • Restarting the machine

If a page is requested and the application is not running, the application will automatically restart.

Unlike traditional EXE applications, web applications do not have a fixed starting point. A user can drop in through any number of paths or entry points. Web application flow and security should be designed accordingly.

For example, a virtual directory may contain three web pages: default.aspx, login.aspx, and bugs.aspx. If you enter the following URL in a browser, you will go to default.aspx, which may send you to login.aspx:

    http://localhost

On the other hand, users may enter the following URL to go directly to the login page:

    http://localhost/login.aspx

Once logged in, they can go to bugs.aspx. If a user tries to go directly to bugs.aspx without logging ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 059600916XErrata Page